Enthusiasm (12 page)

Yvette shook her head. “You can be the heroine. I’m playing the most important part,” she said.

“What part’s that?” said Yolanda. “They’re not going to let you be the hero, silly, they have plenty of boys. And it says here, ‘Directed by Benjamin Seward.’ ”

“No, silly, the audience.”

I thought Yvette had the right idea. Acting in a play—a musical, no less—was a frightening thought for someone as shy as me, not to mention the danger of a painful meeting with Parr. How much easier it would be, if Ash would only let me, to stay home and brood.

But
that
, I told myself, I must not do. No, seeing Parr and Ash together might be good for me, like cauterizing a wound to make it stop bleeding. In fact, I found myself almost hoping that I
would
see Parr: surely, a tempting little voice whispered, it would help me get over my troubles.

The next problem Ash and I faced was finding suitable monologues for our auditions.

Ash naturally first thought of Darcy’s proposal in
Pride and Prejudice
—the speech that begins, “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

Unfortunately, as we found when we consulted the book, that’s also where the speech ends. Jane Austen tells us that “the avowal of all that he felt and had long felt for her immediately followed,” but she doesn’t specify what he says. The rest of the scene takes the form of a dialogue between the proud hero and offended heroine—deeply interesting to readers, but useless to auditioners.

We considered and rejected various alternatives, such as Mr. Collins’s letter announcing his visit to the Bennet family and Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s howl of disapproval at the thought that Elizabeth might become her niece by marrying Darcy. They were all either too brief or too deeply embedded in the novel’s plot to stand alone.

“The problem is, it’s a novel,” I argued. “Don’t you think we’d have better luck finding monologues if we looked at plays instead of books? Or movies, even.”

“No drama could be more dramatic than the works of the great Miss Austen,” said Ashleigh dismissively.

“Let’s at least go down to the video store and see if we get any ideas,” I urged.

She shot me the Mad Gleam. “My dear Julia, I believe you may have hit upon the solution! Perhaps some playwright or screenwriter may have supplied Miss Austen’s missing words!” We rented three different
Pride and Prejudice
s. After some discussion and much poking at the rewind button, Ash picked the Colin Firth version of Darcy’s proposal and scribbled out a transcription.

For my audition piece, I chose Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in
Romeo and Juliet
. It’s part of a scene in which Mercutio, my favorite character, mercilessly teases his cousin Romeo about being in love. He attributes Romeo’s mooniness to a visit from Queen Mab, the fairy responsible for dreams. I chose it because I knew it practically by heart, having written a paper about it for the Nettle. Still, I tended to agree with Yolanda that the play was at least as silly as it was beautiful. The whole tragedy was so unnecessary! If Romeo and Juliet had just
talked
to each other, nobody would have had to die.

Besides being easy for me to memorize, the speech also had the advantage of being by Shakespeare, and therefore tough for a modern girl to deliver and even tougher for a modern listener to follow. Although I refused to let myself flub the audition on purpose, I secretly hoped that the difficulty of the material would keep me from getting a part. Then I’d be spared the pain of watching my best friend’s budding relationship with my lost love.

Mrs. Gerard drove Yolanda, Ashleigh, and me to Forefield for our auditions. As the car wound up the drive toward the school on the hill, I felt my insides quadrilling in a way that couldn’t be explained by mere motion sickness.

“Break a leg, girls,” said Mrs. Gerard, dropping us in front of the R. McNichol Robbins Theater Arts Center, behind the main classroom building. We pulled open the heavy bronze doors and followed signs into the theater, where a group of people clustered near the stage.

A spotlight reflected brightly off the hair of a slim, tallish figure, transforming my inner quadrille into a gymnastics meet. When he stepped aside, however, I saw that he was not the person I half hoped, half dreaded to see, but a brown-haired boy about the same height.

“Ashleigh! Julie!” called a male voice from the other side of the room. It set the trampolines going again briefly until I recognized it a split second later as Ned’s bass. He bounded up the aisle to meet us. “You made it! Come meet Benjo and Ms. Wilson.”

Ashleigh introduced Yolanda, and we followed Ned down to the front of the theater. Aside from one pale creature in a Sacred Heart uniform, we three were the only girls. “Hey, it’s Erin from Sacred Heart,” said Yolanda, running up to greet her. Chris Stevens—the boy who had shared my planter at the Columbus Cotillion—lounged beside Erin. He winked at me. Boys of various sizes punched each other and squirmed, or sat apart reviewing their monologues; some stared at us out of the corners of their eyes.

Benjo turned out to be the tallish, brown-haired guy who had so alarmed me. After a few minutes, during which a bell rang somewhere and additional aspiring actors arrived—including another Sacred Heart girl, this one quite young—he called for silence and addressed us. “Okay, let’s get started. I’m Benjamin Seward, and I’ll be directing
Midwinter Insomnia
, an original musical by Barry Davison, with music by Ned Downing and lyrics by Grandison Parr. That’s Barry over there, and Ned’s next to him, and Parr—where’s Parr?—oh, I guess he’s still at fencing practice. Anyway, most of you know Mr. Barnaby, our faculty adviser, and Ms. Wilson, our musical adviser.” He indicated a bald, bearded man with a barrel chest and prominent ears and a slender, petite woman with straightened hair pulled back into a knot at her neck. Benjo continued, “When I call your name, please come up onstage and give your music to Tyler at the piano. All right? Alcott Fish.”

A small boy presented himself, cleared his throat, sang “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” in a pretty soprano, recited a speech from the same play, and sat down again. The four directors whispered together, then called the next boy.

During the auditions that followed I had time to imagine various dire scenarios in which I fell off the stage, forgot my lines, changed key halfway through my song, fainted, laughed hysterically, or compulsively shouted
fire
; at last I decided to dull my thoughts by running through my speech over and over in my head.

When Erin’s turn came, I stopped and paid close attention. By then Shakespeare’s words in my head were beginning to sound dangerously like nonsense. She sang “My Favorite Things” with all the corn-syrup sweetness it deserves; her speech, from
The Glass Menagerie
, was similarly well articulated, sincere, and over-sweet.

Next came a striking boy with a dark complexion and a beautiful baritone. Then, after a few so-so singers and two pretty good younger boys, it was Yolanda’s turn. Her rich alto, surprisingly sultry in someone so young, made a strong showing in “Too Darn Hot,” from
Kiss Me, Kate
, and her speech from
Raisin in the Sun
moved me almost to tears.

Ashleigh, too, acquitted herself well, with a loud and tuneful rendition of “Take It Back” and a loud and passionate rendition of the Darcy proposal.

Then it was my turn. I made it onto the stage without falling over and handed my music to the boy at the piano. Things started out well enough, but I began to have second thoughts as I sang “It’s All Right with Me.” “It’s the wrong time and the wrong place,” the song begins (How true, how painfully true! I thought). But when I reached the part about trying to get over someone by throwing myself into someone else’s arms, I felt Chris Stevens watching me slyly. By that time I wished I had chosen something else—anything else.

Still, despite my embarrassment, I managed to pronounce the words clearly and stay in tune. Relieved, I started in on my Queen Mab speech—but that too felt far more problematic on stage than it had in the safety of my attic bedroom. “She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes,” said my mouth, while my mind, racing, chided me: What made you think it was a good idea to give a speech about fairies at a boys’ school? How’s that going to go over? I glanced cautiously around the audience—another bad idea. There was Ashleigh grinning at me, which had the perverse effect of making me more self-conscious; there was Chris Stevens, winking with his long cat’s eyes; there was a little boy chewing the end of his pen and another sprawled out over two seats with his eyes closed, both radiating boredom; and there in the back—oh, horror! Had he been there the whole time?—stood Grandison Parr, tall and golden, looking right at me.

I panicked. My voice dropped to nothing. I rushed and mumbled my way to the end, stopping abruptly and cutting off the last three lines (which are kind of obscene anyhow). I dragged myself off the stage and sank into the dusty velvet seat beside Ashleigh’s, where I wished I were dead.

The rest went by in an excruciating, slow-motion blur. Parr took the stage, and I sat, drinking in his pleasant, confident voice, with frozen limbs and cheeks that burned on and on through a thousand other speeches and meaningless songs. When the auditions were over, he came to find us. Ashleigh greeted him warmly, but I could hardly hear what she said over the pounding in my ears, nor could I choke out more than a monosyllable. All through the ride home, while Ashleigh and Yolanda eagerly reviewed the afternoon’s events, I sat with my cheek pressed against the cool glass of the window, hardly blinking, hardly breathing. And the torture repeated itself all night long, first in my memory and then in my dreams, until I half hoped my blushes would set my sheets on fire, ending my misery in one magnificent blaze.

Chapter 11

Parts
~
scripts
~
rhymes
~
songs
~
an igsome Moth
~
an Artistic Rivalry
~
a direly misleading Scene involving a Sofa.

A
fter the previous day’s disaster, I walked the long way around to my first-period social studies class to avoid the bulletin board. I had no wish to see the cast list posted without my name. True, I had half hoped to tank at the audition; but half hoping to tank is one thing, actually tanking quite another.

In the end, my careful detour came to nothing. Ashleigh and Yolanda appeared at my lunch table waving a piece of paper.

“Good afternoon, Headmistress Lytle,” cried the Enthusiast.

I frowned impatiently. I was in no mood for Ashleigh’s play-acting. “What are you talking about?” I said.

“Look!” said Yolanda. She put the page down in front of me, just missing a pool of spilled mustard. “It’s your part—you got a ‘little’ part—Headmistress Lytle—see? And there’s me, I’m Tanya, president of the student body—I hope I get lots of lines—and Ashleigh’s Hermia, and that’s it from Byz High. We figured it was okay to take the poster down, since nobody else from here tried out. But Erin got a part too—she’s Helen. And Emma Caballero, that freshman from Sacred Heart, she’s Chloe.”

“Is this not good news?” said Ashleigh. “Grandison Parr plays Owen, captain of the debate team, and your beloved Ned is the musical director, so you will have frequent opportunities to converse with him during rehearsals.”

“Oh, are you going out with that guy Ned?” said Yolanda. “Crisp! You never told me that. He seems like a really nice guy. I kind of liked that tall guy with the nice voice—he was cute. I wonder if he got a part. He had to, he had the best voice there. Which one do you think he is? Kevin Rodriguez? Ravi Rajan? Ask your boyfriend, okay? Oh, but don’t tell Adam!” Adam White, a junior, was sometimes the man in Yolanda’s life.