Rudolph! (22 page)

"Can't remember the last time I had a tête-à-tête with a squeaker," I said.

"Not very good conversationalists are they?"

"Not really. Unless you're talking about cheese, and then they'll talk your head off."

She laughed and released my hand. "I'm Barb Prescott. I'm the set designer for the company."

"Right," I said.

A tiny smile quirked the corner of her mouth. She put a finger on the stack of bios, and started to slide them—one by one—aside. Hers came up eventually, and she left it there as she wandered past the desk to look out the window.

I scanned the document quickly. Canadian by birth, British by education; six years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Married some guy with an impressive list of degrees—in architecture, of all things. And that was it. No other credits. I turned the page over, wondering if there was something more on the back.

This piqued my curiosity. The most interesting bits of any bio were the blank spots. It'd been a decade since she'd been married, and a surreptitious glance toward the window revealed she wasn't wearing a wedding band, which didn't necessarily mean anything, but still . . . 

"I'm glad you could join us," she said, coming back to the desk and sitting in Metcalfe's immense chair. She filled it better than I, but it was still ginormous.

"That seems to be the sentiment of the day," I said.

"Deep pockets will do that." She looked over the sea of paperwork surrounding me and wrinkled her nose. "You aren't the type who understands all this, are you?"

"Some," I said. "Ted sent me a brick of paperwork, and I thought that was a lot, but apparently he was being cost-conscious and leaving most of it for me to find when I got here."

"Is it telling you much about the show?"

"You don't have enough chairs," I said.

"And?" she prompted.

"It's a lot of paperwork," I said.

She leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. "Come downstairs," she said. "Let me show you what you're really here for."

The house was dark, the stage lit by two banks of small footlights nestled in the floor out near the proscenium. We wove our way past towering sculptures that were hard to make out in the dim light, though I felt like I was sneaking through a forest of frozen monoliths. Barb made me stand on a taped X near the center of the stage. "Wait here," she said, then she left me there.

I lifted a hand to blot out some of the glare from the bank of lights and tried to make out the shape and style of the theater's auditorium. Orchestra—sans chairs—main floor of the house, mezzanine, and a couple of box seats on either side. Either the walls were overgrown with moss or the trim was exceptionally rococo. It was hard to tell in the dimness.

"Ready?" Barb's voice reverberated from hidden speakers, and I jumped out of my skin.

"I'm not a big fan of playing hide and seek," I said once my heart stopped pounding like a jackhammer in my chest.

"Sorry," she said. "It'll just be a minute."

"Where is everyone?"

"Dinner. We break from three to seven. Traffic is horrible in this city. We have to give them extra time to get anywhere. They'll be back in a few hours."

Tiny lights began to blossom out in the audience, gleaming points on chandeliers dangling from the high ceiling. I could make out the walls now and saw that the ornamentation was even more fifteenth-century than I had originally guessed. The lack of seating left the orchestra area a black pit, and some of the boxes on the sides were missing their front railings.

Suddenly, light spilled across the stage on my right, and all the tall figures were illuminated in stark relief. Barb kept bringing up lights, and I found I was surrounded by a field of twisted, tormented figures. They were very detailed, each one attached to the earth by a maze of wire and ribbon, each one straining and pulling to be free.

My mouth went dry. They looked a lot like statues I had seen once. On a metal plate floating on a sea of hellish air.

There were two platforms adorned with fat cones upstage from me, and as Barb dropped the spotlights down, the cones erupted with plumes of fire, aggravating the shadows on the statues and giving the tormented faces strange lifelike qualities. The fire plumes revealed the details of the platforms, and I realized they were made from thousands of plastic dolls, all melted and woven together.

I was still gawking when Barb skipped out from stage left. "What do you think?" she asked, slightly breathlessly.

"What is this? Where am I?"

"You are in Rudolph's throne room. I modeled it on the original designs of Solomon's chambers. Though," she shrugged slightly, "I made some modifications. A little more Gothic."

"Throne room?" I asked. "Rudolph's throne room?"

"Oh dear," she said. "You haven't read the script yet, have you?"

November 24th

I
considered drowning myself in the bathtub after reading the first
two scenes of the play. I eyed the window and thought about taking a swan dive to the street when I finished the first act. And I was beyond numb when I finished.

Gothic? Gothic was a blonde Swede drinking lemonade and licking a cherry lollipop while lounging in a sun-drenched hammock beside a field of sunflowers compared to this. Imagine the blackest point of night captured in a can and dropped into the deepest part of the Marianas Trench, and you can begin to understand the darkness that overflowed this script.

The audience is lulled in the beginning, lead to believe they are about to enjoy a full family outing of Christmas cheer. ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all that. The curtain rises up on a soft winter night. Typical nuclear family sitting around a lit Christmas tree. Mom in her kerchief, Dad in his cap. The children are laughingly trying to decide which present to open first for this is a post-nuclear family that never understood the importance of patience. There is a chorus of sugarplum fairies at the edges of the stage, faces lit by candles as they sing a graceful noel. There are more candlelit fairies then, falling gently from the ceiling of the theater, roaming randomly in the aisles, turning the entire house into a sea of flickering light.

Onstage, Dad directs his young son towards a very specific package. "Open that one," he says. "You should open that one tonight." The son does so, and out of the box leaps a happy puppy. The script notes:
White puppy with single black spot on face, something with short hair and
very
energetic.
The boy is overjoyed. "Just what I wanted," he crows. "He's just what I asked Santa for."

Then, a buzz of feedback from the sound system. The script suggests:
like the sound of a thousand children all screaming with joy, but downtuned a half-octave and slowed to one-eighth speed.
The sea of lights is extinguished as if from the strength of this scream, blown out by the outrageous wind. The scream ascends into screeching static, until the Christmas tree explodes—lights popping into showers of yellow sparks, branches crackling and burning, the angel atop the tree dissolving into a pinwheel of red fire. The family is thrown aside by the explosion, and they lie crumpled on the stage. From out of the exploded tree comes . . . 

ENTER: AN APPARITION
.
The stage is black. The house is black. The only light is the burning Christmas tree.
‘
As he kept looking, why, here the thornbush was burning with fire and yet the thornbush was not being consumed.'
At first, there is only the shadow that reaches out of the flame, a great horned head that stretches across the stage like the stiff, reaching fingers of some great celestial being. The figure appears, limned in fire, a tall figure crowned with twisted horns. The fire subsides quickly, leaving only a ruddy glow on the stage as the figure stands in the living room of the nuclear family. His face is lit with a red glow, a single point of red light like a great Cyclopean eye.

VOICE
:
(over sound system, reverb +10)
No. This is an illusion. This is not real. I will show you reality. I will strip away the sweetness, the candied shell which coats, the taffied taste which numbs, the saccharine smell which opiates. I will show you the true spirit of Christmas. I will show you true.

LIGHT
:
Strobe (15 SEC)
. The nuclear family sprawled in their living room. The tree consumed and blackened against the wall of their house. Standing in the center of the family's once-happy home is an immense reindeer with a thorny rack of antlers and a nose that glows the color of blood.

LIGHTS
: Blackout
(after 5 SEC)

END SCENE ONE

Rehearsals were underway when I finally dragged myself to the Heritage. I stood near the back of the house and watched the capering and quivering figures onstage. Seated in folding chairs about twenty feet from the stage were the choreographer and his assistant. The lights were up on the stage, and the towering giants didn't look nearly as imposing as they did last night. And from here, you couldn't tell the throne was made from Barbie dolls.

"Stop! Stop. Stop!" The choreographer rose from his chair as if elevated by his upraised hand. The mother of Henrik Guljerssen—our choreographer—must have grown up watching Ray Bolger knee and wobble his way through the
Wizard of Oz
. Bolger's impression of a walking scarecrow had resonated so strongly in her womb that Henrik had come out more like a child of flax and chaff than flesh and blood. He stumbled through his early years all loose and rubbery until something locked into place within the recesses of his brain, and what had once been fumbling became graceful, the continual artless pratfall became an expressive circuit of harmonic motion, and the rough and tumble child of straw became a man capable of infinite grace. Even the simple motion of rising from his chair and stopping the action on the stage was performed with such elegance that watching the dancers come to a halt at his call was like watching a train wreck in comparison.

"Just because you are playing cripples doesn't mean that you should dance like them." Henrik turned the up-thrust motion of his arm into a sweeping gesture encompassed even the empty house behind him. "If we had seats, they'd be running a hundred and twenty dollars each. Do you think anyone is going to pay that much to see a bunch of cripples try to keep time? They are going to want razzle. They're looking for dazzle. They're going to want their fucking money's worth." His assistant shrank in her chair as he turned his attention on her. His voice didn't drop a decibel. "Honestly, what ward did we pull these rejects from?" He let the question hang in the air until he finally snapped his fingers at the electric piano, which was tucked away in the corner of stage right. "Again," he said. "From the top."

The pianist—an angular woman poking out of a large overcoat—hunched over the keyboard and began to bang out heavy chords. Shuffling out of their hunched and twisted postures, the dancers transformed into a ragged line like a centipede uncurling when touched with a hot stick. It was like watching a stomach turn itself inside out, and I felt like a first year med student—repulsed and fascinated at the same time.

"No, no, no!" Henrik shouted. The dancers faltered, and the music stopped. He lifted his long arm and pointed an accusatory finger with such
gravitas
that I expected lightning bolts to shoot from it.

Based on the reaction of many of the dancers onstage, I wasn't the only one who expected fingertip pyrotechnics.

"You. Yes. You," Henrik said. "What is the problem? Do you have a medical condition that I need to know about?"

The dancer in question shrugged and scratched his head.

"You move like you've got an inner ear imbalance, and you've got about as much rhythm as an epileptic rehearsing for a Grand Mal," Henrik sneered. "Do you expect me to shut down the entire production while we fetch some dock workers to beat a sense of time into your thick skull? Is that what I need to do?"

The dancer had enough sense to shake his head.

The choreographer stared at the dancer, and we all watched the young man's head wobble faster and faster. And just before I thought the dancer was going to lose his balance, Henrik snapped his fingers and the young man stopped instantly. "Good," Henrik said. He snapped his fingers again. "Let us start again, you lazy clubfoots."

The pianist didn't react quickly enough, and she jumped when Henrik shouted at her in some dialect I didn't recognize. He snapped out a four count as she hurriedly put her fingers to the keys and started playing again. On stage, the line of dancers writhed and twisted.

I wasn't quite sure what the clumsy dancer was doing differently this time, and I must have made some inarticulate noise of confusion because Henrik stopped the dancers again and looked over his shoulder with an indolent curve of his head. "Who's there?" he asked archly.

I cleared my throat and stepped away from the back wall. "Sorry," I said. "I was just curious."

He dismissed me with a wave of his fingers. "Be curious somewhere else."

"I—"

"Why am I still hearing that voice?" he said, looking at his assistant. "Why is he still here?" She leaped up, knocking over her chair, and came back towards me, walking swiftly, her arms swinging stiffly at her sides. She was a rather severe-looking woman in a mousy sort of way. Her black glasses were straight out of the late '90s bohemian catalog, and the angular slash of her mouth was made even more angular by the utilitarian color and application of her lipstick.

"Please," she said softly in a voice that made me think of stuffed animals being shoved into a speeding blender. She positioned herself between me and the stage, indicating the lobby doors to my left. "Go," she said in a tone of voice typically used on dogs who have just been caught pooping on the rug.

"I just wanted to see . . ." I started.

Behind her, Henrik groaned audibly. "I cannot believe these conditions. How can anyone have a creative thought when surrounded by such negativity? Such oppressive bleakness?"

His assistant hunched her shoulders at the sound of his voice, looking like she was about to pass a kidney stone. She gestured towards the door again.

"All right," I acquiesced, raising my hands. I turned and marched out like I had just been caught with my hand in a cookie jar. She slammed the door shut and stared at me through the small porthole-style window. I stared back, silently counting, and got all the way to one hundred and thirty before she blinked. And then, as if embarrassed to have been caught being human, she vanished. In the distance, I could hear the ragged wheeze of the music as rehearsals started up again.

"Get caught snooping?"

I turned and spotted Erma standing in the door to the box office. She was swathed in reds and purples today.

"I guess I was," I said. "I didn't know it was a closed set."

Erma waved a paw at the doors to the theater proper. "Henrik's fussy. His choreography is genius, but it comes with a few eccentricities."

"Is that what you call it?" I asked, wandering over. "It looked like an earthworm turning itself inside out."

"It takes a little getting used to. Most of his work is like that. It seems totally chaotic and random, but there is an order to it, an elegance that makes itself known if you free yourself from the rigid constraints of traditional dance forms," she said, launching into something that felt like a researched speech. "You have to be receptive to the possibilities of new experiences. It's very avant-garde. The French dance community isn't even sure what to think of him. We're so very lucky to have him on this production."

"Is that what the scene needed? More avant-garde than French avant-garde?" I tried to recall the script notes about the throne room dance sequence, but my brain was already blocking all of that out.

"The fire spouts weren't on, were they?" Erma asked. I shook my head. "Oh," she clucked. "That makes all the difference. There is nothing like the play of fire off sweaty skin to illuminate the misery of the human condition." The phone in the office rang, and she bustled off to answer it.

How can you turn Rudolph's life story into a musical?

Well, scratch that. It's already been done. Back in '64—the same year we had that horrible accident with the Nuclear Clock. Rankin and Bass released their stop-motion TV special, and generations of children grew up believing that production values were so shoddy at the North Pole that a place like the Island of Misfit Toys could actually exist. Burl Ives was the serpent who hummed "Silver and Gold" in their ears from Thanksgiving to New Year's. These kids thought elves dreamed of being dentists, that Bumbles bounced, and that Rudolph was actually shorter than your average elf.

Yeah, right. I can walk under most of the reindeer without ducking, and I'm considered a giant in my family.