Acts of Love (18 page)

“Leaving?”
Monte glared at him. “You've got to be kidding. Well, of course you're kidding; what am I getting excited about? You wouldn't leave a play in the fourth week of rehearsal.”

“I said as soon as I can,” Luke murmured. “What's with Rachel and Cort? They're behaving as if they hate each other.”

“They do, at the moment. Just before you got here he criticized the way she read a line yesterday, she told him he didn't know the first thing about character development, he said she didn't know anything about character, period, or she wouldn't be hanging around with Kent Home—”

“What?”

“They went to dinner last night.”

Luke looked around. “Where is he?”

“She wanted a Diet Coke; he went to get her one.”

Luke gazed at the actors sipping iced drinks. “Maybe he'll take up with Abby next.”

Monte snorted. “She's three times his age.”

“And the classiest woman here. I'll talk to him when he comes back. You'd think he'd be more careful, to make sure everything goes—”

Kent walked in, hugging a brown grocery bag patched with wet. “Afraid I'd lose it,” he said, putting it down on the table. The wet spots had torn open and cans were jutting out. “God, I only walked a block, but, you know, cold cans, all that condensation . . .” He looked at Luke. “Something wrong? You were late,” he added, as if whatever was wrong could be fended off with an accusation.

“Sit down,” Luke said.

“Sure, but let me deliver this first.” He took a can from the bag and carried it to Rachel, opening it as he went. They spoke a few words; then he came back and pulled out the chair beside Luke. “Shoot.”

“We'll talk at lunch. Let's begin,” he said to the cast. “Exactly where you left off. I have a few notes from yesterday, so let's stop at the end of act one and go through them.”

Kent pulled out a small notebook. “I did my own last night. Cort's playing this whole act too sweet . . . I don't know how he does it, but he takes my lines and makes them jelly. You've got to sit on him, Luke. And Rachel should be dumber at first; she doesn't see what he's really like. I mean, she falls in love with him but it's more excitement than love, because he's really not a nice guy. Not yet.”

Luke nodded. “I know. We're working on it.”

They listened to the actors, who had known their lines since the second week but were still working on who they were, and how they would grow in relation to the others. There was too much moving around, Luke thought; their lines were lost in superficial activity. But that always happened in the growth of a play, and it did not bother him. And then, suddenly, the three actors on stage came together and for a few moments everything flowed and merged and was just right. It was as if the sun had broken through heavy clouds and everyone felt it. Monte was sitting straighter, Kent was grinning, and Luke was standing, driven from his chair by a surge of excitement.

Then it was over. In the middle of a line, Abby suddenly wheeled and strode to the front of the imaginary stage, gesturing toward Rachel. “Luke, I will not tolerate this. She's like a toy some child wound up. Didn't anyone ever tell her to stand still?”

“Me?” Rachel said. “What was I doing?”

“Moving,”
Abby declaimed, still looking at Luke. “Constantly, perpetually,
interminably.
It's like being in an amusement park with those cars that keep bumping each other. I won't have it.”

“I thought I was getting out of your way,” Rachel said. “You know, so I wouldn't upstage you.”

Abby's eyes flashed and her neck lengthened. “You could never, ever upstage me.”

“Rachel,” Luke said mildly, “the idea of walking is to get somewhere. If you have a specific place to go to or away from, then do it. Otherwise, just stand still and react to the others. You should move in ways that feel natural, but you always should have a reason. Any problems with that?”

“No. I'll try. But . . . wasn't it
good
for a few minutes? You know, just perfect?”

Kent nodded dreamily. “It was.”

“It will happen again,” said Luke. “That's the wonder of it. Okay, let's go over my notes.”

They sat around the table, pouring cold drinks, leaning forward in a small tight group with Monte at one end and Kent and Luke at the other. Luke glanced at his pad of paper. “I'd like to see everything happen a lot faster beginning about two-thirds into the first act, the lines coming on top of each other, the reactions split-second. This is the time when all of you first get an inkling that everything you've thought for a lifetime may not be true, and I'd like that to build, like a crescendo in a symphony. One way to get into that is to do the lines in slow motion. Abby, would you start? At the moment you come in from the sun porch. But don't lose the meaning of the lines; the trick is to hold on to the sense of what you're saying at all times.”

He sat back and listened to them struggle with it. This was one of his favorite exercises, one that required intense concentration and made each phrase sound different not only to the actor speaking it, but to the rest of the cast as well. Speaking and moving in slow motion made everything seem larger and clearer as they had to focus on every syllable, and as they did so they often found new meaning in what they were saying and a new understanding of their emotions. It usually took about three minutes for them to feel what was happening, and when Luke saw their faces change he knew they had reached that sudden moment of feeling their characters expand. Cort and Rachel smiled at each other, their tiff forgotten. Abby put her arm around Rachel. The two supporting actors, who had only a few lines in the first act, watched enviously.

“Okay,” Luke said at last. “We'll try that again this afternoon before we go back to act one. By then you should have a feeling for the tension that begins to build there, and I'm hoping your pace will reflect that. Now, this has been a long morning and I think we should go to lunch. Back in an hour, please.”

He and Kent walked the short distance to Joe Allen and sat at a table along the red brick wall. Immediately the waiter was there. “You have just an hour, Mr. Cameron?”

“As usual; what's good today?”

The discussion was crisp and brief, and as soon as the waiter served their iced coffees, Luke looked at Kent and smiled. “You look like you're expecting a spanking.”

“Isn't that what we're here for?”

“You're too old for one and I don't believe in them. What do you think you've done wrong?”

“Haven't a clue. I could just tell you were pissed.”

“I was wondering how long it would take you to go through all the women involved in this play.”

Kent stared at him. “That's what's eating you? What difference does it make who I date?”

“I'll tell you what difference it makes. I thought you'd have figured this out by yourself, but since you haven't, I'll try to make it clear. We created something new when we all got together for
The Magician.
We're almost a family. Not quite, but almost. We're almost a business, we're almost a club. Are you following this?” He looked up as the waiter brought their lunch, and shook his head as he saw the size of the meat loaf sandwich on Kent's plate.

“It takes a lot of energy to be a playwright,” Kent said. “Oh, black-eyed peas, my favorite. Go on.”

“This isn't some mystery I'm talking about: we've got a group of people depending on each other to bring a play to life, but also dealing with their own lives, and every day is a juggling act to keep them separate. Everybody knows—you sure as hell ought to know—that the minute you ask a group of people to work together in an atmosphere of make-believe and exaggerated passions, without letting their own passions interfere, you need to pay attention to what you're doing or it will get sloppy and destructive.”

“Hey, all I did was date a couple of them,” Kent said.

“You slept with at least one of them, but we won't go into that now.” Luke ate some of his salad. “I don't want to sound pretentious about this, but there's more to it than just giving a few talented people a script and sending them up on stage to perform it. There are other things going on and we have to pay attention to all of them. There's almost no chance that this particular group will ever come together again, which is one of the reasons it's different from other groups, but that also means it's easy to get careless. I don't tolerate carelessness in my plays.”

“Which means?”

“You know what it means. Put the same amount of effort into being a part of this theater company that you do into writing your play. Put the same kind of effort into getting this play to a brilliant opening night. It's yours, for God's sake; who has a greater stake in it? We have enough tensions that go with the territory; we don't need rivalries or sexual bravado. Especially we don't need a crude kid celebrating his entrance into the big time by screwing all the women who are part of his play.”

Kent's face darkened. “You didn't have to say that.”

“No.” Luke shook his head slightly. “You're right, I didn't. I apologize.”

“You apologize?”

“It was uncalled for. It doesn't help for both of us to be crude.”

“Jesus, you don't quit, do you? Look, you never bothered to ask, but I'll tell you anyway. I didn't grab anybody. I mean, I let them know I thought they were dynamite, but they made the first move. Which I admire. But that's only part of it. Look.” He put down his sandwich. “Look,” he said again. “I've been all over the place—Europe, Africa, Japan—and I know a lot about the world, I know my way around, but you people make me nervous. This is your turf and you know what you're doing, you've earned the right to be here. I feel like a kid looking up at a bunch of grown-ups in a place where I don't know my way around, not yet anyway. So I grab—well, that's a bad word right now, isn't it?—I hold on to whatever I can. And Marilyn was—”

“We're not talking about specific people.”

“Right, but I don't tell locker room stories, ever. It's just that I needed people to tell me how great the play is—”

“I do that. So does Monte.”

“I need it all the time! If I don't hear it for a day or two I start to worry that it's no good, that pretty soon everybody'll realize it and you'll call the whole thing off. Or the critics will tear it apart. I've started a new play—I didn't tell you; I didn't tell anybody—and I wake up about two, three every morning scared to death because I'm sure the new one is no good, and neither is
The Magician,
and neither am I. So I grab—I latch on to people who tell me I'm great and then I feel okay for a while. You know, I used to smoke and I'd think I was about to curl up and die if I didn't have a cigarette? This is worse.”

“I'll record it for you on a tape loop. You can play it anytime.”

“Now, that is one terrific idea. What will you say?”

“Damn it, you know what I'll say.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“You've written an elegant play, a moving, personal, meaningful play. The actors love it and so do the rest of us and we're going to give it the best production it could have. Will that do?”

“Yeah. When will you do it?”

Luke contemplated him. “I wasn't serious.”

“Well, I am. I mean, I know it's a joke and maybe it's stupid, but it'll be like my fix. Oh, what the hell, Luke, I'll behave whether you do it or not, but I'd really appreciate it. It would be my mantra.”

Luke shrugged. It always astonished him how much writers needed to be stroked. But then, so did actors and painters and sculptors. Truly creative people were always reaching for more, and what woke them up in the middle of the night filled with fear was the knowledge that they'd never do it all, or even most of it, as well as they hoped to. “I'll make it this weekend,” he replied. “Now, can you tell me anything about the new play?”

Kent leaned forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You'll keep it to yourself, right?”

Luke knew it was a good idea as soon as he heard it, with powerful roles for a man and woman in their forties. “Perfect for Jessica,” he murmured.

“Who? Jessica?”

“Fontaine.”

“Oh. You know, I never think about her, but you're right; she'd be dynamite. I saw her a long time ago in London in
Medea;
she was awesome. But she's been gone forever, hasn't she?”

“Not quite that long.”

“So what happened to her?”

“I don't know. I'm going to find out.”

“And you think she might do it? God, Luke, if we could get her  . . . but I haven't got much to show her. I mean, I've got most of the first act, but that's all.”

“Get me a copy. I'd want to read it, and if I find her, I might show it to her. I won't promise anything; we'll just see what happens.” He reached for the check. “Let's go back; we have a lot to do this afternoon.”

“Oh, let me. . . .” Kent moved in slow motion to extricate his
wallet.

“No, I'll take it. If you learned something, it was worth every penny.”

“Well, I did. You're good, you know. You're a terrific director and you're good with the cast, all of us, the crew, too. I'm not too good with people, I admit it, not all the time, anyway, so I admire people who are.”

“You'll get better. Just pay attention to what you're doing. Let's go.”

Rehearsals resumed with another slow motion exercise, and then went back to the beginning of the play. Kent sat beside Luke, making notes, muttering, fidgeting. Luke looked at him. “You feel it, too.”

“Yeah, something's wrong. I don't know why.”