Enter Three Witches (20 page)

They circled once more in the light and fled into blackness at the sides of the stage as thunder rolled and the light was quenched.

In the next instant the main stage was washed with the harsh light of a stormy afternoon, and Jeremy’s ghastly tree was silhouetted against an ominous sky. Bren sat back with a sigh, knowing he could relax while the king and his attendants described the distant battle and the heroic deeds of Macbeth. The second witch scene was at least five minutes away.

That scene went well too, technically and in every other way. Even as he met the demands of a gathering storm and a slowly darkening stage, Bren found time to be amazed at the performance of the three witches. Erika moved as if she were a bundle of jointless bones animated by some evil puppeteer. She capered around the tree and rummaged for revolting treasures in her tattered shopping bag. (“Here I have a pilot’s thumb, Wracked as homeward he did come.”) Macbeth and Banquo, frail, noble figures from the world of light, listened to the prophecy that would make Macbeth both king and murderer. Then came an even more frenzied dance, then blackout and a perfect vanishment.

“Oh glory, glory, glory,” whispered Eli in the back of the light booth. “We’ll never do that again.”

“Sure we will,” Bren whispered back, as he moved the dials that restored the stage to its previous state of ordinary gloom.

The play proceeded, not without minor mishaps, but on the whole remarkably well. Shifting from one foot to the other and trying not to pace up and down behind the last row of seats, Edward Behrens wondered what he had done to deserve this seeming triumph. It’s not that I haven’t done plenty, he reflected, remembering hours of effort and excruciating patience, but this—this is a blooming miracle.

The king had been killed by Macbeth, and soon his body would be found. Behrens relaxed slightly and smiled as he watched the brief comic scene (the only one the grim play affords) in which the porter is awakened by the late arrival of Macduff. Now came the horrific discovery scene and the lighting sequence Bren had bungled so thoroughly in the Saturday rehearsal. It should go well again, as it had the last two nights. Behrens spared a moment to be grateful to Eli for talking him out of replacing Bren.

In the light booth Bren leaned forward, listening for the cue to begin the subtle changes that would precede the discovery of the murdered king. The moment came, and his hands moved on the switchboard. The cues unfolded as he had planned them. All around him in the high, shadowy corners of the theater where he had labored so long, the lights faded and bloomed.

Onstage Macbeth’s grim castle slowly emerged against a starless sky. Light from the porter’s lamp spilled across ancient stones and touched the tired faces of the men gathered in the courtyard. It had been a night of evil omens, but now it was time to wake the king. Reluctantly Macduff took up the lamp and went to the door of Duncan’s chamber. For a moment the door yawned black in the castle wall. Then light flared within, and Macduff staggered forth with his terrible cry, “Oh horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!” The sky flushed with the sullen red of dawn, and the very air seemed suddenly suffused with blood.

Bren watched the shifting, mingling beams from his big spotlights with intense satisfaction. He could hardly believe that only a few weeks ago this mystery had been closed to him, and now this power of transformation was in his hands. I have my own witchcraft now, he thought with a wry smile, but mine is real. I’ve got calluses and a couple of burns to prove it.

At intermission, while Eli faded the last scene, Bren was already on his way backstage to look for Erika. He therefore failed for a second time to notice the occupants of the balcony.

Miranda, flanked by her sister witches, was enjoying herself, but even she had opening-night nerves. She had never tried anything on this scale before or anything that involved so much sheer mental power acting over so great a distance. “It a lot like changing the weather,” Louise had said. “And you a real champion at that, babe. Besides, we build that old pyramid of power together, don’t you forget that.” Miranda still felt that it was her show and she might just screw it up. This was a poor attitude for a witch in need of total concentration. So she had bided her time, soaking up the atmosphere of the terrifying play, letting its dark mysteries charge her mind. Now, as the lights dimmed for the second half, she felt ready for the coming trial. Her eyes glowed like sapphires in the gloom, and her body tingled with energy. “What we waitin’ for?” Louise grumbled in a low voice. “I want to watch Shakespeare, I can rent him from the VCR place, put my feet up and have a beer.”

“Just a little longer,” Miranda whispered back. “I know what I’m waiting for, Lou, and it will be worth the wait, I promise you.”

Later Miranda was to swear with perfect truth that she had done nothing to influence the first two thirds of opening night at the Perkins School. “Each important event has its own aura,” she explained, “and the aura for this performance was especially good. That’s the long and the short of it, my dears.”

And perhaps it was. Certainly there is a tide which, on certain unforgettable occasions, will sweep a production forward from one fine moment to the next. Each high point builds upon the one before, and astonishment gives way to confidence in the inevitability of victory. So it was that night with
Macbeth
.

In the back of the house Edward Behrens congratulated himself on the emotional hardihood that had enabled him to put up with Brian Rushmore. The temperamental boy actor had disappeared, and in his place a tormented Scottish king struggled in the toils of pride and fear. The banquet scene began. Macbeth’s terror was real, and so, to Behrens’s relief, was Banquo’s ghost. It was possible to believe in the ghastly apparition that rose so convincingly from the hollowed-out end of Jeremy’s banquet table. It was even possible to believe that Macbeth saw it and no one else did. The tension grew, and the guests dispersed, suspicious and disturbed. Alone with his terrible consort Macbeth cried out, “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood.”

During the next scene, quiet and threatening, in which Lennox and another lord voiced their suspicions of Macbeth, the director crossed his fingers and prayed for witches and apparitions to match the wonders that had gone before. And in the small booth above his head, Eli slid from his seat, and Bren sat down at the board with a pounding heart. He was afraid again, and in a rather different way from his earlier attack of stage fright. It was a sensation that was difficult to account for. Downstage the two men parted, and the lights went out.

From the wings, Erika listened to the rumble of the cauldron being rolled into place and looked out into the black cavern of the theater. Suddenly her eyes widened. Like Banquo’s ghost, it was a thing not everyone could see, and this was just as well, for at the balcony rail stood three figures outlined in flickering blue fire. To Erika’s terrified eyes, they seemed abnormally tall. Even the grandmother appeared to have grown, and her white hair crackled in the uncanny light. With joined hands they stood and stared down onto the darkened stage. Erika felt Miranda’s eyes boring into the corner where she crouched and covered her face with her hands. Then there was a hiss behind her, and a strong push in the middle of her back sent her stumbling out onto the stage seconds before the end of the blackout.

Thunder cracked, and there was a sound of rising wind. A streak of lightning showed for a moment the smoking cauldron and the three witches crouched around it. Darkness was followed by light of such an extraordinarily evil quality that a low murmur of fear went through the audience.

The rising steam turned red as Bren’s trembling hand brought up the special spot, but the witches’ faces seemed lit from within by the fires of hell. Gray rags became gray flaps of skin, pendulous and horrible, hanging from the swaying bodies of the dancers. Frightful things went into the pot—scales and eyes, livers and lips—and now, slowly, a thick, pervasive stench began to invade the theater as if vapors from that unholy brew were drifting forth on the rising wind.

The incantation ended, but the dance went on. The first witch seemed to levitate and fly through the darkening air. The others followed with a shriek, faster and faster, until at another thunder clap they dropped to all fours, staring into the distance.

muttered the second witch, and Macbeth was there, blustering and desperate, to demand his future of the forces of darkness.

In the light booth, Eli moved as if in a trance, slipping the first slide into the projector. “First apparition, an armed head,” he mumbled, and was relieved to see the head appear on the scrim at the back of the stage. “Now for the bloody child,” he said. But the bloody child had been improved. The scrim wavered, and the blood ran. Someone in the audience gave a low whimper, and Brian’s voice shook as he demanded a third apparition, a child crowned, with a tree in its hand. Child and tree appeared, and the tree was green as all the fields of spring, its branches stirred by a freshening breeze.

Still Macbeth is not satisfied. He has been warned to beware Macduff but also that he cannot be brought down by any man of woman born, nor defeated until Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane. But what of his heirs and of the prophecy that Banquo’s children will be kings?

“Seek to know no more!” the witches cry, but Macbeth is adamant. No one can doubt his courage or his foolhardiness as he stands his ground in the raging gale.

Tonight there is no jerkiness or overlap of slides to mar the procession of the nine kings across the scrim. The kings are there—eight in the likeness of Banquo, followed by Banquo himself, carrying a mirror in which is seen, hugely magnified, an endless progression of identical crowned figures moving away into some unimaginably remote place and time, all kings of Scotland, while Macbeth lies in an unremembered grave.

Bent now upon cheering their ravaged guest, the witches dance again with a perverted jollity. They prod each other’s wobbling flesh and scream with mirth, while all about them the tempest roars, and the air crackles with blue light. Then suddenly they are gone, and in the throbbing darkness of the theater, the voice of Macbeth cries out:

For a moment nothing happened. “Bring up the lights!” Eli hissed.

“I can’t,” Bren whispered. “It’s been taken out of my hands,” But somehow he managed to start the next cue, and the stage was flooded with ordinary light for the return of Lennox.

In the balcony Miranda sank back in her seat. “Enough, do you think?” she murmured.

“Let’s take a breather and then do a number on that crazy walking woodland,” said Louise, mopping her brow with an enormous purple handkerchief.

And so it was that the luckless extras who carried their green branches onto the battlefield were scarcely seen. True, it was possible to make out the occasional arm and leg, for the movement of the forest was, after all, only a strategy. But the “boughs” specified by Shakespeare had grown into sizable trees. Their advance upon the beleaguered forces of Macbeth had the quality of a nightmare dreamed by the mad king himself—he who now grew “aweary of the sun” and yet stood fast, shouting to his men,

The forest marched, and once again the parents and friends of Shakespeare at the Perkins School shifted uneasily in their seats. In the back of the house stood a much-shaken Edward Behrens. “There’s still the fight,” he said under his breath, “and if Brian carries this off, he gets a gold medal and the right to be obnoxious for the rest of his life.”

Unable for once to think of a quotation, Mr. Behrens punched his victorious Macbeth on the shoulder as the actors came backstage after their curtain call. “I am speechless with admiration, Brian,” he said. “Truly speechless, believe it or not.”

“Thanks, old man. It was really no problem,” Brian said with a gracious inclination of his head.

“Oh, Bear!” cried Lady Macbeth. “Wasn’t it all too wonderful and weird?” She threw her arms around him with something between a laugh and a sob and deposited a large smear of makeup on his white shirt.

He patted her head, wondering why it sometimes seemed that only the brainless could act, and looked around for Erika. “It was both,” he said, “and you were extra marvelous. So were you all,” he added for the benefit of anyone else within hearing.

When he was able to disentangle himself from the rest of the cast, he found the first witch, alone in the wings and staring out at the empty stage. Her expression was at once ecstatic and terrified. “Tell me what you did,” said Behrens, without compliments or preamble.

“I didn’t do anything,” Erika said. “It just happened, Bear, and it scared me out of my wits.”

He looked at her in silence for a moment, then reached out and gave her a gentle shake. “Things like that don’t just happen,” he said. “In fact, they don’t happen at all, but never mind for now. Pull yourself together, girl. We’ve laid on a party after the show, and you must be there looking like a normal witch instead of one who just escaped from the funny farm.”