by Tanya Chris
“You must schmooze good,” I said when the new guy returned with a script in his hand. “I didn’t even hear any yelling.”
“I asked her if she was our makeup designer.”
That drew a laugh. Rebekah’s makeup was startling—vivid, dramatic, and over-the-top with bright pink cheeks, ruby red lips and sapphire blue eyelids.
“She actually does do makeup design sometimes. Much better than she does her own makeup, fortunately.”
“Physician, heal thyself.”
“Quoting Shakespeare. Nice. Even if it is the wrong show. I’m Nate, by the way.”
“Joshua.” He reached a hand over and I shook it. “I’m playing Iago.”
“I’m playing Othello.”
“I see.”
The two of us appraised each other. Joshua’s brown eyes were framed by lashes as thick as mine, but other than that we didn’t have much in common, even aside from the difference in skin color. I looked, according to Lissie, like you’d imagine Lord Byron would look—poetic, clean shaven, with pale skin, blue eyes, and dark hair that curled at the nape of my neck.
Joshua’s jaw was square. Along it ran a sculpted line of facial hair that continued up to join the hair on his head which was trimmed as short as the hair of his beard. His build was imposing, both tall and broad, with biceps that bulged obviously from beneath the short sleeves of his dark blue polo shirt.
“Carol’s not thinking straight,” I said. “Even if we try to ignore the race issue, you look more like a warrior.”
“Thanks for the compliment. I’m not going to return it by suggesting that you look more like a conniving weasel though.”
“But I could.” I put on my best shifty face.
“Are you saying I couldn’t?” He matched me, weasel for weasel.
Color me impressed. A minute ago he’d looked like he could beat whatever he wanted out of whoever he wanted it from. Now he looked like a master manipulator. “Will the real Joshua please stand up?”
“The real Joshua prefers to charm his way through life.”
“Hence why you have a script.” I waved at the stapled clump of papers in his hand. “But charm is a form of manipulation.”
“So is bullying, I suppose.”
“I think I like you.” I smiled one of my debonair smiles.
“Don’t try to charm a charmer. That smile is wasted on me.” But he smiled back, his white teeth flashing brightly against his darker skin.
I felt the full force of that smile. I had competition—not just for roles but perhaps for the ladies. I dropped my eyes to his left hand and smiled harder when I saw the ring there.
“Are we going to be OK?” I asked him.
“Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Because I have your role.”
“And I have yours. The director read me for all the major roles. She must have liked what she saw for Iago.”
“That’s what she said, that she cast the actor who read best for the role.”
“So trust her.” He grinned wickedly. “Anyway, Iago has more lines. It makes sense to give the bigger part to the better actor.”
“Oh, now it’s on.”
This was going to fun. Joshua was going to be fun. Even the specter of Deb’s wrath couldn’t dim my optimistic enthusiasm for the show. Shakespeare was never easy, but with me and Joshua and Deb playing the lead roles, the end result would hopefully be worth the effort.
Carol called the rehearsal to order. She introduced herself and Rebekah while Rebekah passed around the pile of scripts. Why that couldn’t have been done as people came in, I had no idea. Rebekah enjoyed the power of her position, that was all.
Then Carol had us go around the room and introduce ourselves. There were only three women. Aside from Deb who played my wife, the doomed Desdemona, there was a roly-poly older woman playing Emilia—“your wife,” I said to Joshua, reaching across the two empty seats that separated us to poke him teasingly in the ribs—and a teenaged girl playing the role of the clown.
As the men introduced themselves—seven besides me and Joshua had speaking parts; the rest were, um, extras—Joshua slid across the space between us and casually draped his arm across the back of my chair. I raised an eyebrow at him and he winked back.
He was offering protection, I realized, communicating his acceptance of me as Othello to the rest of the room. I hadn’t asked for protection, but it meant something to be offered it.
~~~
“I think you did a little better with your wife than I did with mine,” Joshua said when Carol gave us a break between acts. He jerked his head towards Deb and the woman playing Emilia who were talking to each other on the other side of the room.
“Yes and no,” I answered. “Deb’s cute, but we don’t get along.” I caught her eye and tried to smile at her, but she turned away, her hair flying like a figure skater’s from the speed of her rotation.
“So the audience is really going to buy it when you try to kill her.”
“The animosity goes the other way, but maybe Carol saw something there when we read together. Maybe that’s why I’m Othello.”
“Or maybe it’s because Iago has more lines.”
“You aren’t going to let that go, are you?”
He smiled that high wattage smile. “Not as long as it gets a reaction.”
I tamped down the reaction. I really wasn’t feeling competitive with Joshua, despite being thoroughly impressed by how well he’d read. The show had room enough for two stars. And—not that there were any women in the cast to hit on once you eliminated Deb—he was wearing that ring.
“Anyway,” I said, working to change the subject, “looks like you’ve already got a wife. Or husband,” I added in the interest of inclusiveness.
“Wife, as it happens, but I like the way you think.”
“Let me introduce you around a little.” Aside from the sudden influx of people of color, I knew almost everyone in the room. “This is your first show here, right?”
He nodded as I steered him over to a group of Central Playhouse regulars.
“Why is that? Don’t tell me you had to wait for Othello. We don’t do a lot of minority-specific shows, because we don’t have a lot of minorities—OK, maybe that’s the other way around—but we do plenty of shows where race is immaterial. Are you new to the area?”
“Not new, exactly. Returning, more like. I grew up a half hour from here but I went away for college. Since I’ve been back and working full time—” He shrugged. “It’s been hard to find the energy. I saw some shows here when I was in high school, so I remembered the name when I saw the audition notice and somehow I got my butt off the couch and down here to audition.”
“It gets easier. You can have both—a job and a life. I’ve been managing.”
I introduced Joshua to Pete, who was playing Joshua’s partner in crime, and to the other Pete, who had one of the minor henchman roles.
“Repeat,” the other Pete said, holding out his hand.
“Sorry?”
“They call me Repeat. He’s Pete and I’m Repeat. I’m doubling as the fight choreographer, not that either of you two are doing any real fighting.”
“Nate fights a girl,” Pete said. “With his bare hands.” He wrapped his hands around Repeat’s throat and pretended to throttle him, but since he had to stand on his tiptoes to do it, the effect was somewhat lessened. “What a man.”
“Better hope she doesn’t fight back,” Repeat said. “I think Deb could take you. I’ve seen what she can lift.”
Deb usually held the position of lighting designer, a job that involved lifting heavy lighting instruments over her head and swinging precariously from the lighting bars with one foot balanced on an unevenly footed ladder.
“She’s tougher than I am,” I agreed, not bothering to mention that my day job as a sheetrocker required me to walk around on stilts holding sheets of drywall over my head. There was no point in arguing with Pete and Repeat once they got going. It would on
ly make me part of their comedy routine.
Rebekah interrupted the inevitable follow-up jokes by calling us back to rehearsal. Joshua and I strolled back to our side of the auditorium to take our seats.
“Do you know those other guys?” I asked, pointing at a group of men clustered together.
“Are you seriously asking me if I know those guys because they’re black?”
“Sorry.”
“Do you know them?”
“Not yet.”
He fixed me with a hard look, then shook his head. “So we’ll go talk to them after, OK? They’re not aliens.”
“It’s not that,” I said, feeling stupid. “I’m still expecting someone to be pissed because I’m playing Othello.”
Joshua sighed. He put his arm around the back of my chair again, this time curving his hand in so that it touched my shoulder. “From what I heard in Act One, you’re going to make a great Othello. Hey, the second act is your act. Knock it out of the park, OK?” He squeezed me into him.
I looked up at him, realizing with a start that I had to look up. At six foot two, I wasn’t used to looking up at anyone. “Thanks.”
He withdrew his arm and rattled his script as Carol kicked off the second act by reading the stage directions. The second act really was my turn to shine. Reading the lines, making them come alive, feeling Othello’s passion and despair deep in my own soul, I forgot about everything outside the play.
“And smote him thus,” I finished. My eye trailed over the stage directions that followed: Stabs himself. Not only did I get to choke a woman, I got to commit suicide. Nothing like a dramatic on-stage death to make a role fun.
When the few lines following my death had been read, Carol gave us a last pep talk and Rebekah handed out contact sheets and rehearsal schedules and we were all dismissed.
Joshua marched straight over to where a pair of black guys were chatting, mentally towing me behind him. Once we’d met Rudy and Mark, I felt a lot better. No one treated me like a dirty usurper. Rudy had been cast as Cassio, the only real good guy in the show, and Mark had a few lines here and there in a role similar to Repeat’s.
We all made what passed for getting-to-know-you conversation in community theater, meaning we exchanged acting resumes. When Repeat wandered past, I grabbed him and introduced him to Rudy who, along with Pete, had the big fight scene. Repeat immediately started jousting with him, testing Rudy’s claim that he’d used a sword before by waving his arm around like some kind of frantic Harry Potter.
Bored with Repeat’s antics, I looked around and caught Deb watching me, her expression blank. I smiled tentatively and was surprised when she walked over to us. I introduced her to Joshua.
“You were great,” Joshua said with enthusiasm. “You really nailed that devotion in the face of asshole behavior in the last act.”
“Practice.” Deb shot me a pointed look. I rolled my eyes away from her, refusing to engage.
“Really? If some guy’s acting like an asshole to you in real life, I hope you’d just walk away from him. We don’t live in Shakespearian times anymore.”
“You’re right. If a guy’s not going to treat me with respect, I don’t have to have anything to do with him, do I, Nate?”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“Too bad we don’t have more scenes together,” Joshua said to Deb. “You bring a lot of passion to your reading.”
“Super.” Deb turned from Joshua to glare at me. “Not only do I have to deal with you, I get to enjoy the black version of you. Two assholes for the price of one.” She stalked off without giving either of us a chance to respond.
“What did I do to deserve that?” Joshua asked.
I picked up his hand and tapped his wedding ring. “You flirted with her while wearing that, which makes you a low-life womanizer.”
“Not flirted, exactly. Just tested the waters. You know.”
“I do know. But those are waters you don’t want to wade in, at least not with that ring on your finger.” I waggled his hand to make my point.
“So I’m Black Nate. Nice. Does that mean you’re a low-life womanizer too?”
“I guess it depends on how you define those terms. I like to think I’m not.”
The way he looked at me made me realize that I was still holding his wrist. I dropped it and he ran his hand over his head, eyeing me like he was trying to make a decision.
“This may seem a little forward, since we just met, but if you’re not doing anything Friday, maybe you’d go out with me? My wife’s got this gig at Billy’s.”
“The country-western bar?”
“Exactly. I’ve gotta go and support her—she always comes to my shows—but I have a feeling I’m going to stand out like something less cliché than a sore thumb, if I could think of something less cliché than that.”
“You’re going to stand out like a black dude at a country-western bar?”
“That works. Wanna be my date?”
“I’m not sure a couple of guys on a date would blend in any better.”
“I’ll try to keep my tongue out of your mouth,” he said with a grin. Then his tone got more serious. “You’d enjoy the show, I think, as long as country music doesn’t totally turn you off. Sherry’s great, and the band she’s singing with has a rockabilly vibe.”
“I don’t mind country. I mean, I like show tunes and that’s about as corny as you can get.”
I’d been intending to call Jenny and set something up for Friday night, but I could always see her Saturday. I didn’t hang out with guy friends often enough, spending most of my evenings either at the theater or in some woman’s bed. Living with Derek these last six months had shown me the different appeal of guy-on-guy time. A guy should have friends, friends who were a little less juvenile than Pete and Repeat.
“Sure. Let’s plan on it. I’ll give you my number.”
“I think it’s on one of these.” He held up the raft of papers that had been handed out. “And I’ll see you tomorrow at rehearsal, right?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I agreed.
On the way home, I found a country radio station and laughed when Achy Breaky Heart—probably the most annoying country song I knew—came on. Hopefully the music Friday night wouldn’t be as hokey as that but, hokey or not, I looked forward to it.
Chapter 4
Since I didn’t have to meet Joshua until nine, I dropped by my mother’s for dinner first. It was weird to think of it as my mother’s and not just home. Until my sister Desi moved back in with her three children, forcing me to share a room with one of them, I’d had no motivation to move out. Lissie called me spoiled, but I didn’t need her to tell me that. Living with Derek meant always having a place I could bring a woman, but it also meant eating fast food three meals a day and doing my own laundry.
“Hi, Ma.” I dropped my laundry bag on her kitchen floor.
Well, it didn’t always mean doing my own laundry.
My mother put down the spoon she’d been stirring with and held out her arms so I could walk into them. I kissed her cheek, then wrapped my arms around her fleshy waist and rested my head on top of hers. Ma always smelled like Jean Nate. I’d been buying it for her birthday ever since my father died and eleven-year-old me got it into his head that it was a duty I needed to take on. She probably didn’t even like Jean Nate, but she wouldn’t smell like my mother without it.
When I was done hugging her, I went over to Desi and bumped her cheek with mine, then dropped into a chair at the kitchen table next to her. “Where are the monsters?”
“In front of the television being tranquilized. I’m taking my tranquilizer in liquid form.” She raised her wine glass. “Want some?”
“No, thanks. I’m going out later. I’ll save it for then.”
“You shouldn’t drink if you’re driving, Nathaniel.”
“I know, Ma. I’m not planning on getting drunk. I’m going out to listen to some music with a friend.”
“What
friend?”
“A guy from the show I’m doing.”
“What show?”
“Othello. Hey, Desi, guess what? I get to strangle your namesake in this one. You’ll come see it, right?”
“When have we ever missed a show?”
“I just want to make sure you don’t miss this one, not just because I finally get to wrap my hands around your throat.” I made a little brother face at her. Desi was the closest in age of my three sisters and therefore the one I annoyed the most. “I think it’s going to be really good. All the leads are strong.”
“It’s still Shakespeare,” she said, making a face right back at me.
“Yeah, can’t do anything about that.” Even I had to admit that about half of Shakespeare was tedious rubbish, but the other half made it worth doing.
“Don’t pick on your brother, Desdemona,” my mother said, even though we’d been teasing each other. I smirked at my sister. I always got off easy. Yeah, spoiled. It was OK with me.
“How’s work?” Ma set a basket of bread in front of me.
“Same as always.”
“Felix treating you OK?”
“Sure, Ma.”
My uncle was a high-strung drama queen who started yelling whenever a job went bad, but I knew how to stay out of his way.
“And you’re showing up on time? Don’t take advantage of his generosity.”
Giving me a job was Felix’s way of caring for his dead brother’s family. I figured I had endless job security and maybe I took advantage of that now and then. Construction work started early and theater nights went late, not to mention the extracurricular activities that sometimes occurred afterwards.
“Mostly.” I stuffed some bread into my mouth to avoid answering further.
“You know, just because he gave you a job doesn’t mean you have to stay at it your whole life,” Desi said.
“What else would I do?”