An Idol for Others (22 page)

“What if I don’t like them?” Johnny asked.

“Then we’ll have to find others,” Walter said. Writers would be treated with respect in his theater of the future. “Except Greg Boland. He’s tied in with the movie money.”

“I never expected to be a power in the theater,” Johnny said with a crinkling of humor around his eyes.

“You’d better accept Walter’s judgment unless you feel very strongly,” Clara advised him. “We’ve gone over them very carefully.”

They spent the rest of the week seeing actors they had summoned and dozens who were drawn by Clara’s announcement. Walter wanted to talk to all of them as part of his mission to discover new talent, but he soon learned that it took too much time, and Clara put a sign on the door saying,
NO CASTING.

David had given them a list of things he wanted them to do, such as hiring a rehearsal hall and having actors’ copies of the play typed, and Walter stuck to it. He hated spending any of the money they had so miraculously raised; he felt lost without David’s experience and guidance. Clara wanted to branch out on their own and fix dates and commit funds without consultation with their partner. He firmly restrained her. She presided serenely over the office from behind the battered desk. The telephone rang constantly. The film company’s press department was lining up behind the production. He and Johnny were in demand for interviews.

David arrived at last, teeth flashing, gold glittering. Walter breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God you’re here, old pal. Take over. I’ve been working on designs for the set. You can get Oscar in, and I’ll go over them with him. The cast is penciled in. Johnny’s pleased. You should draw up a contract for him. We’re about ready to go.”

“Except we don’t have a theater.”

“We have four weeks of rehearsals to find a theater.”

“No, you wanted the regular three weeks of rehearsals, plus an extra week in the theater with the set. That’s the way it’s budgeted. Three weeks to find a theater.”

“True.”

“I wonder …” Clara began. Her eyes explored the air in front of her, in the way she had, without focusing on anything in particular. She looked out at the world rather than into herself when she was thinking. They hung on her words, but none emerged.

“Generally speaking, you don’t go into rehearsal if you don’t have a theater,” David elaborated. Clara had allowed him to take her place behind the desk in honor of his arrival. The cramped quarters gave everything that was said great weight. They breathed into each other’s faces.

“Let’s not worry,” Clara said finally. “Walter’s ready to start. I don’t think we should keep him waiting.”

“The thing about Clara is that she understands genius,” Walter said.

They decided to start rehearsals in ten days. Being able to make such decisions lent an air of fantasy to the whole enterprise. The first rehearsal returned Walter to the familiar atmosphere of his church sociables. He sat at a table flanked by Johnny and Clara, facing the actors in a row of folding chairs, with Greg Boland in the middle as befitted the leading man. He was lean and loosely knit with the right combination of intellectuality and rough-hewn appeal that Walter wanted for the part. He let the actors read through the play without interruptions while he checked his heavily annotated script and scribbled additional comments. He sensed excitement stirring in the bare, drab hall. The company burst into applause for Johnny at the end.

“It looks all right, Johnny,” Walter said.

“It’s thrilling,” Clara asserted.

Johnny shrugged. “It’s good,” he agreed.

From then on, Walter was so absorbed in the play that the only time that existed for him was the time he was creating within its dramatic framework. He was quickly satisfied that he and Clara had chosen the actors well. Greg Boland seemed to rely rather heavily on charm, but Walter was confident that Greg could dig below the surface once he knew his lines. Walter refused to listen to Clara when she came to him with production problems. “Work it out with David.” was his standard rejoinder. He was aware that they were constantly conferring together. They told him they had found a theater and that the budget seemed to be holding up to the pressure of a number of small, unexpected expenses. He was more interested in getting Jill Cummings, the lead actress, to remember a “but” she kept leaving out of one of her big speeches.

After two weeks he was ready for the first full-length run-through. Everything was going smoothly–but not too smoothly, he hoped. He knew the theatrical superstition about chaos being the prelude to success. There was nothing chaotic about the run-through. If it had been a routine Broadway success of the sort he was used to directing, it would have been almost ready to open. He had created tension but not impact. Several of the key performances, including Greg’s, lacked resonance. It was exciting where it should have been searing.

He knew where the trouble lay. The play was too long. He had stressed pace at the expense of emotional values. He had never been in a position to edit a text to suit himself and hesitated to suggest cutting to Johnny for fear of disrupting the harmony with which they had worked. Johnny and Clara waited for him while he went over his notes with the actors. He joined them and suggested they all go have a drink.

“Well, how did it go?” Walter asked after the three of them were installed in a booth in the back of a small theatrical bar in the neighborhood.

“It’s going to be brilliant,” Clara announced stoutly.

He looked at Johnny, who made an almost imperceptible movement with his shoulders. “It’s hard to say with all the interruptions. This is the first time I’ve sat through a play in rehearsal. In Paris it seemed to go a little faster, but that might have something to do with the language. Of course, it was new to me then.”

Walter took a swallow of his drink. “How about trying some cuts, Johnny?” he suggested, digging in for a storm.

Johnny looked at him impassively. “Where?”

“Well, that whole section after the big scene with the mother, for instance. It doesn’t go anywhere. I know it has some lovely writing in it. That’s why I haven’t suggested it sooner.”

“Can’t you speed it up, dearest?” Clara asked.

“You know better than that, Clarry. Pace has nothing to do with speed. The pacing is very tight already. There’re several places where I’d like to open it up. I know I could get more from Greg. I’m talking about adding maybe ten minutes to the playing time when I should be cutting by at least 15. How about it, Johnny?”

“You’re aware, of course, that’s where the whole point of the play is established,” Johnny pointed out.

“That may be what’s the matter with it. You’re stating something that doesn’t need to be stated. The play makes its point for itself.”

“You can’t compromise with a thing like this,” Clara challenged him. She continued to treat Johnny with special deference. “You’re worrying about theatrical effects when it’s a question of ideology.”

“I’m interested in the theater, Clarry, not in politics.”

“But that’s what Johnny keeps telling you. The theater is politics. Everything is politics.”

“In that case we have nothing to worry about. I’ll concentrate on theatrical effects, and they’ll turn out to be politics.”

“Very funny, but you still don’t want to rob the play of its whole meaning.”

Johnny studied her disinterestedly. He didn’t even make the concession of being grateful for her support. He turned to Walter. “You might have something,” he said. “I can see that the passage with Leonard might be extraneous, even though it’s one of my favorite things in the play.”

“Same here, but we’ve got to think of it as a whole. How about it? Will you perform the operation, or shall I?”

“You better. That way I can holler if I don’t like it.”

Clara made an impatient sound in the back of her throat. “Really, Johnny. I thought you’d fight for what you believe in. Why does everybody let him have his own way?”

Johnny smiled faintly. “I guess because there’s no excuse for him unless he’s right. We’ll soon find out.”

Walter stayed up most of the night to make the cuts he had indicated and others he had been considering since the beginning. He didn’t have to rehearse the changes to know that he was making the play more manageable for himself, more conventional, and much more accessible to a Broadway audience. He felt sure that by simplifying the dramatic line and gaining time for it to grow from within, the play would develop the impact that it lacked. He had made it so completely his own that he felt no compunction toward the author. Success counted far more than literary experimentation. He didn’t call another run-through during the last week in the rehearsal hall, so Johnny wasn’t able to assess the effect of the cuts.

The first day in the theater where the set was in place provided a taste of the chaos that was generally considered lucky. Walter had provided himself the luxury of an extra week of rehearsal to be followed by a week of public previews in place of an expensive out-of-town try-out, so he didn’t feel rushed and flung himself cheerfully into the avalanche of work.

The set was lit; clothes were checked and adjusted. Props created problems that had to be solved. The three partners were all over the theater at once, backstage, down front, in the box office, up in the balcony. They ate whenever something came to hand. Walter never knew what time it was, and at one point Clara told him that he hadn’t left the theater for over 36 hours. As order reemerged, rehearsals became a succession of complete performances.

“I don’t quite know how you’ve done it, but you’ve almost turned it into an American play,” Johnny commented when he’d seen his first uninterrupted run-through. “It may be less impressive–less distinguished, maybe?–but I feel more part of it somehow. I guess I’m an American after all.”

Walter was delighted at the success with which he had molded the company into a sensitively integrated ensemble. The actors were playing off each other, constantly enriching and expanding the dramatic values of the text. Only Greg Boland remained slightly mechanical, an actor in the center of a living organism. Walter knew that there was more in him and decided not to push him until he saw him in front of an audience. Some actors were incapable of opening up without the stimulus of a public. He wasn’t completely satisfied with his set either, but he had theories about a bare stage that he didn’t dare put into practice yet.

He was briefly annoyed one evening when he found the curtain down until he remembered that it was the night of the first public preview. Since everybody would be there on cut-rate tickets or free passes, he regarded them as a nuisance. He knew, though, that their presence would completely alter the performance, so he attempted to anesthetize himself to the shocks the evening was bound to bring.

He thought it went well. The actors overplayed, as was to be expected; there were disconcerting shifts of emphasis here and there; but there were no technical hitches, and he was surprised at the lethargy of the applause at the end.

“People who come to these things never know how to react,” Clara said, standing at the back of the theater. “They need the critics to tell them what to think.”

When he went backstage to go over his notes, he was lavish in his praise of the actors and crew to counteract the feeling of letdown in the air. Morale was as important now as lines or light cues. He was tempted to cancel the next day’s rehearsal as a demonstration of his confidence but was aware of the delicate balance between the benefits of rest and the near-paralysis that could ensue from a relaxation of tensions.

During the following night’s performance, he concentrated on the audience. It was restless at the beginning, doubtless resentful of having been lured to an unknown play with unknown actors that apparently wasn’t even going to be funny. The play slowly got a grip on the house. He was beginning to look forward to the final curtain and an expression of the enthusiasm that he felt building up when the spell began to dissolve.

He had keyed down the final scene. Coming after the violence of the earlier scenes, it had the aching desolation of the aftermath of a particularly devastating storm. It wasn’t coming off. He felt all his body tensing as he fought through every word of Greg’s long bitter final speeches. “Come on, come on,” he kept muttering to himself. It seemed so nearly right. Just the slightest additional pressure of intensity, a shadow of a stress, and Greg would have them. He felt as if they were engaged together in a struggle to tame some willfully stubborn dumb animal. They failed. The curtain descended once more to lethargic applause.

He hurried backstage distributing the elixir of enthusiasm that the audience had withheld. He asked Greg to stay and sent the others away with a valiant display of optimism. He told Clara to go home and to make sure the girl who had been hanging around Greg went too.

“Are you ready to make a night of this?” he asked when Greg had changed and removed his makeup and they were alone together on the stage in the light of the bare bulb overhead.

Greg studied a long bony forefinger, held straight and horizontal before his eyes. “What seems to be the trouble?” he asked without taking his eyes off it.

“The last scene. The audience isn’t getting it. We’d better go over it. How does it feel to you?”

“All right. You’re not going to cut it?” he demanded, voicing the actor’s dread of losing any of his lines.

“No, it’s not that. This is a tough play for a Broadway audience. They’re probably expecting more of a punch. We may be playing it too fine for them.”

“I’m playing the play the way I feel it,” Greg said. “You told me you wanted it that way.”

“You’re doing a brilliant job, Greg,” he soothed him. “Everybody agrees about that. I want to do everything possible to make this a real showcase for you.”

His moody face brightened considerably. “All right, fella, let’s get going.” He made a vaudevillian one-two feint at Walter.

They started to walk through the scene, Walter close beside the actor, throwing him cues and murmuring suggestions. “No self-pity. Make it stronger than we had it before. More of a protest …” “There. Where the old woman interrupts you. I’ll have her make it bigger, almost a scream. Now start building …” “That’s it. Now hit it. ‘If some die.’ You’re accusing all mankind. Really lay it on …” “Good. Now break it right off. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Hold it as long as you like. You’ll have to time it with the audience. Then way down. As if you can hardly believe your own ears. ‘I can still say it. Blah-blah-blah.’”