Edmund knelt to pray. Bobby got down on all fours at first. He thought Edmund was going to do some kind of ac.tor’s exercise. Drew shrugged and got down beside Bobby, but he understood what Edmund was doing. He folded his hands. I joined Edmund. I didn’t believe any of it, but he did, and that was enough for me.
Edmund clenched his hands together. “Heavenly Father, we do implore Your blessing on our endeavors. If all the world’s a stage as ’tis said, let this stage rise like a new cre.ation, and if it be Your will, may it happen soon, for we’ve got only four weeks. Bless all who undertake this labor, and may our work be offered to Your greater glory. Amen.”
Looking around out of the corner of my eye, I could see some people staring at us, and a little kid pointing and ask.ing what we were doing. I kind of was wondering the same thing myself.
Edmund opened his eyes. “I dare to hope He has said yes,” he declared to us. Then he got up and threw his arms around me and Drew. Drew reached out an arm and dragged Bobby in.
“Here’s how it shall be,” my Romeo said. “We raise the money—we’ve already begun that. Then we find what we need to build the theater. Then we take the whole to who.ever gives us permission to do it. This we must do in three days. Then, we build the stage, rehearse our play and do it for the multitudes who will come.”
“Damn,” Bobby said. “This kicks ass.”
“Aye,” Edmund said. “It doth.”
Chapter Twenty.
Five
That night, Edmund called everyone who’d given him a phone number. Amazingly, more people agreed to put up at least some money for the show. There’s something about an English accent that makes anything sound reasonable to an American, I think. Anyway, by the end of the evening, he had over ten thousand dollars in pledges.
When I got to school the next morning, it was the first day of finals week. The year was ending and I’d hardly no.ticed. Amazingly, I sailed through my first one, biology, and even finished early. I hadn’t known I liked the subject so well.
When I went out into the hall, I saw Tanya Blair. She waved and came hurrying toward me.
“This is fantastic,” she said. “Is it okay if I tell my Uncle Lou?”
“Sure. You can sell him a ticket.”
“No, that’s not it,” Tanya said. “My uncle Lou has a com.pany. It’s him and this other guy. Standing Ovation. They
build sets. They’ve got contracts with the theaters all over this area. They could bid on the job.”
To tell you the truth, I had sort of been wondering how a bunch of kids were going to build an Elizabethan theater. This sounded encouraging.
“Have him talk to Edmund,” I said. “Fast.”
That afternoon, when my English final was over, Ed.mund called me and said to meet him at the Row. When I got there, standing in the square were a couple of guys who were definitely theater types. One was short and good- looking with an elaborate beard. The other was almost a gi.ant, dressed in a leather kilt with tools hanging off of it.
The one with the beard turned out to be Tanya’s Uncle Lou.
“Well met, gentlemen,” Edmund said, shaking their hands. “I’m Edmund Shakeshaft, and this is Miranda Hoberman. She plays Juliet.”
“Hi, Miri,” Lou said. “Glad to meet you. Tanya’s said some good words about you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s great you guys want the contracts. But did Edmund tell you we’ve only got ten thousand dol.lars? And it’s mostly in pledges.”
“We can do it for five,” Gerry said. “And if you can front a thousand or so, we can get started as soon as you want.”
“How can you do it so cheap?” I wanted to know.
“Because most of it’s ready to go—we did the same kind of thing last year up in San Francisco. Open air Comedy of Errors. We’ve still got the stage. All we have to do is knock it back together, anchor it and repaint it so it looks like what you want.”
“Something else we could offer,” Lou said. “We made some knock-down portable seats. Sort of like two-tier bleachers with backs. Seats about a thousand.”
“Very good,” Edmund said.
“And Fresnels. Will you be wanting Fresnels?” Lou said. “We’ve got those.”
“Ah. Fresnels,” Edmund said.
He knew nothing about lighting, I realized. All his plays in England had been done in sunlight. All our rehearsals so far had been done under bright work lights.
“Yes. We want you to light the show,” I jumped in. “We’ll run them if you can provide them.”
“Provide ’em, set ’em up, run ’em if you want,” Gerry said.
“An extra five hundred’ll cover it,” Lou said.
“Thanks,” I said. “That’ll be great.”
Edmund gave me a grateful look. Then he extended his hand to Lou and Gerry. “Gentlemen, ye are hired,” he said. “Now, we have an appointment with the management of this marketplace in thirty minutes. I suggest that we all go. It will give us cred.”
The manager of Malpaso Row was a young well-dressed woman named Elizabeth Castillo. She wasn’t used to offering part of her mall to theater types. But she also wasn’t used to the level of charm that the three guys I was with knew how to project. Edmund was young, serious and full of passion. Every time she heard his British accent, she would smile. Lou was elegant. He talked a little about the sets he’d built, and leaned forward to listen every time Elizabeth Castillo had a question or a comment to make. And Gerry just threw out his legs, leaned back in his seat and smiled a testosterone-rich grin at her that never stopped.
In twenty minutes, the facilities manager leaned forward, gave all the guys a huge smile and said, “I wasn’t inclined to say yes to your proposal, gentlemen, but I’ve changed my mind. Malpaso Row does have a policy of doing a certain amount of community outreach, and Shakespeare is popu.lar. Taking everything into consideration, I think your play is an experiment that we can support.”
And we walked out with permission to build a theater in the middle of a mall.
The four of us went to the bookstore next, and over an espresso, Edmund signed a contract with Lou and Gerry.
“You spoke of a thousand,” Edmund said. “But I have two upon me, and ye may as well have them both now.”
He pulled a wad of hundreds out of his hip pocket and handed them over to Lou.
“I’m going to enjoy this job,” Lou said.
Two thousand bucks. Just like that. I shook my head. Maybe God did want to get this show up and running.
Chapter Twenty.
Six
Edmund reassembled the cast the next night, in our back.yard. Mom had been glad to let us use it, and had even helped with some mysterious project involving huge amounts of typing and editing. There were some boxes full of paper on the patio. When I asked what they were, Edmund only winked and said, “Patience.”
About a quarter of the cast wasn’t there. Word was they were tired of the fights and tension. Even if there was a good chance that those things were over, they’d had enough. Mostly, these were the smaller parts, but you know how they say there are no small parts, only small actors? This time it wasn’t true. Verona was decimated.
Vivian was there, which didn’t exactly cheer me up. I’d really hoped she’d quit. She kept away from Edmund, though, and sat close to her mother.
Drew was one of the missing, and that was much worse. You can’t do Romeo and Juliet without Mercutio. I left mes.sages on his phone and at his mother’s studio.
The rest of us were lounging around on the grass in our newly beautified yard. We were willing, but confused. We knew what we wanted to do, but not how we were going to do it. We wanted Edmund to tell us.
He didn’t let us down. Standing on an upturned planter, he threw out his arms.
“I thank all of ye for your loyalty to this play. We are in excellent condition. We miss many friends tonight, but some will be coming back when they see we are serious, and hear what we have done already. Others we may
replace with ac.tors who were not cast the first time. And I promise you, we have enough to do this play with those who are here right now. We do need a good rehearsal space. Drew and I are working on that and I may have good news for you in a night or two. In any case, the show will go on. If I can, I mean to perform the best Romeo and Juliet ever, and I mean for us to leave a light in people’s souls that will shine for the rest of their lives.”
A few of us laughed and clapped.
“Beginning tonight, I want to start doing this show the way I’ve known it done in England,” Edmund went on. “I have seen it work there, and it will work this time. From now on, if someone has a thought about how to make a scene better, speak up. You’ll be amazed at what can happen.”
Bill London put up his hand. “Edmund, I like the sound of what you’re saying. But we’re not professionals the way you are. We don’t live this stuff. We need someone to tell us what to do.”
Edmund nodded. “I take your point. But what I say is, let’s do this play as I’ve known it done in England, where everyone can contribute what they think.”
“But who decides?” Maria said. “Someone must decide.”
“Come on, Ed,” Bobby shouted. “If it weren’t for you we’d all be sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. Take
some responsibility, damn it. Be the director.”
A lot of people shouted that Bobby was right.
“Okay, okay,” Edmund said. “You all make sense. But I say we English know best how to mount a play, and this is the best way. When you have your new scripts in your hands you’ll begin to see how this can work.”
“New scripts?” I said. I had the script in my hip pocket. Unless Edmund’s brother had done a total rewrite and sent it forward from 1597, I didn’t need a new script.
“New scripts,” Edmund said. “English-style scripts. We call them sides. And when you have your sides, you’ll find this is a different play from what you’ve known so far.”
Edmund began to hand out the contents of the boxes. Some of the scripts were only a few pages. Others were nearly the whole play. Each one had an actor’s name at the top, together with their parts. And each script had nothing but that actor’s cue lines and speeches. The rest of the play was gone.
“What’s up with this?” Phil Hormel asked, looking up from his handful of sheets.
“It’s how we did it in London the last time I was in this show,” Edmund said. “I thought it might be interesting to try it. If it doesn’t work out, we can always go back to the old way. But let’s do act two this way and see what we get.”
So we did.
And what we got was a whole new show.
I know, it was a new show anyway. But all of us had been in plays before, and none of us had done anything like this. It was a little like improv if you’ve ever done that, except that in improv you’re making things up as you go along. Here, we were improvising to discover what was already there. But what was there changed as we did it.
At first, we were clumsy and slow. We missed cues, dropped lines. But then, like in improv where you have to concentrate on the other actors or you won’t know what to do yourself, we learned to focus on everything the others were doing, and we started to fly.
Nobody was hanging around waiting for a cue. We didn’t dare. We didn’t want to. We knew we’d miss something. So we were not only a cast, we were an audience. And as the night went on, we got more and more into it and everything became more and more intense.
We still didn’t finish that night. How could we when we kept coming up with questions and ideas and interrupting ourselves? But when ten o’clock came and it was time to pack it in, we kept on for another hour, and didn’t want to stop then.
But we did, and then we applauded ourselves. We hugged. We jumped. We slapped each other’s butts.
Bobby was so happy he couldn’t even talk. He just punched the air over his head and squeaked.
Phil Hormel hugged himself.
Maria smiled like she really meant it.
And Vivian had a grim, but satisfied look on her face.
As for me, I was sure I could feel Edmund’s iron resolve not to kiss Miranda ever again rusting away in my arms each time Romeo and Juliet clinched. This guy was mine, even if we’d only kissed once. Juliet just had to be patient.
Oh, did I mention that Edmund was brilliant? He was totally in charge and totally not throwing his weight around. He was Oberon the fairy king and we were his loyal sprites, and we were loving every minute of it. It was glorious, we were glorious and nobody wanted this night to end.
But end it did. People started to leave, and they were happy and excited, more than they’d been since the first
night of rehearsals. I had a feeling that when word got around a lot of missing faces were going to be coming back.
I leaned back against a tree and watched the yard empty out.
“Helen of Troy thinks you did great tonight,” I told Ed.mund.
“Ah. Yes. Well, ye see it does work...”
He was nervous. It was sweet.
Bobby was wandering around the yard, muttering lines and waving his arms, trying different things, in a world of his own. He didn’t want to let go of this night any more than I did.
Drew came around the side of the house. Someone was with him, but I couldn’t tell who it was.
“Dude. You’re late,” Bobby said.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.
Drew ignored us. “Excuse me, Edmund,” he said. “This probably isn’t the best time, but it’s important. I mean, I didn’t intend for this to happen, but we need—you need— to know about it right now.”
I had never seen Drew like this. He was totally rattled.
“Drew, whatever it is, ’tis all well,” Edmund assured him. “For the play will be well. And what beyond that can be wrong?”
“I’m not sure,” Drew said.
“What is it, then?” Edmund asked.
Drew sighed. “There’s someone with me I think you need to meet.”
A tall man stepped into the patch of light coming from one of the back windows. I recognized him even though I’d never met him before.
That face. That bad portrait that Edmund had laughed at, was known all over the world. And now the living man
Douglas Rees
was standing in my backyard next to Drew Jenkins, taking in everything he saw with the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen.
“Give ye good evening, brother,” said William Shake.speare.
Chapter Twenty.
Seven
The Shakespeare boys did not seem all that glad to see each other. No hugs, no smiles. They stood apart. Edmund was tense as a taut guitar string. His big brother glowed with his sense of his own superiority.
“Give ye good evening, Will,” Edmund said, making an elaborate bow, and looking at his brother like he was a pile of unwashed dishes. “How come ye here?”
“Marry, Doctor Dee did send me,” William Shakespeare said. Then he bowed, not to Edmund, but to me. “Have I the honor of addressing the Lady Miranda?”
“I’m Miranda Hoberman.”
“O, fairest of Juliets, of ye has Doctor Jenkins also spoken. I am honored to meet ye.”
“And this is my friend Bobby Ruspoli,” Drew said to Shakespeare.
“Give ye good evening, fair youth.”
“Dude. This is major,” Bobby said. “You brought da Man.” I’d never seen Bobby look so amazed, not even when
he found out who Edmund really was. Then he bowed to Shakespeare.
Our new guest smiled, but Edmund didn’t. His whole body was rigid with anger.
“Drew, my friend,” he said. “What does this mean?”
“I–I was working on an idea I had...” Drew stuttered.
“Aye, indeed,” Shakespeare interrupted. “Three messages has John Dee had of Doctor Jenkins. Three shining gems of intellect which he has shared with me. He treasures every word as if ’twere Ho
ly Writ.”
“But Drew, why told ye me nothing of this?” Edmund said.
“I wasn’t expecting this to happen,” Drew said. “I had an idea I was working on, and I was going to tell you as soon as I knew I had everything right—I mean, it could be danger.ous. I didn’t want anybody risking their life or disappearing besides me. And if it didn’t work, I didn’t want to disappoint you. But this—I didn’t plan on it”
“Disappoint me? How?” Edmund said.
“My ultimate goal was to give you a way to go home. If you wanted to,” Drew said.
“Ah,” Edmund said slowly.
I thought back to that night when Drew had asked me what he could do for me, and I’d said, “Find a way to send an English lout back to his own time.” Or something like that. And now Shakespeare was here. The Shakespeare. Not in London, not in the Renaissance where he belonged. In my backyard. I couldn’t think. My brain was numb.
But I tried. “What…?” I said.
Drew seemed to understand what I was trying to say, sort of. “It—it isn’t—frankly, I don’t get—everything....” he said.
“Tell what ye can,” Edmund said.
Drew let out a big breath. “Do you remember when you said that the theater was a metaphor for life?”
“Aye, for so it is,” Edmund said.
“And, Miri, do you remember when your mom said maybe Doctor Dee had touched some kind of subatomic synchronicity or something, and you had possibly tapped into it for a second?”
“Yes. Get to the point, Drew. Quickly.”
“Well that got me to thinking about how the Elizabethans used their stage. No fourth wall. No naturalism. The stage was wherever they needed it to be at that moment, especially the big area down front. We call it ‘neutral space.’”
“We do call it ‘the great,’” Shakespeare said. “‘Play this on the great,’ we say.”
“So anyway, I thought that, if the stage is the world, then the world is a stage,” Drew said.
“All the world’s a stage!” Shakespeare said. “All the men and women merely players. I must write that down. Prithee, Doctor Jenkins, help me to recall it when I have a pen about me.”
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