Acts of Love

by Judith Michael

  "Not sure. Fifty, maybe. Forty's probably too young."

  "And the three great-grandchildren?"

  "Well, obviously not. Grandchildren, maybe. If she's fifty and she got married young . . . twenty? . . . twenty-one? . . . something like that. It's not a big deal, you know; Kent can rewrite it in a week or so; most of it would stay the same. Lena and her grandson . .. well, it would have to be her son. But the important thing is how she changes him, right? That's okay whether he's her son or grandson, right? And the love story can stay the same; it's great the way it is. Kent can handle it. He'll be here in a few minutes; once we get him going on it, we're ready to roll. Should be smooth,

  Acts of L

  o V E ~ 19

  right? It's not like you and I are strangers; we did another play together, one of your first, right?"

  "It was the first." Luke kept his voice casual and amused. "Almost thirteen years ago to the day and you're exactly the same, Monte. Still trying to upstage the playwright."

  Gerhart drew two large circles for breasts and began shading in the nipples. "Everybody needs help, you know, even playwrights. Hey, we talked about this, Luke. A month ago? Something like that."

  Luke sat back, stretching his legs. He looked relaxed, but those who knew him well would recognize the tension in his body and his eyes. "Give it up, Monte. We never talked about Lena's age; you just dreamed it up. The whole story revolves around her and her grandson, and we aren't going to make her one year younger. Or older, for that matter."

  Gerhart took off his square-rimmed glasses and contemplated Luke through pale eyes that looked small and newly laundered without lenses shielding them. "Nobody likes old women."

  "Who told you that?"

  "I didn't have to be told. / don't like old women."

  "I'm sorry to hear it. Most audiences do, you know. How else would you explain Jessica Tandy and Ethel Barrymore and Constance Bernhardt?"

  "Constance— Your grandmother. That's why you're so hot for this play!"

  "Lena does remind me of Constance. But that wouldn't be enough. This is a terrific play, Monte, and you know it. It's hard to believe that Kent wrote it—that he knows so much at his age—but somehow he got it all right: it's a solid story with wonderful lines and the characters are absolutely true to—" He stopped as the buzzer on Gerhart's desk sounded.

  "Well, the great playwright's here," Gerhart said. "We'll see what he has to say."

  "He won't like it," Luke said flatly.

  There was a rush of air, as if a tornado had spun into the office. Kent Home was young, tall and thin and flamboyantly good-looking, with a shock of black hair, dark blue eyes magnified by wire-rimmed glasses and a long neck that made his head seem like a kind of beacon, swiveling to take in the world. He wore faded blue jeans, a belt with a silver-and-turquoise buckle and a white open-necked shirt, and he was talking

  20 ~ Judith Michael

  before he was more than two steps inside the door. "I've got a great idea for act two, not a change really, but a terrific way to make Daniel look stronger a little earlier, we don't have to wait quite so long to see what he's really like inside. I'd thought of it earlier, actually, but—"

  "Good morning," Monte said, standing behind his desk.

  Kent looked at his outstretched hand. "Pretty formal, Monte. I mean, we're practically related, right.? When you do a play . . ." He looked at Luke. "Hi."

  "Monte thinks structure is a good thing," Luke said, amused, and Kent shrugged and went to the desk to shake Monte's hand.

  "Good morning," he said, emphasizing the words. "Glad to see you looking so well. Glad to see everybody looking so well. God, it's nice to be cool. I walked from my apartment and I could feel myself melting, starting with my feet and sinking into a puddle, like the Wicked Witch of the West—"

  "We're talking about rewriting Lena so she's fifty," Monte said, sitting down. "Better for audience identifica—"

  "Fifty.? Fifty years old instead of eighty-two? You're not serious."

  "If we're talking about it, we're serious."

  "You can't be. You're out of your mind. Luke?" Kent turned to him. "You're serious about this?"

  "I wouldn't tolerate it."

  "Then why the hell are we talking about it?"

  "Because I want to," Gerhart growled. He drew wide hips, curving them into mountainous thighs, then threw down his pen. "Listen, damn it, I've produced fifteen plays and twelve of them made money. Twelve! Four are still making money. That's a hell of a record, and you know it, and I had something to say about every one of those plays. Just because I spent my time making money instead of going to college doesn't mean I don't know what's wrong with the theater. You people talk to each other too much; you forget ordinary folks. And ordinary folks like young; they don't liJ{e old."

  "Bullshit." Kent had been prowling the room; now he stood in the center of it, legs apart. "The Magician is about Lena—Christ, Monte, you l^now this—who's the real magician, the way she makes things happen between people, and it's partly because of her age. I mean, you don't have all that wisdom when you're young."

  Acts of Lo

  V E ~ 21

  "You're young."

  "I'm different, I'm a genius. What the hell, this play is about real people and it's about a woman who isn't young!"

  "Fifty isn't young."

  "You just said it was; you said that's why you want to change her age."

  "Not young young. But not old. Old is out, damn it. There's no way I'm going to produce a play about an old hag who people will think is a witch, not a magician."

  There was a silence. Son of a bitch, Luke thought again, seething. No one was going to tell him how to direct The Magician; he'd lived with the script for three months and by now it was his far more than it was anyone else's. But still he had to go through this charade to get where he had thought he was when he first walked in twenty minutes ago. They're midgets when it comes to directing, he thought, and then, with a glance at Gerhart's huge frame, he broke into a chuckle. Midgets.

  "What's so funny.^" Kent demanded.

  "Not a lot." He stood up. "I didn't come here to listen to you two hack away at each other. We're going to talk about getting this play produced or we'll drop the whole project and I'll put together a new team."

  "Lena's age stays the way I wrote it," Kent said flatly. "It doesn't change by one year. Not by one goddamn day!"

  Luke nodded. "We understand that."

  "Look, it's a no-brainer," Gerhart said. "Do a draft, Kent, give us something to talk about. Couple days, that's all. Well, take a week. Can't talk without something in front of us, right.''"

  "No. Damn it, Monte, how many times do I have to say it.'' No. No. No."

  Luke leaned forward, his hands on Gerhart's desk. "Monte, read the play again, straight through. I don't intend to have this discussion again, so this is what I want you to think about." Pulling a pad of paper to him, he scrawled three lines, tore off the sheet and put it in front of Gerhart. "First, you know who fills most theaters these days: older people who can afford the price of a ticket. You think they won't understand Lena, and admire and identify with her? Second, when there are young people in the audience, whom are they going to lean toward? We know they'll identify with the lovers, but what about Lena, who'll remind them of their grandmother ... or make them wish they had a grandmother like her? Third,

  22 ~ Judith Michael

  when Lena's grandson falls in love, it's very much like the love affair Lena had when she was young; she feels more protective of it precisely because she's in her eighties—sixty years removed from that passion. A woman of fifty could look forward to another love affair; Lena can't. I have notes on all those points, but before I show them to you I want you to read the play again, beginning to end, not stopping for single lines or even scenes. Get a feel for the whole thing." He waited. "I assume you'll have time to do that," he said evenly.

  Gerhart was drawing again, concentrating on bulging calves fad
ing to slender ankles. After a moment he looked up and grinned. "Well, you're a tough hombre, Luke. I don't mind that; it's why you're the best director around. I thought of those things—you're right about the old people in the audience; you might be right about everything else, I don't know, but I did think about all that and it's a hell of a good play just the way it is. I knew that last night. No question I'd like her younger—I think with some rewriting we could make it work—and you know I always try to get my way and I will again—fair warning, Luke, I always try to get my way—but for now, with Lena, you've got a good case, so, okay, we leave her alone."

  Kent was staring at him. "So okay? We've been playing a game? Monte, I have better things to do with my time than play your little games."

  "I'm paying for your play, Mr. Home, and if I want to play a game now and then, I'll play it and so will you. This wasn't a game, though, this was serious. I wanted her younger. I fight for what I believe. You don't understand that? Look at you, standing there like Clint Eastwood ready to shoot me through my whatsit. I tried and I lost. Sometimes you'll try and you'll lose. That's how it goes."

  "I don't lose."

  "The hell you don't. You'd better think again about that."

  "Let it go," Luke said. "It's going to be a rough two months of togetherness if you two can't learn to get along. That's your assignment. Both of you." He opened the office door. "Monte, ten o'clock tomorrow? We'll start again. Tommy will be here, too."

  "Tommy?" Kent asked.

  "Webb," Monte said. "Casting director. Ten o'clock, Luke."

  "I'll be here, too," Kent said aggressively.

  "Of course you will," Luke said, "it's your play. But I shouldn't have to tell you that this isn't a one-man show: not yours, not mine, not Monte's.

  Acts of 1

  o V E ~ 23

  The theater—at least my theater—is no place for tyranny. You've never had a play produced, but whether you had or not, here you do it our way. Some lines—what the hell, sometimes whole scenes—always need rewriting; the minute rehearsals begin you can hear when lines that look terrific on paper just don't work when they're spoken. I'll never deliberately compromise your integrity as a writer, but I'm telling you now, you'll be rewriting as we go along."

  "I don't rewrite. It's perfect the way it is."

  "I've never seen a perfect play. Neither have you. The Magician is a wonderful play, but I can't promise I won't ask for changes, and if that doesn't satisfy you, you'd better pull out now."

  There was a silence. "You know I wouldn't do that."

  "I'm glad to hear it. Tomorrow at ten.?"

  Kent nodded. Monte was drawing shoes on his nude woman. Luke left. He had a lot of planning to do, or it was going to be a hell of a long two months.

  "It doesn't seem long enough to put on a major play," said Marian Lodge as they sat in Luke's office an hour later. She was tall and thin with hair slicked back and gold loops swaying from her ears, and she wore a linen suit and a silk rep tie. She sat erect in an armchair, a malachite roller-ball pen poised over the pad of yellow lined paper on her lap and a tiny tape recorder hissing faintly on the arm of Luke's chair. "Readers of The New Yorf^er profiles demand verisimilitude, you know, so I'll want all the details. How do you get everything done in two months? Don't actors need more time to learn their lines and psych out their characters, and then rehearse.? And what about all the rest of it—costumes, stage sets, lighting, props . . . I'm fascinated by the theater, you know; I could talk about it forever."

  "I don't have quite that much time," Luke said with a smile that was caught by the photographer who prowled about the room, his camera's automatic shutter making a rapid staccato as he photographed Luke, the few prominent, abstract sculptures, the leather-and-suede furnishings and the signed photographs that covered the walls. Luke held his smile and masked his impatience. He had only agreed to the interview because Tina Brown had asked him to do it as part of a double issue on the arts, and already he was regretting it. "Let's see how much we can do in an hour. As for the two months, preparation for a production can go on

  24 ~ Judith Michael

  too long: not only does it reach a plateau, it can slide backward and lose whatever freshness—"

  "So how do you decide how long to rehearse?"

  "It depends on the complexity of a play, and the number of characters. But I'd think something was very wrong if a play took much more than six weeks of rehearsal."

  She nodded. "Now, I know you and Claudia are divorced, but do you have children?"

  Inwardly, Luke shrugged. He knew all about this kind of interviewer. She would skim the surface, dipping now and then into the real details of his work, but never enough to interfere with the personal titillation she was really after. "No," he said.

  "Would you like children ... or are your plays your children?"

  "Plays are like children: they need nurturing and shaping, they need a creative atmosphere in order to reach their fullest potential, they—"

  "Yes, but what about you, Mr. Cameron? Surely you've thought about your own children . . . you're—I have this in my notes somewhere—how old you are—"

  "Forty-five. Of course I've thought about children; my grandmother liked the idea of having great-grandchildren. She talked about it until the day she died. I was seven when I went to live with her—my parents had died quite suddenly, within two months of each other—and Constance took me in. I grew up backstage, with tutors and various casts and crews to teach me everything that tutors didn't know. I remember once, when I was ten, we were in San Francisco touring How Green Was My Valley and everybody was talking about Haight Ashbury. It sounded like pure romance and excitement—sexual excitement, though I think, at ten, I could barely have defined or recognized it—so one day when my tutor was sick I took off by myself. I had a little money and I bought a map and a candy bar and some kind of soft drink, and I actually got to within a few blocks of where I thought I was going when one of the cast members, Terry Evans, plucked me off the sidewalk. Constance had enlisted everyone— cast, crew, even the cleaning staff—and sent them to scour San Francisco to find me. But Terry didn't take me right back. He called Constance to tell her he'd found me and then he took me on a tour of the Haight, a real one, including dinner at some little place that's long since disappeared. He gave a running commentary that even a ten-year-old could understand, so

  Acts of L

  o V E ~ 25

  I saw that there really was romance and excitement there, and a kind of innocence that's rare today. But Terry also made me see the young people who were lost in drugs and fantasies and were vulnerable to exploitation. In fact, that was what he made sure I learned that day: how brutally some people prey on the innocent. There was sexual exploitation and financial exploitation—shopkeepers and landlords who robbed those kids blind— and con artists who used them to make a buck by running bus tours through the Haight, filming it for television, writing cockeyed newspaper stories about it, using real names and photographs. Of all the examples of man's inhumanity to man, the Haight, under Terry's tutelage, was probably the most devastating. And it's still in me, in the way I direct, in the way I feel about the undercurrents of relationships, the power struggles between people. I guess I was pretty shaken up, because by the time I got back to the theater that night I remember being relieved to know that there were new rules about my not going off alone, and from then on Constance made time to be my fellow explorer. She and I explored three dozen cities before I went away for high school and then college. We were a great team."

  "A charming story." Marian Lodge smiled brightly. "But speaking of exploring, I do want to explore your ideas about your marriage and marriage in general, your friends and of course children."

  "Miss Lodge." She looked at him expectantly, her pen poised. "I thought you'd be able to grasp the reason I told that story. I thought I was making it clear that I have no intention of talking about my marriage or my friends or my feelings about children. I'll be
glad to talk to you about my grandmother and the plays I've directed and those I plan to direct and what I'm trying to achieve in my directing. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I assume that's what you came to hear."

  "Well. Do you always tell interviewers what kind of an interview they can do?"

  "Always."

  "So you direct the interview the same way you do a play. Did you direct your marriage that way? Oh, dear me, I'm sorry," she said quickly as Luke stood up. "That slipped out. I apologize. May I rephrase it? Do you direct any of the events of your life in the same way?"

  He smiled. "No."

  "Would you sit down again? I am sorry. It's just that I'm known"—she smiled again, a confidential smile—"for getting all those intimate details

  26 ~ Judith Michael

  no one else can get. Those are what make a person come alive on the printed page: I'm sure you know that."

  "A good writer makes people come alive through language and imagery, not titillation."

  She flushed. "Well, yes, of course. But I'm thinking of our readers, you know; they expect to read about your personal life; they want to/{now you."

  "They'll know me through my work. I'd think that's what The New Yorl^er readers would be most interested in." He remained standing, leaning casually against the wall behind his desk. "From the time I was seven to my thirteenth birthday, when Constance decided I needed a real high school, and after that on summer vacations, I lived backstage, watching, listening, asking questions, pestering the crews to let me work on stage sets, lighting design, props, everything that goes into a production. When I was fifteen I knew I'd be a director and I was already criticizing the way plays were being staged. I was an unbearably arrogant teenager, absolutely sure I'd already learned everything I needed to know. Constance listened to me with great patience and more than a little humor and then told me that I had a few things left to learn and I was going off to college, whether that was part of my lifetime plan or not."

  Having launched himself, he talked easily about his early years in the theater and then all phases of theater life, using anecdotes, famous names, a sprinkling of technical backstage terms, an inside look at scandals of the past and his own style of directing, especially in the plays and films that had made his name one of the most famous on Broadway. Then he added the statistics magazine editors love: how many plays he had directed, where they had opened and later toured, the number of tickets sold, how many people were involved in the production of a play and how many people in the theater made a good living at it (very few).