Enter Three Witches (16 page)

“You’re right,” he said. “It was crazy to go off and leave you like that.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Bren cried. “I’m sorry, I just don’t know, but I was horribly worried about you. It’s taken you hours to get home.”

“Oh, that was no problem.” Erika’s voice had grown cool and airy. “I met Jeremy. Isn’t that amazing? He was wearing the most awesome gorilla suit, and he took me to this really neat party. I had a lovely time.”

“You’ve been out with Jeremy all this time?” Bren yelled into the phone. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Frankly, the thought never entered my head,” she replied. “Why would it? You know, you really don’t sound normal.”

“I’m drunk,” Bren said. “Drunk as a skunk. That’s an old saying.”

“Picturesque, but I think I’ve heard it before,” Erika said.

Alcohol, frustration, and guilt produced in Bren an emotion that was strange to him; he was totally and irrationally enraged.

“Picturesque,” he snarled. “Always the neat, smart word. Always calm, cool, and collected. You know what I think? I think something got left out of you. I don’t think you’ve got a scrap of feeling anywhere.”

“Maybe if you stuck around once in a while, you’d find out,” Erika said.

There was a brief silence. Bren felt anger drain away, to be replaced by an immense hopelessness. “I did once,” he said, “or twice, really. The second time didn’t do me any good.”

“Too bad you won’t get another chance,” Erika said, and hung up the phone.

Bren sat looking at the dead thing which was the telephone receiver as if uncertain of its use. Shadow put a heavy paw on his knee and whined. “Well, that’s that,” he said to the dog. “We’re going to have to backtrack, old boy, and find out what made life so wonderful before she came along with her little silver monkey wrench.” This conceit pleased him for a moment. He thought about going to bed and beginning a new, monkish life in the morning; but then he remembered that morning meant an all-day technical rehearsal, and he groaned. How, hung over, short of sleep, and deprived forever of Erika, was he going to survive such an ordeal?

“We won’t even get to go to the park,” he said to Shadow as he stumbled to his feet, “but come on. At least we can sleep together.”

“I shall unseam you from the navel to the chops,” shouted Edward Behrens. “I’ll fix your head upon my battlements.”

He stood in the first row of the theater and glared up at his Macbeth, an imposing figure, kilted and cloaked in dark plaids but wearing the petulant expression of an exhausted child.

The rehearsal had begun well, with the three stunningly repulsive witches chanting, “When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?” It had foundered eleven lines later as the king, a sturdy scholarship student from the Bronx, entered with his soldiers and demanded, “What bloody man is that?” Not everyone in the company had heard this treacherous line before, and those who had not infected those who had with their unseemly mirth. Once order had been restored, Behrens’s patience was tried again as Bren and the sound man struggled to produce a gradually increasing thunderstorm during the second appearance of the witches. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, but never at appropriate times, and often the thunder came before the lightning, as if Bren had to be reminded to flash the floodlights. The blackout had to be done a dozen times before the girls managed to vanish without a trace. Would it work on opening night? Probably not, the director thought, but technical problems were the reason for having technical rehearsals. Ego tantrums were not.

“Please tell me, Brian,” he continued in a dangerously calm voice, “why, when we have spent endless weeks blocking this misbegotten play, you insist upon delivering every line downstage center with your back to the other characters.”

“It doesn’t feel right to go upstage on that line,” the actor said.

“It doesn’t
feel
right?” Behrens repeated. “Now he says it doesn’t feel right. In the first place, you have done it properly a hundred times before. In the second place, this is a
tech
rehearsal, Brian. This is not a feeling rehearsal, except for my feelings, which are at the moment just short of savage.”

Brian smirked and seized his advantage. “All right, then, it’s dark up there,” he said, pointing at the spot some six feet behind him where his Lady stood, tapping her foot.

With a sigh of resignation, Behrens turned toward the light booth. “Eli, just a shade brighter upstage right for Laurence Olivier here, and then maybe we can get on with it before we all die of old age.”

At the switchboard Eli groaned, turned a dial, and scribbled furiously on his clipboard.

“That’s thrown everything else out of balance,” Bren observed, peering down at the stage.

“Please,” Eli said. “Do me a favor, Bren.”

“What?”

“Two favors. One, don’t make any remarks. Two, get me another Coke.”

“Yes, master,” Bren said, and headed for the Coke machine while the play lurched forward a few more lines and stopped again.

The second and third witches were also buying Cokes. He supposed the first was avoiding him, but from the prison of the light booth it had been hard to tell.

The second witch was a tall, bony girl whose blond hair, powdered gray, hung in lank strands against her ravaged cheeks. Polly, the third witch, was normally plump and cheerful. She had never seemed really fat, but for
Macbeth
she had contrived the look of a monstrous, nocturnal toad—bloated, pale, and evil-looking. They were dressed in scanty rags over leotards the same color as their pale gray skins. They had black lips and wispy beards and were gossiping about a party.

“Hail, lovely ladies,” Bren said, feeding his coins into the Coke machine. “When, think you, comes an end to this ghastly day?”

“Hail, good McBren,” said Polly, and then they chanted together, “‘When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won.’ But,” finished the tall witch, “that won’t be ere the set of sun, unless the Bear murders the Rushmore and plays Macbeth himself.”

“I think the sun set hours ago,” Bren said, “but you can’t tell in this tomb.”

The rehearsal had started at two o’clock and had so far progressed to Act Two, Scene One. Soon sandwiches would be brought in, after which cast and crew would struggle on into the night. With weekday curfews and schoolwork in mind, Mr. Behrens had decided to hold the first technical on Saturday and the second technical and the dress rehearsal the Wednesday and Thursday nights before the Friday opening. He knew that the interval might prove disastrous, but he had been even more reluctant to keep everyone up all night during the week.

“How do we look?” Polly asked, doing an exaggerated model’s turn, her fat jiggling, her bearded chin tipped up at a provocative angle. “I wish we could see ourselves from out front. Someone simply has to take pictures.”

“Utterly ravishing,” Bren said, then added casually, “but where’s the third weird sister?”

“She’s in a sulk tonight,” Polly confided. “Sits in a corner with a book except when Jeremy wants her for something.”

Bren felt a thud in the pit of his stomach. Why had he asked? Even though he felt terrible, and his lighting earlier in the play had been a disaster, some of the despair of the night before had lifted. Now it settled again like a black mist.

“When Jeremy wants her for something,” he repeated dully.

“You know, to hand him props or whatever,” Polly amplified.

But Bren refused to be reassured. He pictured Erika and Jeremy backstage. They would be joking in whispers, chuckling and nudging each other. In the dark alleys between the masking curtains, they would wait for their cues and kiss. He had seen her only from afar as she played the first witch scenes at the beginning of the play, noting that her costume and makeup, enhanced by sharp spikes of shocking pink hair, were even more gruesomely effective than those of the other two.

“I’d better take Eli his Coke,” he said, “before he collapses on the switchboard and electrocutes himself.”

“I’ll tell Erika you asked about her,” Polly said with a knowing smile.

“Thanks, Pol. I’m sure that will be riveting news,” Bren said, and retreated toward the sanctuary of the light booth. As he crossed the back of the house, he was appalled to see that the rehearsal had taken a leap forward and almost reached another of his scenes.

“Great timing,” Eli said, sliding out of his seat as Bren charged into the light booth. “Don’t get rattled. You’ve got at least thirty seconds to find your place.”

Thirty seconds was not enough. The coming scene, in which Macduff discovers the body of the murdered king, was Bren’s pride and joy. Its effects were subtle, complex, and terrifyingly beautiful. The cue arrived, and he was still frantically searching the lighting script.

When the sequence failed to begin, Behrens stopped the rehearsal. “Are you geniuses asleep up there?” he shouted.

“I’ve got it now,” Bren called. “Sorry.” But he was still fumbling.

Eli leaned over his shoulder and started the cue. “Pull yourself together,” he hissed. “This thing has to be done right. If you can’t do it, I will.”

“I can do it. I just got lost. Why am I the only one who’s not allowed to screw up?” Bren asked.

“You’ve been screwing up all day,” Eli said, and continued to work the lights.

Bren scrunched miserably in his seat as Eli took over his cues, not only from the murder, but all the way through the dispatching of Banquo on the heath. He had not only missed his favorite scene, he missed his last scene before the final appearance of the witches.

Soon they would break for sandwiches. I’ll go out to a deli, Bren thought, and wander around on Broadway. Even this seemed better than a convivial gathering of actors and technicians, during which he would surely have to watch Jeremy and Erika flirting while they ate. He had not spoken to her since the horrible telephone conversation of the night before, but it seemed pointless even to try. When the break came, he went straight out to the street without going down into the theater, thus avoiding Behrens as well as Erika.

After a lonely sandwich on Broadway, the evening still stretched interminably ahead. “I could have gone home and had a nap,” Bren grumbled to himself as he waited in the light booth while the play crawled forward. But Eli might need him to refocus a light or change a gel. A technical rehearsal involves not only major crises, but innumerable small changes in costumes, makeup, props, and lights.

The final witch scene with its projected apparitions called for the efforts of both light men, and technically it went quite well. Eli appeared to have forgotten his earlier impatience, and in any case he could not have managed alone. Bren was determined not to disgrace himself again. He watched the witches almost without interest except for the lines and movements that were cues to change the lights. Even so, he could hardly fail to notice that their performance was very poor. Erika in particular had lost her edge. She seemed dispirited, and her timing was off. Several times she stumbled, and her awkwardness confused the other two, who had come to depend upon her leadership.

Down in the house, Edward Behrens sighed, took notes, and let it pass. He still had the fight and the coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane ahead of him; a little lousy dancing could be overlooked. But during the following scene he felt a small thump in the next seat and turned to see Erika beside him. Even in the dim light that spilled from the stage, he could see streaks of tears in her horrible gray makeup. She gave her beard a vicious yank, and most of it came off in her hand.

“It’ll come right,” Behrens whispered to his favorite witch.

She shook her head. “I blew it, and I’m going to blow it again,” she muttered.

“You won’t, you know. This is just tech rehearsal blues.”

“I wish it were,” Erika said. “I’m afraid it’s something much, much worse.”

Behrens reached out to give her spiky head a reassuring pat, then leapt to his feet as he saw the scene onstage end in unparalleled confusion. The wife of Ross, hotly pursued by a murderer, had caught her foot on a strut projecting from the tower of her castle. This began slowly to revolve and then to break apart as Jeremy plunged onto the stage, both hands outstretched in a futile effort to hold it up.

“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!” the director cried, and from their various stations around the theater, the entire cast and crew broke into gales of wild hilarity.

The remainder of the rehearsal was an anticlimax. The burst of laughter seemed to have done everyone good, and the company slogged through the rest of the play, changed into street clothes, and went gratefully home.

Only Eli remained to fiddle with a single spotlight on the edge of the balcony. Behrens watched him for a moment before turning wearily to climb the stairs. He would have to say something about the lights, for which he had felt such confident expectations. He knew that Eli had replaced Bren in the scenes before the intermission, and it now seemed to him that he had been a fool to entrust such a vital task to anyone so inexperienced.

“I feel mean as a dog,” he said to Eli when he had joined him at the balcony rail, “but I think you’re going to have to take over the things Bren was doing by himself. We can run them through one extra time to give you the practice.”

Surprisingly, Eli shook his head. “He’ll be all right,” he said. “Leave him alone, if you can stand it.”

“I don’t know how much more I can stand,” Behrens said. “His work was an almost total disaster tonight, and it’s not as if it weren’t really crucial stuff. I’m sure you thought you knew what you were doing, but he’d never even seen a light board before this play, right?”

“That’s right,” Eli said, “but he’s really good. He’s got a fantastic touch for it. Just something was wrong tonight. He was sick or something. Trust me, Bear. We’ve got almost a week for him to get over whatever it is, and two more rehearsals.”

The director was silent, studying the skinny, tireless boy bent over the spotlight. Then he shrugged. “Well, I guess you’re right, however it turns out,” he said. “After all, this is supposed to be an educational institution, not the Royal Shakespeare Company. Give him some aspirin and a kick in the ass, and we’ll hope for the best.”