The Queen of Patpong (28 page)

Chapter 23
An Indigestible Lump of Exposition

P
rospero’s island, or at least the part of it that’s visible to the audience, is a rugged, steep-sided rock that juts up almost vertically on the left and then crinkles its way down on the right, ending offstage. It lifts its craggy silhouette against the unbroken gray of a cyclorama, one long piece of seamless fabric that curves all the way around the back of the stage, from the floor to the top of the audience’s sight line, and which is lighted the color of gunmetal for these act 1 moments following Prospero’s magical storm. Later in the production, as the day wears on, different lighting will turn it turquoise, but for now the gray is fine, easy on Rafferty’s tired eyes.

The vertical edge of the rock begins its thrust about four feet from the curtains on the left edge of the stage, leaving room for actors to come and go. That’s
Rafferty’s
left, as he faces the stage, but for the actors, who are facing out, it’s stage right. Mrs. Shin, in giving direction, always means
stage
right and
stage
left, even when she says only, “Cross right” or “A few steps left.” So: stage right; stage left; upstage, or away from the audience; and downstage, or toward it—the points of the theatrical compass.

Everyone in the room except Rafferty, and probably Kosit and Anand, understands it instinctively.

A big, irregular, dark-looking cave, Prospero’s hangout, punctuates the rock face at about center stage, and a huge clutter of driftwood has been stacked just to one side. The pile of driftwood is on a hinge, and on the back of it—the side that’s invisible to the audience at the moment—is a bunch of heavy canvas framed and painted to look like rocks. The unit will be swung around to provide scenery for the clown scenes—what Rafferty, who shortened them for weeks, thinks of as the
endless
clown scenes—and also to mask part of the cave.

Beginning high on top of the island, a rough-hewn stairway of sorts has been incised into the rock. It appears near the pinnacle and then angles back and forth all the way down to the stage floor. This was designed to be used by arriving and departing actors, but Mrs. Shin has been worried about the stairway since long before the set was built, anxious that someone might fall through it and get hurt. She’s decided, as she sets the action of the play, that the stairway belongs exclusively to Ariel, since Miaow is by far the lightest child in the cast. Miaow has tried not to look smug at having an entrance only she can use.

Rafferty is sitting next to Mrs. Shin, about eight rows back from the stage, feeling like he’s entered an enchanted world. This is the first time he’s seen the entire set with most of the lighting, and it’s turned the auditorium into a sorcerer’s stony realm, completely sealed off from the urban friction of Bangkok and the real-life drama of the past few days. The school’s theater accommodates about four hundred people in rows of hard, fold-down wooden seats—another reason to shorten the play—set in front of a classic proscenium stage, complete with a small orchestra pit and a curtain. For
The Tempest
the curtain has been festooned with cloth seaweed in half a dozen shades of green and brown, with sparkles glued here and there. Some kelpy pieces are ten or fifteen feet high, extending all the way from the floor of the stage to the top of the proscenium arch. Mrs. Shin was not allowed to sew the seaweed to the curtain, so every now and then Rafferty sees the glint of safety pins.

He likes the safety pins. They seem appropriate to the production, a bit of inexpensive practicality in the middle of all the magic.

The boy playing Prospero, a Chinese kid named Luther So, is onstage now and is not having a good time portraying age. He’s presenting Shakespeare’s magician as a stiff-kneed hunchback who walks high-shouldered and bent over, leaning on his magician’s staff and frequently grabbing his back as though in pain. Every time he takes a step, Mrs. Shin says quietly, “Oh, dear,” and finds a way to keep him still.

“Why don’t you just have him stand there through the whole play?” Rafferty asks behind his hand. “The other actors can hang hats on him.”

“He speaks the verse very well,” Mrs. Shin says. “He understands every word. And it’s unusual for a ninth-grader to have such a strong lower register.”

“And such a weak lower back.”

“Shhh.” But she’s smiling.

Privately Rafferty thinks it wouldn’t matter if the kid played the whole role stark naked on a unicycle, because no one, or at least no one who’s male, will ever see him. Siri Lindstrom, who’s been assigned the role of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, is an incipient heartbreaker, the kind of girl who seems to carry her own breeze with her. Her ash-blond hair, which falls to the middle of her back, is constantly in motion, framing a face having nothing wrong with it that’s big enough to see with the unaided eye. The first time she came onstage, Kosit, sitting three rows back, said something that made Anand laugh. Mrs. Shin had twisted around toward them.

“My police escort,” Rafferty said.

“What an interesting life you lead.” Mrs. Shin looks up at Siri, who’s huddled with Luther running through the lines of the play’s eternal second scene, in which Prospero explains the whole backstory to his daughter, starting before she was born. It seems to take as long to tell as it did to happen. Siri’s wearing a great many yards of muslin, draped in layers around her like she’s just come from some celestial steam bath. All the actors are in working costumes, rough muslin approximations of their ultimate outfits, so they can learn how to move in them without falling on their faces. Siri seems to be having no problem with hers, but she could probably dance on pointe in full body armor. “Wait till they see her in the real dress,” Mrs. Shin says, regarding her. “She’s breathtaking.”

“Miaow hates her.”

Mrs. Shin nods matter-of-factly. “She’s got a lot of company. Siri is not a girl’s girl.”

Rafferty says, “I’m just glad I’m not her father.”

Mrs. Shin gives him a quizzical glance. “And Mia?”

“Well, Miaow’s difficult sometimes, but it’s a different kind of difficult.”

“For the moment,” Mrs. Shin says, and now it’s Rafferty’s turn to look at her.

“You think?”

“Absolutely. She’ll probably never be tall, but she’s going to be a beauty.”

Rafferty looks up at the top of the rock, where he can just see the chopped-yellow crown of his daughter’s head. She’s sitting where she always sits, all by herself on the highest step of the metal stairway that leads to her entrance. “Really.”

“Take my word. I’m an expert on how they’ll grow up. I’ve been watching it for years.” She leans forward and calls out, “Luther. Siri. Let’s have it out loud and in your places.” Luther hobbles downstage, and Rafferty can almost hear his joints creak. Siri drifts weightlessly toward center stage, which is her favorite place. “Ellen”—Mrs. Shin’s voice is louder—“give me the cave lights.”

The inside of the cave takes on a pale color halfway between a peach and the inside of a conch shell.

Rafferty says, “Pretty.”

Mrs. Shin says “Shhh” again, focused on the stage. Luther has launched into the story, much shortened by Rafferty, of how his brother betrayed him and stole his dukedom, in connivance with the king of Naples, and how Prospero and Miranda wound up cast away on this benighted island. He is interrupted by dutiful interjections from Siri, as Miranda, who is herself interrupted by Mrs. Shin, who reminds her that the people in the back of the theater will want to hear her, too. It is, Rafferty thinks, one of the worst scenes Shakespeare ever wrote.

He says, “Still feels too long, doesn’t it?”

“It’s been too long for four hundred years.” Mrs. Shin slips sideways out of the row and goes down to the edge of the orchestra pit at the foot of the stage. The actors break off and look at her. “I want you guys to pick it up by about ten percent,” she says. “We’ll move on now, but as soon as you’re both offstage, I need you to run through it a few times, just speeding it up. Here’s the motivation: Luther, you’re eager to get through it so you can talk to Ariel and find out about the storm. Let the intensity speed you up. Siri, maybe you can cut him off with some of your lines, because as good a daughter as you are, you’re a kid, you’re impatient—”

“This is important material,” Luther says. He was born to be forty. He’s watched anxiously as his big opening scene has been snipped like substandard yardage. “The audience needs to hear it.”

“They need to be awake, too,” Mrs. Shin says. “You guys are doing great, but this scene is a big, indigestible lump of exposition, and we haven’t solved it yet. Okay?”

Siri says placidly, “When will I get my real costume?”

“When it’s finished,” Mrs. Shin says, a bit shortly. She smiles, taking the sting out of it. “Siri, why don’t you go backstage and think about how to hurry this scene along? That way you’ll be ahead of Luther when he’s finished out here.”

Siri nods and floats off stage left, where a sun-dappled meadow probably awaits her. Even Luther, whose developing sexuality seems to be taking an interesting direction, watches her go.

“Okay,” Mrs. Shin says, clapping her hands. “Lights ready? Ellen?”

“Ready!” a girl shouts.

“Mia?”

Miaow stands up, high on the rock, looking even smaller than usual, and says, “I’m here,” and then disappears again.

“Then let’s go.”

Mrs. Shin backs up the aisle, still facing the stage, with her right arm behind her back, fingers crossed. The peach color inside the cave is replaced by a chilly steel blue, and the cyclorama darkens ominously to slate gray. A bright spot of light hits the top of the rock, where Miaow had been standing, and Mrs. Shin calls out, “Ellen. Not till you see her. Where’s our sound?”

“Sorry,” a boy says from stage right.

“Put the light on the cyclorama back the way it was,” Mrs. Shin says. “I want to see this whole transition come together. Luther, you cue everything. Everybody ready?”

A general chorus of readiness from all over the theater as the cyclorama brightens, and then Mrs. Shin claps again and says, “From ‘Come away,’ Luther. Go.”

Luther cramps his way stage left, toward the bottom of the stairway, and says, “ ‘Come away, servant, come; I am ready now. Approach, my Ariel, come.’ ”

The sky darkens and the onstage lights dim, and Rafferty hears a howling wind, punctuated by crashing waves, and suddenly there’s a sunburst at the very top of the rock as Miaow, wearing a waist-length shirt of little mirrors above black tights, is transfigured by a pure white spotlight, and she lifts her arms high, the brilliant mirrors flung out like an exploding star, and says, “ ‘All hail, great master! grave sir, hail!’ ” and Rafferty gets goose bumps.

“
That
works,” Mrs. Shin says as she resumes her seat. “That’ll wake them up.”

Miaow is maneuvering her way down the uneven, curving staircase as though she’s been walking it her entire life, throwing off points of light as effortlessly as she throws off her lines. The spotlight follows her, and down below, Luther realizes he’s not standing in his own light and makes the adjustment.

“Look at her,” Mrs. Shin says proudly. “She doesn’t even check to see where she’s putting her feet.”

“She’s been in more dangerous places than this,” Rafferty says.

“She’s going to be wonderful.”

Four feet from the bottom of the stairway, Miaow makes a flying leap to the stage floor, leaving behind the follow spot, whose operator hadn’t expected the jump. Mrs. Shin, who hadn’t been expecting it either, starts and emits a mild “Eek.” Miaow is all over the stage now, owning it, swooping and diving ceaselessly as she describes the storm she caused, the storm that drove onto the island the boat containing Prospero’s evil brother and the king of Naples. As he watches and listens, Rafferty begins to feel an odd kind of tension, the sort of low-level electrical charge he experiences in his scalp and skin when he’s close to working his way through a problem. Despite the sensation, which definitely demands attention, he’s distracted by something very different in Miaow’s voice, a quality that’s nothing like how she had played the lines when he helped her learn them. He looks up at the stage and then glances over at Mrs. Shin to find her leaning on the back of the row of seats in front of them, staring at Miaow as though the entire speech is new, something Shakespeare, against all odds, just wrote.

“What in the world is she doing?” Mrs. Shin asks, although Rafferty doesn’t think the question is addressed to him.

Miaow is certainly doing something. The tale of how she bewitched the ship and made all aboard terrified that they were about to drown, how she drove them to leap into the raging sea, and how she dispersed them around the island in small groups, is told with white-hot fury, as tightly focused as the flame from an acetylene torch. When she assures Prospero that the shipwrecked courtiers are all safe on solid ground, their clothing not even wet, she sounds bitterly regretful, as though she’d rather report they’d been flayed alive one at a time and their skins hung over bushes to dry. When, in answer to a question from Prospero, she describes the king’s son sitting and sighing on a rock, “ ‘His arms in this sad knot,’ ” she accompanies the words with a petulant crossing of her arms, and she gets a laugh from offstage. Somebody else whistles, perhaps at the sheer amount of energy Miaow has just generated.

There’s a silence. Luther has been so busy watching Miaow that he’s forgotten his line. Now he turns to face the audience and asks, “Is she going to do it like that?”

“Good question,” Mrs. Shin says, moving back into the aisle. “Mia. Where did
that
come from?”

Miaow takes a step back and looks down at the stage floor, and the spotlight goes out, and she’s just a little girl again. Rafferty thinks she’s going to retreat into sullenness. But she says, “Ariel hates them. She hates all of them.”

“Why?”

“They’re bad. Look what they did. How they stole everything from Prospero. How they put him and the baby—I mean Miranda, who didn’t know anything and never hurt anybody—into a leaky boat and tried . . . tried to drown them. In the ocean. Like kittens nobody wants.”