In One Person (5 page)

“Teaching
and
putting onstage,” Richard answered my grandfather. “There are theatrical disadvantages at an all-boys’ school, of course—but the best way for young boys
or
girls to understand Shakespeare is for them to put on the plays.”

“You mean by ‘disadvantages,’ I would guess, that the boys have to play the women’s roles,” Grandpa Harry said slyly. (Richard Abbott, upon first meeting the mill manager Harry Marshall, could not have known about the lumberman’s success as an onstage cross-dresser.)

“Most boys haven’t the vaguest idea how to be a woman—it’s a mortal distraction from the play,” Richard said.

“Ah,” Grandpa Harry said. “Then how will you manage it?”

“I’m thinking of asking the younger faculty wives to audition for roles,” Richard Abbott replied, “and the older faculty daughters, maybe.”

“Ah,” Grandpa Harry said again. “There might be
townspeople
who are also qualified,” my grandfather suggested; he’d always wanted to play
Regan or Goneril, “Lear’s loathsome daughters,” as Grandpa alliteratively spoke of them. (Not to mention how he longed to play Lady Macbeth!)

“I’m considering open auditions,” Richard Abbott said. “But I hope the older women won’t be intimidating to the boys at an all-boys’ school.”

“Ah, well—there’s always that,” Grandpa Harry said with a knowing smile. As an older woman, he’d been
intimidating
countless times; Harry Marshall had merely to look at his wife and elder daughter to know how female intimidation worked. But, at thirteen, I was unaware of my grandfather’s jockeying for more women’s roles; the conversation between Grandpa Harry and the new leading man seemed entirely friendly and natural to me.

What I noticed on that fall Friday night—casting calls were always on Friday nights—was how the dynamic between our theater’s dictatorial director and our variously talented (and untalented) would-be cast was changed by Richard Abbott’s knowledge of the theater, as much as by Richard’s gifts as an actor. The stern director of the First Sister Players had never been challenged as a
dramaturge
before; our little theater’s director, who said he had no interest in “merely acting,” was no amateur in the area of dramaturgy, and he was a self-appointed expert on Ibsen, whom he worshipped to excess.

Our heretofore-unchallenged director, Nils Borkman—the aforementioned Norwegian who was also Grandpa Harry’s business partner and, as such, a forester and logger
and
dramaturge—was the very picture of Scandinavian depression and melancholic forebodings. Logging was Nils Borkman’s business—or, at least, his day job—but dramaturgy was his passion.

It further contributed to the Norwegian’s ever-blackening pessimism that the unsophisticated theatergoers in First Sister, Vermont, were unschooled in serious drama. A steady diet of Agatha Christie was expected (even nauseatingly welcome) in our culturally deprived town. Nils Borkman visibly suffered through the ceaseless adaptations of lowbrow potboilers like
Murder at the Vicarage,
a Miss Marple mystery; my superior-sounding aunt Muriel had many times played Miss Marple, but the denizens of First Sister preferred Grandpa Harry in that shrewd (but oh-so-feminine) role. Harry seemed more believable at divining other people’s secrets—not to mention, at Miss Marple’s age, more feminine.

At one rehearsal, Harry had whimsically said—as Miss Marple herself might have—“My word, but who would
want
Colonel Protheroe dead?”

To which my mom, ever the prompter, had remarked, “Daddy, that line isn’t even in the script.”

“I know, Mary—I was just foolin’ around,” Grandpa said.

My mother, Mary Marshall—Mary
Dean
(for those unlucky fourteen years before she married Richard Abbott)—always called my grandpa
Daddy.
Harry was unfailingly addressed as
Father
by my lofty-sounding aunt Muriel, in the same black-tie-dinner tone of voice that Nana Victoria unstintingly hailed her husband as
Harold
—never
Harry.

Nils Borkman directed Agatha Christie’s “crowd-pleasers,” as he mockingly referred to them, as if he were doomed to be watching
Death on the Nile
or
Peril at End House
on the night of his death—as if his indelible memory of
Ten Little Indians
might be the one he would take to his grave.

Agatha Christie was Borkman’s curse, which the Norwegian bore less than stoically—he
hated
her, and he complained about her bitterly—but because he filled the house with Agatha Christie, and similarly shallow entertainments of the time, the morbid Norwegian was permitted to direct “something serious” as the fall play every year.

“Something serious to coincide with that time of year when the
leafs
are dying,” Borkman said—the
leafs
word indicating that his command of English was usually clear but imperfect. (That was Nils in a nutshell—usually clear but imperfect.)

On that Friday casting call, when Richard Abbott would change many futures, Nils announced that
this
fall’s “something serious” would again be his beloved Ibsen, and Nils had narrowed the choice of
which
Ibsen to a mere three.

“Which three?” the young and talented Richard Abbott asked.

“The
problem
three,” Nils answered—he presumed, definitively.

“I take it you mean
Hedda Gabler
and
A Doll’s House
,
” Richard rightly guessed. “And would the third be
The Wild Duck
?”

By Borkman’s uncharacteristic speechlessness, we all saw that, indeed,
The
(dreaded)
Wild Duck
was the dour Norwegian’s third choice.

“In that case,” Richard Abbott ventured, after the telltale silence, “who among us can possibly play the doomed Hedvig—that poor child?” There were no fourteen-year-old girls at the Friday night casting call—no one at all suitable for the innocent, duck-loving (and daddy-loving) Hedvig.

“We’ve had . . .
difficulties
with the Hedvig part before, Nils,” Grandpa Harry ventured. Oh, my—had we ever! There’d been tragicomic fourteen-year-old
girls who were such abysmal actors that when the time came for them to shoot themselves, the audience had
cheered
! There’d been fourteen-year-old girls who were so winningly naïve and innocent that when they shot themselves, the audience was
outraged
!

“And then there’s Gregers,” Richard Abbott interjected. “That miserable moralizer. I could play Gregers, but only as a meddlesome fool—a self-righteous and self-pitying clown!”

Nils Borkman often referred to his fellow Norwegians who were suicidal as “fjord-jumpers.” Apparently, the abundance of fjords in Norway provided many opportunities for convenient and unmessy suicides. (Nils must have noticed, to his further gloom, that there were no fjords in Vermont—a landlocked state.) Nils now looked at Richard Abbott in such a scary way—it was as if our depressed director wanted this upstart newcomer to find the nearest fjord.

“But Gregers is an
idealist,
” Borkman began.

“If
The Wild Duck
is a tragedy, then Gregers is a fool and a clown—and Hjalmar is nothing more than a jealous husband of the pathetic, before-she-met-me kind,” Richard continued. “If, on the other hand, you play
The Wild Duck
as a comedy, then they’re
all
fools and clowns. But how can the play be a comedy when a child dies because of adult moralizing? You need a heartbreaking Hedvig, who must be an utterly innocent and naïve fourteen-year-old; and not only Gregers but Hjalmar and Gina, and even Mrs. Sørby and Old Ekdal and the villainous Werle, must be
brilliant
actors! Even then, the play is flawed—not the easiest
amateur
production of Ibsen that comes to mind.”

“Flawed!”
Nils Borkman cried, as if he (and his wild duck) had been shot.

“I was Mrs. Sørby in the most recent manifestation,” my grandfather told Richard. “Of course, when I was younger, I got to play Gina—albeit only once or twice.”

“I had thoughts of young Laura Gordon as Hedvig,” Nils said. Laura was the youngest Gordon girl. Jim Gordon was on the faculty at Favorite River Academy; he and his wife, Ellen, had been actors for the First Sister Players in the past, and two older Gordon daughters had previously shot themselves as poor Hedvig.

“Excuse me, Nils,” my aunt Muriel interposed, “but Laura Gordon has highly visible breasts.”

I saw I was not alone in noticing the fourteen-year-old’s astonishing
development; Laura was barely a year older than I was, but her breasts were way beyond what an innocent and naïve Hedvig should have.

Nils Borkman sighed; he said (with near-suicidal resignation) to Richard, “And what would the young Mr. Abbott consider an
easier
Ibsen for us mortally mere
amateurs
to perform?” Nils meant “merely mortal,” of course.

“Ah . . .” Grandpa Harry began; then he stopped himself. My grandfather was enjoying this. He had the utmost respect and affection for Nils Borkman as a business partner, but—without exception—every keenly devoted and most casual member of the First Sister Players knew Nils to be an absolute tyrant as a director. (And we were almost as sick of Henrik Ibsen, and Borkman’s idea of
serious drama,
as we were of Agatha Christie!)

“Well . . .” Richard Abbott began; there was a thoughtful pause. “If it’s going to be Ibsen—and we are, after all, only amateurs—it should be either
Hedda Gabler
or
A Doll’s House
. No children at all in the former, and the children are of no importance as actors in the latter. Of course, there is the need for a very strong and complicated
woman
—in either play—and for the usual weak or unlikable men, or
both
.”

“Weak or unlikable, or
both
?” Nils Borkman asked, in disbelief.

“Hedda’s husband, George, is ineffectual and conventional—an awful combination of weaknesses, but an utterly common condition in men,” Richard Abbott continued. “Eilert Løvborg is an insecure weakling, whereas Judge Brack—like his name—is despicable. Doesn’t Hedda shoot herself because of her foreseeable future with both her ineffectual husband
and
the despicable Brack?”

“Are Norwegians always shooting themselves, Nils?” my grandfather asked in a mischievous way. Harry knew how to push Borkman’s buttons; this time, however, Nils resisted a fjord-jumping story—he ignored his old friend and cross-dressing business partner. (Grandpa Harry had played Hedda many times; he’d been Nora in
A Doll’s House,
too—but, at his age, he was no longer suitable for either of these female leads.)

“And what . . .
weaknesses
and other unlikable traits do the male characters in
A Doll’s House
present us with—if I may ask the young Mr. Abbott?” Borkman sputtered, wringing his hands.

“Husbands are not Ibsen’s favorite people,” Richard Abbott began; there was no pausing to think now—he had all the confidence of youth and a brand-new education. “Torvald Helmer, Nora’s husband—well, he’s not unlike Hedda’s husband. He’s both boring and conventional—the
marriage is stifling. Krogstad is a wounded man, and a corrupted one; he’s not without some redeeming decency, but the
weakness
word also comes to mind in Krogstad’s case.”

“And Dr. Rank?” Borkman asked.

“Dr. Rank is of no real importance. We need a Nora or a Hedda,” Richard Abbott said. “In Hedda’s case, a woman who prizes her freedom enough to kill herself in order not to lose it; her suicide is not a weakness but a demonstration of her
sexual strength
.”

Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your point of view—Richard took this moment to glance at Aunt Muriel. Her good looks and opera singer’s swaggering bosom notwithstanding, Muriel was not a tower of
sexual strength;
she fainted.

“Muriel—no histrionics, please!” Grandpa Harry cried, but Muriel (consciously or unconsciously) had foreseen that she did not match up well with the confident young newcomer, the sudden shining star of leading-man material. Muriel had physically taken herself out of the running for Hedda.

“And in the case of
Nora
. . .” Nils said to Richard Abbott, barely pausing to survey my mother’s ministrations to her older, domineering (but now fainted) sister.

Muriel suddenly sat up with a dazed expression, her bosom dramatically heaving.

“Breathe in through your nose, Muriel, and out through your mouth,” my mother prompted her sister.

“I know, Mary—I
know
!” Muriel said with exasperation.