The Cornerstone (25 page)

Friday – Opening Night

“Where’s the patron seating?” A white-haired, overdressed woman leaving a heavy floral perfume trail took one of the elaborately designed programs Claire held in a box.

“First four rows.” Claire tried not to breathe too deeply. “They’re marked off, just sit past the red ribbons.”

The theater was filling up. Claire counted the rows that still had empty seats and there weren’t many. Standing at the back where the double doors were propped open, she and a couple of volunteers were handing out programs. Bayard had ordered 550 printed, which was fifty more than the exact number of seats, but it seemed to her they should have done more. If they ended up with a full house, there wouldn’t be many left as souvenirs of the show, considering some people had asked for two. The price break wasn’t significant unless you ordered at least a thousand, and the promotions budget hadn’t allowed the company to spend that much money unless they were willing to scrimp somewhere else. That’s what Morris had told her, knowing as he did all about the cost of getting things printed. She’d already stashed away a copy for her mother, who’d asked for one because Claire’s name was listed among the crew.

She’d dressed in her one good outfit, a gray velveteen pantsuit that had already earned her a number of compliments. With her hair pulled up and a piece of her mother’s jewelry, an 18k gold brooch of a butterfly, on her lapel, she felt as much in costume as anyone in the cast.

She doled the programs out without paying much attention to the stream of people filling the auditorium until a young man stopped in front of her and opened his palm for a program. He was tall and so incredibly good looking she thought he must be a model or an actor. Golden blonde curls framed his chiseled cheekbones and caressed the collar of his perfectly fitted tux. She caught her breath at his incredibly blue eyes as he whispered “thank you” in a voice that in any other circumstance would have sounded overwhelmingly seductive. His fingers lightly brushed hers as she gave him the program. So cold. He should have worn gloves to the play. She watched him maneuver with feline-hipped grace around the people still lingering in the aisle chatting. Beautiful men had never given her much heart flutter, but she would’ve made an exception for that one. Was he a celebrity? She’d have to ask Addie after the show if they had any famous guests on the patron’s list.

Claire felt butterflies in her stomach, in a good way. The whole air of opening night was tense with anticipation, something she’d never experienced. Sure, she’d been to a couple of plays and live concerts, but never from the other side of the aisle, as a member of the group putting on the show. The audience buzz was lively, especially because of the way Bayard had directed the stage setup. The curtains were wide open with Faustus’ study fully revealed under a single spotlight while the rest of the stage was in shadow. Dressing the set was being done in front of the audience, as if they were watching through a window into the room. Two stagehands dressed as pages ambled across the stage, carrying Faustus’ ornate chair and placing it just so in front of the desk. Then another in a scholar’s robe came out of the wings with the tall desk candle and placed it carefully beside the books and papers. Although she’d seen this bit practiced any number of times, Claire watched all the stage business from the audience’s perspective now, feeling excitement build as the set came together.

The house lights dimmed, which was Ruben’s cue that Act One was only minutes away. The opening notes of Bach’s ominous Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor recorded on some massive sixteenth-century pipe organ in Amsterdam came through the theater speakers, and Claire shivered. She loved this part of the preshow, especially the way the opening theme built slowly, relentlessly, first as single notes and then gradually layering counter melodies under the first one, and finally driving the whole thing through the pedals in the bass into a massive crescendo of polyphony. It was the perfect setup for the emotional underpinnings of the play.

Claire put the box of programs on a chair by the door and slipped down the aisle to the side door that allowed access backstage. She found her place in the wings, opened the script, and took a deep breath. The lights went down and Act One got underway.

Bayard emerged from the wings and stepped to the footlights to deliver the Prologue.

Claire found herself holding her breath. He looked amazing. In full period costume, he looked every inch an actor from the Rose or the Swan. From his rakish cap with a long feather to his midnight blue quilted doublet and breeches, down to his silk hose and leather handmade shoes, he was exactly what she imagined a sixteenth-century player would have looked like. She wondered where he’d had the costume made and how much it must have cost.

“...we now perform the tale of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad…”

His British accent was impeccable, his timing and delivery nuanced. Claire shook her head. The man was good.

“…On waxen wings he did extend his reach too far, and melting, heavens conspired his overthrow…”

After he’d wow’d the audience with his perfect delivery and strode offstage, the bar was set. Act One proceeded in high gear. Faustus declared his intentions to seek unholy knowledge, and cemented his blood pact with Lucifer’s lieutenant Mephistopheles. Claire’s stomach clenched as they went through the stage business of the knife and writing the pledge in blood, but all went smoothly. Tom seemed in total control of the action, playing off Morris with fierce concentration.

“
Consummatum est
,” said Tom. “Receive this scroll, a deed of gift, of body and soul.” He rolled up the parchment and handed it to his Mephisto. Morris took the scroll with a slight bow and a wicked leer at the audience. As the act drew to a close, they had the audience in the palms of their hands. Tom was so good at this, Claire wondered if he’d been sandbagging all this time and really did have acting credentials he’d neglected to mention.

By the time intermission rolled around at the end of Act Three, Claire found she was mostly watching the play as a rapt spectator, being swept up in its intricacies and the inevitable downward slide of the brilliant but flawed main character toward his doom. Audience applause so far confirmed what she was seeing: Tom and Morris were riveting. The secondary actors were giving stellar performances as well, maybe in response to the energy flowing between the two principals. She slipped into the green room during intermission, unable to calmly sit on her stool and wait for the action to start up again.

The green room was crowded, but Addie spotted her as soon as she stepped through the door. “Hey, it’s Claire. Don’t you look beautiful!” Claire thought Addie, costumed in the voluptuous one-shouldered silk gown of Alexander the Great’s paramour, her auburn hair done up with strands of pearls like a Greek goddess, was pretty much a knockout herself.

“As if.” Claire smiled, self-conscious at suddenly being the center of attention.

Alexander the Great, a drama major from the university, hulking next to the coffee machine in his short cape, fighting kilt, and little else, gave a low wolf whistle and winked.

“Stop, you guys.” Her cheeks flushed. She felt embarrassed, but oddly pleased.

“Well, it’s true. Who knew there was a princess under those medical scrubs?” Addie was grinning.

Claire gave her a look. “I promise this is the last time you’ll see me in this outfit.” Looking around the room, she did a quick head count to see who else from Act Four was ready and accounted for. The German Emperor Charles sat on the long sofa with Frederick and Martino, two members of his court. He was laughing at something the Persian King Darius, sprawled in an overstuffed chair to his right, had just told him. Darius and Alexander, along with Addie, were part of the mime commanded by Faustus to enthrall the German sovereign. Morris, tall and inscrutable in his devil’s makeup, was texting on his cell phone beside the water cooler. Finally, she spotted Tom.

He’d taken the folding chair in the corner, which set him somewhat apart from the others. He sat with his scholar’s robe pulled up off the floor, revealing his jeans and boots. The costume mistress had decided not to put him in a wig, and instead had made a period-accurate academician’s cap that covered his head and tied under the chin, although he’d left the strings undone, which seemed to fit Faustus’ rash personality. Far from rash, though, Tom seemed lost in thought, staring off across the room. Claire started to go speak to him, and then held back. He didn’t look all that approachable at the moment.

The lights blinked twice.

“That’s it—places, everybody,” said Addie, gathering up the hem of her dress and heading for the door. Claire held it open as the actors filed out and down the narrow corridor to the backstage area. Tom was last out. He gave her a tight smile.

It was unsettling. “Everything okay?”

“It’s all good,” he said, and gave her hand a quick squeeze. Before she had time to register how out of character that was for him, at least as far as she knew him, he’d disappeared into the darkened hallway.

Still mulling this over, Claire took her station as Act Four got underway. She sensed Bayard’s presence behind her. She whispered to him, “It’s really good so far, isn’t it?”

He smiled grandly. “Beyond expectations. I’m very pleased.”

Well, as long as the impresario was happy, she refused to let Tom’s distant mood dampen her spirits. She was having a good time, the best in weeks. As long as Tom got his lines right, she didn’t care what was up with him. Except the sensation of that quick squeeze of his rough hand lingered in the back of her mind.

The cast romped through Act Four, which was mainly comic relief with Faustus playing unholy tricks on courtiers and foiling their plot to take him out. The mood lightened for a bit, the audience laughed aloud at all the right places, and then everyone settled in for the climactic Act Five, where Faustus’ Wittenberg colleagues beg him to repent his ways and ask for divine mercy. He repudiates them, remorseful and yet resigned to his fate. Claire realized she was holding her breath again as Faustus, in the solitude of his study, hears the clock tower bell begin to toll the hours, forcing him to acknowledge the fact that his time is running out and shortly Lucifer’s lieutenant will come to claim him.

The Good Angel glided out of the wings and stood behind his chair, reaching toward him, palms up in supplication. The bell tolled again.

“Ah, Faustus, if thou hadst given ear to me, e’en now Heaven’s bliss might still be yours…”

From the opposite wings, brushing past Claire and Bayard, Addie now garbed in red as the Evil Angel went to Tom and crouched at his knees. More bell sound effects.

“But instead you gave ear to me, and now must taste what Hell will give thee.”

Defeated, the Good Angel withdrew. Addie stood up and spread her arms wide, as Ruben slipped a red filter over the spotlight.

“Now, Faustus, stare with thine eyes in horror at what lies before thee…” The bell tolled for the eleventh time. “And so I leave thee, till ‘tis time…” She made her exit, and Tom got up from his chair to approach the footlights and speak his lament for his lost salvation, which was actually a two-and-a-half-page soliloquy that to Claire seemed the most daunting of anybody’s lines in the play. She watched the script closely as he began, although she was sure he wouldn’t forget anything. He hadn’t so far and tonight he was definitely on a roll.

“…
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi
, slowly, slowly run, ye horses of night…” The twelfth bell clanged. Thunder boomed through the speakers and lightning danced over the stage.

“…If only this cursed soul could be changed into drops of rain and fall into the ocean, and ne’er be found…”

Tom stared into the audience as if peering into the very pit of Hell. Morris entered upstage, at first a darker shadow against the backdrop and then stalking slowly forward, his retinue of devils and minions, including the Evil Angel, hanging back behind him, which was a little odd, Claire thought, because they’d practiced this entrance with everyone clustered tightly around him.

Tom turned to them and his body language telegraphed both fear and confrontation.

“Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.” He faced the audience again. “Ugly hell, gape not, come not, Lucifer!” But Morris’s red-caped frame came out of the shadows and into the spotlight to stand beside him. Tom turned once more and looked him in the eyes.

There was a beat of silence, and then another. Claire’s stomach flipped. Their timing was off, something wasn’t right.

Tom’s voice took on a harsher tone. “Art thou indeed Mephistopheles?”

Morris waited a beat and then answered. “One name among many.”

Claire frowned—that wasn’t in the script. What the hell were they doing? And there was something wrong with Morris’ voice. Was the sound guy playing with the effects? She’d heard that peculiar inflection before somewhere—it iced her blood and filled her mind with black despair. And then she knew with certainty where, and when. With a catch in her breath, she cut her eyes to Bayard. Even in the dim light his face was bloodless, his expression a mask of stark terror.

She leaned in and whispered to him, her voice unsteady. “T-they’re not following the script. What’s happening?”

He looked at her for a blank second or two, as if empty air had spoken to him, then fixed his gaze back on the two figures center stage.

An acrid, sulfurous tang invaded the theater and rode the air circulating the room. A red haze lit the stage as the proscenium curtains began to smoke.

“Well, Tom,” said the voice that wasn’t Morris. “We meet again.”

“Nay, demon, my name is Orin Ó Braonáin and I am come to free my mother.”

Wicked laughter filled the theater, bouncing off the walls and reverberating across the rows of the packed house.

Fire blossomed along the open rafters over the stage, and the smoke alarm erupted for a few shrill bleats before the flames ate the wiring and silenced it. People began to panic and scream as the auditorium filled with smoke.