Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater

by Seth Lerer

  I sat down in a corner, looking for the Jew, the famous speeches, and for Tubal. I’d seen the play on TV years before, and when I was at Oxford I went to an outdoor performance at New College in which all the parts (in supposed Shakespearean authenticity) were played by men. But I had no memory of Tubal. It took time, wading through seas of prose where Portia and Nerissa speak, long verse passages of plot exposition, and the confusions of all the stories Shakespeare wove together in the play. There was the story of the caskets, which I had completely forgotten: Portia’s father “was ever virtuous,”

  Therefore the lottery that he hath devised in these three chests of gold, silver, and lead, whereof who chooses his meaning chooses you, will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one who you shall rightly love.

  Shakespeare’s prose was a nightmare to me, and I flipped over the pages, looking for familiar lines. Shylock, in this edition, was just called “The Jew,” and I scanned down the page—Jew, Bassanio, Jew, Bassanio, Jew, Bassanio, on and on, until Antonio enters. “I am debating of my present store.” He doesn’t have the money. Ah, he needs Tubal to front him three thousand ducats. Now I understood what he was doing in the play. Now I read on, remembering the scenes on TV and at New College. I found the passage where the Jew demands his pound of flesh. I found the scene where the Moroccan picks the golden casket. I laughed out loud at the clowns, held my breath over Jessica. I was just into act 3 when I saw him: Enter Tubal.

  Here comes another of the tribe.

  Shylock then asks about Portia, and Tubal answers:

  I often came where I did hear of her, but cannot find her.

  I read the words aloud: about the flattest, most unpoetic line that I had ever seen in Shakespeare. And then, Shylock:

  Why, there, there, there, there! A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt! The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now. Two thousand ducats in that, and other precious, precious jewels.

  Amazing. There he is, in prose, and he’s more powerful than anyone in verse. I read the lines over and over. I heard the climax in the repetitions—all the drama in those four theres, a heartache in a price tag, and a lifetime’s pause between precious and precious. Tubal speaks, now only to be interrupted:

  Tubal: Yes, other men have ill luck too. Antonio, as I heard in Genoa—

  Jew: What, what, what? Ill luck, ill luck?

  Tubal is full of information, but the Jew’s words, in their simple, insistent repetitions, say far more. Again and again in this brief scene, Tubal tries to tell the Jew, as simply and prosaically as possible, that Antonio’s fleet is lost, that Portia has spent Shylock’s money in Genoa, and that she has sold off his turquoise ring:

  I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wreck. . . .

  One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for a monkey. . . .

  But Antonio is certainly undone. . . .

  Empty lines, undramatic. It’s Shylock who has it here, Shylock who iterates over and over, giving us what Shakespeare clearly must have seen as Jewish rhetoric: repetitive, insistent, every word a finger thrust in the air. “Good news, good news! Ha, ha, heard in Genoa!” And then, after this brief exchange, Shylock is done with him. “Go, Tubal,” he says, three times at the scene’s close, as if he can’t wait to get him off the stage.

  I closed the book and thought of all the things Dad could have said. I remembered the pictures on his wall, the roles he played at camp, with Mom in the suburban theaters of their pastimes. I remembered how he called me the last time he’d seen his own parents together, just before his father died, and he said, “It was like in Lear, two birds in a cage,” pronouncing “Lear” as if it had three syllables. Did he audition for Antonio, all metered melancholy? Did he ask for Bassanio, all bonhomie? Or Shylock—would he have shown up at the call all nose, all accent?

  I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

  I said those lines for him like a Kaddish, thinking of the collar and the chains, the leather and the spikes, the costumes of his company, begging that he be understood, begging that even for his faults he be forgiven. If we are like you in the rest . . . But he was not. He walked on, right after these lines, said his prose portion in the wake of Shylock’s prowess, gave the news, and then was shooed offstage:

  Go, Tubal, meet me in our synagogue.

  I turned the page, and the edition showed a reproduction of a painting of the two of them, the old Jew with his beard and hooked nose, and his friend, with side-locks and his hands clasped in a moment of remorse. It was an eighteenth-century painting, but the poses looked like something out of silent film—arch, overacted. The Folger picture on his wall had the cast in modern dress: a black Antonio in a gray suit, a pudgy Shylock in a rep tie, looking for all the world more like a suburban Reform rabbi than a Shakespearean merchant. Where were the enchantments of a costume? Ten years after he’d dressed up as the Pasha, here he was, all prose in a suit he’d purchased for the part.

  I remembered a day, several years before, when I took him to meet my Stanford colleague, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, Jewish, from New York, close to Dad’s age. He’d grown up on Park Avenue and had been openly gay, I gathered, since college. Since arriving at Stanford in the mid-eighties, he had lived in an exquisite home near the campus. Dad was in San Francisco by then, and he drove down in the black Celica to join me for tea at my colleague’s house. We’ll go in my car, I said, and we sidled through winding streets, mapped out for affluent physicians and business school professors, quietly pulling up to the house. The boyfriend let us in, a slight Japanese man, about ten years younger than I was, and he led us through the living room, past Rookwood pottery and Biedermeier furniture, past first editions of the modern poets, and through a glass door on to a cedar deck. There was a table, four chairs, and a teapot in a cozy. There were four china cups and saucers, and a plate on which four slices of date-nut bread had been fanned. My colleague was already sitting there, waiting for our courtesy, and I introduced Dad and talked about how he had been doing some acting, and wasn’t it a pleasure, now that he had moved to San Francisco, that he could spend time with me and his grandson. My colleague put out his hand, a little surprised when Dad actually took it and shook it, and we sat down and had the tea, and each of us got a single slice of date-nut bread. It is a lovely garden, isn’t it Dad, and you know my colleague has been such a good friend since I first arrived. But we got nowhere, and the boyfriend was visibly jealous of my attentiveness to his patron.

  Finally, just to try and get things going, I began.

  You know, it’s always fascinated me how many of Shakespeare’s great characters have only daughters and no sons. Prospero, Shylock, Lear. It’s as if they couldn’t bear the burden of male children, as if they must be the teachers or the keepers of their daughters, as if male identity figures itself against a woman who rebels. Being a parent in Shakespeare—I wonder if it had anything to do with his own sense of fatherhood, or his relationship to his own father. What do you think? Do you think his father really was a Catholic? Do you think his name was really Shakeshaft and he changed it? The father-daughter relationships are really the most powerful. I mean, after all, who really has a son in Shakespeare?

  “Only clowns and kings,” my colleague said, not looking at me, almost as if he were speaking to the tea.

  Oh, right, of course. I got back on the horse. Remember Henry IV, Part 1, the scene where Prince Hal plays with Falstaff. “Do thou stand for my father.” Or the bit at the end, where Hal and Henry meet at battle, and they finish each ot
her’s other lines. I loved that bit. Yes, I guess there really are some good sons in Shakespeare. Prince Hal.

  “Or Lancelot Gobbo,” said the boyfriend, like he was letting air out of a tire.

  The wind blew through the fruitless mulberry tree in the garden. A hummingbird passed by, held itself almost soundlessly at eye level, and finding nothing sweet or red nearby, flew off.

  All this came back to me in the bookstore, and I flipped through to find the scene with Gobbo and his father from The Merchant:

  Do I look like a cudgel, or a hovel post, a staff, or a prop? Do you know me, Father?

  I scanned a few lines down:

  Do you not know me, Father?

  And then I remembered how the afternoon had ended: how I brought the conversation back to Dad as Tubal, how I told my colleague that he’d played in The Merchant at the Folger. And I was back, for a minute, in that garden.

  I missed the show, but I’ve seen the pictures, really a terrific production.

  “Really?” my colleague perked up.

  And now my father: “Yes, it was a lovely production, all modern dress, remarkable cast.”

  “Yes, I’m sure. And how did you play Tubal?”

  “Well.”

  . . .

  And at the close of Henry IV, Part 1, when Prince Hal and the King meet on the field of battle, he turns to his father:

  And God forgive them that so much have sway’d

  Your Majesty’s good thoughts away from me!

  I will redeem all this . . . ,

  And in the closing of some glorious day

  Be bold to tell you that I am your son.

  FOUR

  Blithe Spirits

  I must have fallen asleep in the bookstore, and the owner poked me, wondering if I was buying anything that day. “We’re not a library.” You’re not much of a bookstore either, I retorted, and then immediately realized my mistake. I’m sorry, my father passed away this week, and I’ve been thinking a lot about him. I described him to the owner and he knew him immediately.

  “Oh, yeah. Old guy. Beard, leather jacket. Came in all the time. Never bought anything. I’m surprised he had a son.”

  He had two. And a wife.

  His silence asked the question.

  It’s a long story.

  “Business is slow.”

  My parents met as actors, in the Brooklyn College production of Blithe Spirit in 1948. Dad was in his early twenties, out of college, already with an MA and a teaching job. What he was doing back at Brooklyn College starring in stage plays with undergraduates was a mystery to me. But there he was, Charles Condomime to Mom’s Ruth, the second wife. We have a picture of the cast, each member signing off under his or her costumed head—an assembly of Jewish immigrant children, convinced that the surest way to successful assimilation was to ape the artifice of 1930s British swells. Decades later, hardly a week went by when, sometime between the salad and the ice cream, Dad would yell out, “Damn you, Ruth,” and Mom would get that look on her face as if to say, “Tell that silly old bitch to mind her own business.” It was their play, and “Always” was their song. Without the slightest provocation, Dad would burst into its opening refrain, and he and Mom would do a turn around the kitchen and recall how Morty Gunty or Irwin Mazursky garbled their lines, couldn’t act, and now, see how famous they became (Irwin having changed his name to Paul). And as the strains of “Always” filtered down the hall, the Brooklyn College Barrymores came back to life.

  We had a theatrical life, and I was put onstage almost as soon as I could talk. Every summer, Mom and Dad would work the camps in upstate New York, Dad directing the plays, Mom doing the sets. When I was five, they put me in the camp itself—the kids’ bunk at camp Kee-Wah—while they did the shows. Privileged arena for the Brooklyn aristocracy (that summer, the heir to the Waldbaum’s grocery chain was a bed-wetting bunkmate, and the camp boasted such alumni as Lauren Bacall and Paddy Chayefsky), Kee-Wah offered up that blend of Jewish cultural instruction and athletic sadism so characteristic of the fifties summer experience. The camp was run by Isidore (“Izzy”) Monees, a man who looked exactly like Mr. Magoo and whose name I always misunderstood as “easy money.” He’d bark his orders to his minions and make unannounced spot-checks on bunks just to terrify us.

  That summer when I was five, I had a counselor who was a medical student. He insisted on playing doctor with us—a whole bunkload of the barely toilet-trained. He’d bring out his stethoscope and reflex hammer at all hours, giving us exams (I think I had suppressed the horror of it all until, when my own son was five, I told him I had to go off and give my students an exam, and he said, “Will you use a stethoscope?”). There was also my Israeli accordion instructor. He would show up in sandals (the first man I ever saw wearing sandals), play “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” and then hand over the accordion. “Now, you play.” At one point he said something in Hebrew about my performance, and I quit the accordion then and there.

  But I could not get out of playing so easily. The year before, I wasn’t even in the camp and Dad put me onstage. All I remember is that I was supposed to be a horse, and as I was running around the stage in a circle, the counselor playing the piano yelled out, “Seth Lerer.” It was the only name I heard. Had she called everyone’s name, or just mine? And the summer I was five I was a dog, the emcee of a talent show where everyone was dressed as animals. And I remember, too, another show when I was costumed as a doctor (I borrowed the counselor’s stethoscope), with “Ben Crazy, MD,” written on my smock. And even earlier—I must have been just three—there is a memory of Dad insisting that I put on a large diaper and get on a platter, trussed up like a roast pig with a tomato in my mouth, while the drama staff danced out intoning, “Larry Lerer, Larry Lerer, Larry Lerer,” to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus.

  His name, my name, they blend together. For years, I heard his name yelled out. Hardly a week went by in Brooklyn when I didn’t hear a voice calling out, “Mister Lerer, Mister Lerer! Remember, Kiss Me Kate, 1954? Another opening, another show . . . ,” and some poor pimpled adolescent would be going through the motions of a show my Dad had put on years before. It was as if he had taught, or directed, everybody. There were fat little boys and svelte women, on street corners, at newsstands, in Ohrbach’s, everywhere. “Mister Lerer!” Once, years later, when I was a college student, we all went to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer. Driving around, we found a bit of shore that turned out to be a nude beach. Of course, Dad had to drag us there; what an adventure. And my brother and I, now too embarrassed to say anything, and my mother, with that “It’s child support!” look on her face, sitting there while Dad strutted around naked, deep in the narcotic of his exhibitionism. And then, from out of the surf, “Mister Lerer, Mister Lerer! Remember, Kiss Me Kate, 1954? Another opening, another show . . . ,” and now a middle-aged fat man in a red beard, dancing along the sand, his genitals flying this way and that, a pendulum to mark the time.

  Play after play, my parents marked their time. After we left New York in the mid-1960s, we moved to Boston, then to Pittsburgh. Suburban amateur groups, conditioned to the well-meaning posturing of Junior League matrons, would gape in awe at Mom and Dad’s flamboyance. Whenever we moved into a new town, they would seek out the theatricals, much as someone else’s parents might seek out the church or the good schools. The parts were all impostures. When we lived in Needham, Massachusetts, Mom and Dad starred in a local production of The Rivals. He was Captain Absolute, the dashing scion of the minor aristocracy, feigning to be young Ensign Beverley to woo Lydia Languish (Mom). Captain Absolute. The name became a clarion at home. For in the mid-1960s, TV was full of superheroes: Mr. Terrific, a mild-mannered clerk who takes a special potion; and Captain Nice, a momma’s boy whose potent pill made him the Superman of the suburbs. Such shows should really be appreciated as the origin of camp, playful tales of effeminates who find themselves transformed for public maleness. Did Dad take a pill each morning? What were the potions o
f his public self? In those Rivals days, he would return from work and, entering the kitchen stage right, would announce, “It’s Captain Absolute.” And Mom, languishing in her days alone, would hide her secret novels and the LPs and make a dinner that he would never finish before charging out, quoting a line crushingly out of context:

  No, no, I must prepare her gradually for the discovery . . .

  He never did.

  Another town, another show. Once, they played in The Odd Couple. Dad was Felix, the neat freak, and Mom was Gwendolyn—or Cecily, I always got them confused. Neil Simon’s Pigeon sisters, I discovered later, had the same names as the ingénues in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a play my parents never did, but one they raved over in a performance at Stratford, Ontario, where the great William Hutt played Lady Bracknell in repertory one year with King Lear.

  I’d often wondered if Dad would age into Lear or Lady Bracknell, but there was no question about Mom. She remained born to play her part, Renée, named after Renée Adorée, a silent film star of the 1920s whom her father must have coveted. She stares out of the photo at her grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, three years old with the look of a born performer: pouty, blank, covered in that ennui that years later would become the core of her Ruth. And there she is, in the portrait for her wedding, looking in a mirror and adjusting her veil. The camera catches her reflection, not her full face, and for all the world she looks less like a bride-to-be than an actress preparing for a part, surrounded by the mirror lights, the makeup, the costumes.

  Mom rediscovered her theatrical gifts after she and Dad divorced. She’d moved back to New York, to Jackson Heights in Queens, but found it changed so much since her childhood that streets were barely recognizable. Old Jewish women jostled on the street with recent émigrés from Argentina. Colombian drug dukes (the lords were elsewhere) shared office space as bogus travel agents with south Indian accountants. Korean dry cleaners paid rent to Greek landlords.