Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  Thomas started over. One for one. Two for two. Miss.

  “Shake it off,” said Coach McPhee. “You can’t be perfect. See how well you can do.”

  Three for four. Four for five. He finished at eight out of ten. The free throws toward the end felt really good.

  “Eighty percent’s a winner in any league,” said Coach McPhee. “You’ll do well as soon as you learn to control your emotions.”

  “You threw me off when you mentioned girls,” said Thomas.

  “My point exactly,” said Mr. McPhee. “Let me tell you a true story. A very embarrassing story. When I was a kid, early teens, I used to watch a girl in the apartment across the alley get dressed. Every day at the same time she’d be in that room with the shades up, and she’d take off every bit of her clothes, and then she’d brush her hair by the window.”

  It was funny to imagine Mr. McPhee as a peeper. “She’d brush it and brush it and brush it,” he said, “and I’d watch her the whole time. I got into so much trouble for that.” He paused.

  “And?” said Thomas.

  “And I got into trouble,” McPhee said. “That’s the moral of the story, Boatwright. If you fool with girls, you’re going to have trouble. Take my word for it.”

  “How’d you get caught?” said Thomas.

  Mr. McPhee laughed. “I’m the type who always gets caught,” he said. “Go get your shower and then I’ll walk you over to play practice.”

  It was 5:35. Thomas showered and dressed in ten minutes while Coach McPhee put away the basketballs and turned out the lights. They stood together outside in the cold while Coach locked up the gym. He had his key to the gym on an old Boston College key ring.

  “Supposed to snow tonight,” said Coach McPhee.

  It was good to have the coach along as they walked across the dark campus to Bradley Hall.

  “Mr. McPhee?” asked Thomas. “Why does somebody like Angus do what he did?”

  They walked in silence for a time, and Thomas thought that Coach McPhee was not going to answer.

  “It’s a passion,” said Coach McPhee. “It brings us into marriages and splits us into divorces. Sometimes it goes bad. It’s a tricky force, Thomas. Right now in your life it would be better for you to stick to basketball and stay away from the ladies.”

  He sounded just like Dad. You asked him a question about somebody else, and he gives you a lecture about yourself. It was always sensible advice, impossible to follow.

  SCENE 8

  They were having a terrible time killing off Desdemona.

  It was Monday afternoon, and Benjamin Warden watched from the back of the auditorium. For such a brief and famous piece of stage business, the smothering scene presented an astonishing set of complications.

  The blocking would not work. If Cynthia as Desdemona lay in bed, then her lines were inaudible to the audience, and nobody could see the anguish on her face. If she sat up in bed, then the Lipscomb boy as Othello had to push her down before he could smother her with the pillow, and the effect was more comic than horrifying. If she got out of the bed to have her final speech with Othello elsewhere in the bedroom, then the imagery of the scene disintegrated.

  “Shakespeare wanted it to occur in bed,” said Dan Farnham. “He wanted to show an act of violence between a man and a woman in a bed. The parallels between Desdemona’s death and the sex act are obvious and disturbing. The only thing is, I don’t see how the hell it’s been blocked. People have been doing it for 350 years, and I can’t figure how to set it up.”

  Warden was there to help and could offer none. Stagecraft was a mystery to him; what looked perfectly natural up close was either invisible or ridiculous from the viewpoint of the audience.

  So far Farnham had been remarkably patient with the logistical problems. Warden was worried more about Cynthia, who seemed increasingly fatigued and desperate with each run-through. She really wants it to work, he thought. But she is exhausted.

  Patrick McPhee and Thomas Boatwright entered the auditorium from the lobby. Farnham explained to McPhee why the blocking was forcing them to run behind with rehearsal.

  The coach understood the problem immediately. “It’s like putting in an offense in basketball,” he said. “The one that works one season with one team just isn’t right for another.”

  “You sound terrible,” said Farnham. “Are you getting a cold?”

  “Lost my whistle,” said McPhee. “Too much yelling at these renegades.” He gave Thomas Boatwright a soft slap on the head.

  The actors stood on the stage waiting for Farnham to get back to them. They were nearly motionless in a series of poses that the director might have carefully arranged to look casual. Cynthia sat Indian style on the bed, which had just been finished that afternoon and supported an old mattress from Stringfellow Hall. Greg Lipscomb leaned against the bed with his arms folded across his chest. Ginny Kaufman, wife of the dean and cast as Emilia and understudy to Desdemona, sat in a folded chair at the edge of the stage and read. She had graying hair which she wore in bangs, and she used large round tortoiseshell glasses to read. Nathan Somerville had on a white tee shirt and lounged back on the balls of his hands as he sat on the stage itself next to her chair. Thomas Boatwright sat in the front row of the auditorium. He wasn’t in this scene; his character was dead by now.

  “Any suggestions, Pat?” asked Farnham.

  McPhee asked why they had given up on kneeling. “We’ve never done it with Desdemona kneeling,” said Farnham.

  “Maybe that was Maggie Smith in Olivier’s version,” said McPhee. “I’ve seen somebody do it somewhere.”

  Farnham said Olivier’s was good blocking to steal.

  “Why not? I steal basketball plays all the time.”

  Cynthia asked McPhee to show her how.

  He still wore his gray sweatsuit and basketball shoes from practice and vaulted easily up onto the stage. “Desdemona kneels at the edge of the bed. Othello faces her. She holds out her arms as if to embrace him. He grabs her by the throat and chokes her. Then he forces her down onto the bed, all the time climbing onto the bed himself, and finishes her off by smothering her with a pillow.”

  They tried it.

  “That feels right,” said Cynthia.

  “No problem for me,” said Greg.

  “It feels exactly right,” said Cynthia again. “I’ve tried it this way on my own. It’s what Desdemona would do. I should have thought of it myself.”

  “The basketball coach sets us back on schedule,” said Farnham. “Of course, the smothering isn’t going to be enough. We want Othello to stab her, too. Get the knife, Greg.”

  Greg left the bed and walked over to the props table offstage.

  “I can’t find it,” he said.

  Farnham groaned, not angrily. “Who has the knife?” he asked the group. Then, calling up to the light booth, “Landon? You got the knife?”

  Landon replied that he did not.

  Thomas reached into the right front pocket of his jeans and pulled out his red Swiss Army knife. He held it up from his seat.

  “You can borrow this if you want,” he said.

  Farnham waved it away. “We need something more authentic,” he said, and he walked over to join Greg at the props table. He found the dagger stuck to the taped handle of a fencing blade.

  “Put this back in its spot when you finish,” he said to Greg. The dagger was about eight inches long and ended in a thin, tapering point. From Warden’s seat in the auditorium, it looked like a dangerous crucifix. Greg Lipscomb was wearing large floppy boots—part of his costume—and he stored the knife in the right-hand one.

  “Not there,” said Farnham. “You’re going to be barefoot by this point of the play. You get more and more African.”

  Greg put the knife up his sleeve.

  “Othello must have a knife hidden on him,” Farnham said to McPhee. “That solves two problems for us. First, how Desdemona seems to come back to life just before she dies. We can have her succumbing
to loss of blood rather than suffocation. Second, how Othello manages to stab himself after he’s supposedly been disarmed.”

  They were doing the business with the knife now. Emilia calls from the door to the bedroom. Othello has the pillow over Desdemona’s face. Her arms are waving frantically. Othello has to hurry now because of the approach of the lady-in-waiting. He pulls the knife out of his sleeve and speaks: “I would not have thee linger in thy pain:/So. So.” On the first “so” he stabs her in the heart. On the second he twists the blade. Desdemona arches her back in an agony that looks also like sexual ecstasy.

  Warden played with Othello’s words: “I would not have thee linger in thy pain.” It was the voice of one who loves intensely.

  He was surprised when his throat thickened and tears burned his eyes. It was only a rehearsal of a high school play, and yet it had awakened an urge within him that had to be satisfied now.

  SCENE 9

  It was 6:15 before they got the damn death scene figured out. Thomas had sat around for over half an hour watching Farnham and McPhee screw around with the blocking while everybody else got bored out of their gourds. Teachers were always asking students to get to places on time so they could make them wait after they got there. It was nice of Mr. McPhee to be so interested in the play, but hey, come on, some of us have work to do. Farnham should have been getting as irritated as Thomas was over McPhee’s interference, since McPhee was out-blocking the director. But Farnham seemed glad for the help. Maybe McPhee would invite Farnham to basketball practice to put in new options for the offense.

  What Thomas wanted more than anything was to do his scene. This acting business was okay, better than basketball even, except for the unpredictability of Mr. Farnham’s rehearsals. Thomas knew theater. His dad had been reviewing plays since before Thomas was born, and three years ago they had gone on a backstage tour in Stratford, England, where they had seen how slanted the stage was and how small the auditorium looked from the stage side. They had met one of the directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he had seemed just like a regular person you’d see at a cocktail party. But he’d been in a hurry to get to his rehearsals. Everything in the professional theater seemed to run on schedule. Mr. Farnham was too temperamental to be prompt.

  In the back of the room Mr. Warden sat and watched. Thomas had waved to him from his seat on the front row, and Mr. Warden had waved back. Thomas had thought about going back to sit with him. He was a good advisor, really interested in what you were doing. But Thomas knew that sometimes he liked to be alone. If Mr. Warden wanted to see him, Mr. Warden would come down to the front.

  Mr. McPhee jumped down off the stage and landed softly on his white basketball shoes. He sat beside Thomas in the cushioned theater seats. Thomas asked him how he knew so much about Shakespeare.

  “Being a coach doesn’t mean you have to be ignorant,” said Mr. McPhee. “Remember, I’m a teacher, too.”

  Thomas watched Mrs. Warden as Desdemona. She lay on the bed on her side, facing the audience, pretending to be asleep. Greg entered from upstage left, miming the holding of a lantern in his right hand. In his left hand, he was holding his book.

  “Put out the light, and then put out the light,” Greg read. When Desdemona awakens, she springs up into a kneeling position, her legs tucked beneath her on the sheets. Her husband is pacing. He’s literally insane with jealousy. He accuses her of infidelity with Michael Cassio; she is shocked for a moment into silence, and then she swiftly denies any such treachery. He tells her to prepare to die.

  “Kill me to-morrow . . . says Desdemona in desperation. “Let me live tonight . . .

  “Nay, if you strive—”

  “But half an hour!” she pleads. She has reduced her request to a mere thirty minutes, but her pleading only strengthens his resolve.

  “Being done, there is no pause,” says Othello.

  And it is here that she lifts her arms in pleading as he comes toward her. She is asking now not even for half an hour, only for enough time to speak to God: “But while I say one prayer!”

  “It is too late,” Greg replied, and his hands closed around her neck. With Greg it was only one hand and a book pressing against her throat, but the result was amazing. She started to scream.

  Greg jumped back and dropped his paperback. She had scared him. The screams subsided into sobs. Nobody moved. Farnham was on the apron of the stage; Mrs. Kaufman and Nathan Somerville were backstage but visible in the wings.

  “I just started thinking about Robert Staines,” said Mrs. Warden. “The hands on the throat, the choking. I was in that room on the night he died, rehearsing this part. It all just caught up with me for a minute. I’m sorry.”

  Mr. Farnham walked up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. She got up from the bed and moved away from him.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  Nathan Somerville looked at his watch. Mr. Farnham saw him do so and looked at his own.

  “It’s 6:25,” said Mr. Farnham. “We’ll have to break for dinner now anyway.” He turned to Thomas. “Roderigo, can you come back at 7:00? Iago?” He asked Nathan with a swivel of his head.

  That was so damn typical. Thomas had hoped to call Hesta after dinner and before study hall.

  “I’ll be here,” said Thomas.

  “Me too,” said Nathan.

  “You, too, Othello,” said Mr. Farnham to Greg.

  Mrs. Kaufman walked up to Mrs. Warden and tidied her long blond hair the way she might smooth out a bedspread. “Can I walk you to dinner?” she asked.

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” said Mrs. Warden. “I need to think.”

  “Do you want to stay down here alone?” asked Coach McPhee.

  “Ben’s here,” she said, but when they looked to the back of the auditorium, Mr. Warden was gone.

  Thomas wondered whether he had been there to see his wife break down.

  Mr. Farnham called to Landon to leave the stage lights on. They’d be back in less than an hour.

  “I’m going to skip dinner and work on my lines,” said Mrs. Warden. “I’ll be here when you return.”

  Mr. McPhee and Mr. Farnham walked out together. Mrs. Kaufman asked Landon Hopkins to walk with her. Thomas, Greg, and Nathan left together. Outside the building they bundled up against the cold and walked straight for Stringfellow Hall.

  They did not see Kemper Carella in the dark of the sidewalk to their right, nor did they notice him enter Bradley Hall.

  SCENE 10

  It would be crazy to make a move here, now, early evening in a lighted theater with the woman lying in bed on the stage of all places, but Carella was tempted. She was so hot. He had seen everybody associated with the production leave the theater building, and he knew where the husband was—hell, Carella had just run into the old astronaut pacing the campus sidewalks and mentally orbiting somewhere around Uranus.

  Carella stood for a minute inside the door of the auditorium and watched her work on her lines. She would mumble the words, kneel on the bed, hold out her arms, melt her face into a sprezzatura seizure of terror. She was hot to watch, those titties bouncing up and down, that long foxy hair. What if he climbed up on the stage and tied her up?

  “Who’s there?” she called from her bed.

  She must’ve spotted him.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  She looked surprised to see him out among the seats. “The acoustics in here are strange,” she said. “I thought I heard a noise backstage.”

  He walked down the closest aisle of the auditorium and hopped easily up onto the stage. She looked even better up close.

  “Hi, Cindy,” he said. She didn’t like that name, he could tell.

  “What do you want, Kemper? I don’t have much time.”

  This won’t take much time, babe, he thought. Oh, how good it would be to peek under those blue jeans of yours.

  “You’re working awfully hard on a play that doesn’t happen until March,” he said.

  She a
sked him again what he wanted.

  Before he could answer, the telephone rang. Carella answered it.

  It was Patrick McPhee. “I’m at the gym looking for Dan Farnham,” he said. “Have you seen him over there?”

  Daniel Farnham was nowhere in sight.

  Carella hung up the telephone and turned back to Cynthia.

  “Well?” she said. “What’s going on?”

  He told her.

  SCENE 11

  After a dinner like that, you felt like getting something to eat.

  It had been the worst ever—lasagna charred on the outside and cold on the inside, a salad that was nothing but lettuce and no dressing, stale bread, and canned fruit cocktail for dessert. The rumor was that everybody working in the dining hall had quit because they were scared that Angus Farrier would murder them. The truth was that the electrical power in Stringfellow Hall had gone out for the crucial half hour before dinner, so everyone on the staff had valiantly carried casseroles of lasagna to faculty apartments and common room kitchens around the campus in order to heat up the food. It meant that everyone had a buffet dinner instead of a sit-down, family-style meal at assigned tables. That part had been good; it had meant that Thomas and Greg could eat together instead of with their advisors. The bad part was that the power had come back on in time for them to see clearly what they were eating.

  “They could have at least put out butter and salad dressing,” said Thomas.

  “Or heated up the bread,” said Greg.

  “Or put out some breakfast cereal.”

  “Or driven us to McDonald’s.”

  “Or given us the cheese and let us make our own pizza.”

  “Do we have any food back in the room?” Greg asked Thomas.

  “Just some crackers and some of that aerosol cheese.”

  “I meant food,” said Greg.

  They were walking in the cold from Stringfellow to Bradley Hall, where they hoped to finish their rehearsal before the 7:30 study hall.