Wishing in the Wings (33 page)

I heard Jenn splutter behind me. I said, “I have absolute faith in Jenn’s ability to make up her mind, Ronald.”

“No! Not her! I gave her a simple list of product names! But she couldn’t approve them!”

“I think you misunderstood.” I tried to paint a coat of sympathy over my words, but I didn’t waste a lot of time getting the sound exactly right. For someone as tone deaf as Ronald, nuance wasn’t worth the extra effort. “Jenn didn’t say she couldn’t approve them. She said she wouldn’t approve them.”

Ronald stopped dead in his tracks. “What?” His roar must have been audible back in his own office.

In another place, in another time, I would have found a way to be conciliatory. I would have woven the necessary lies. I would have placated. I would have soothed. I would have applied every last trick in my bag of dramaturgical training.

But not now. Not when I had just learned how dangerous silence could be.

My goal as dramaturg wasn’t to make every single person in the Mercer love every other person. It wasn’t to smooth over conflict solely for the purpose of smothering negative feelings. My goal was to make the best play possible.

And Ronald J. Barton, Popcorn King, wasn’t part of that vision.

I could feel Ryan behind me, his support as solid as the painted metal roof on Fanta’s hut. The cast murmured beyond him. Some of the actors had never before laid eyes on Ronald J. Barton. They hadn’t had the opportunity to view his fashion sense first-hand. They hadn’t had the pleasure of listening to his fog-horn bellow.

Hal knew what we were up against, though. I glanced at him, made sure that he was on board. He gave me the tiniest of nods, the slightest visual sign of his approval.

Taking another step forward, knowing that I had to stand alone, I raised my chin. I spoke clearly, precisely, never raising my voice but using every last shred of my theatrical experience to make sure that Ronald could hear each syllable of my reply. “Ronald, we will not use your flavors. They, and their names, are insensitive and insulting. We will not devalue our audience or this production, just to help you sell more popcorn.”

Ronald’s eyes bulged. His face flushed crimson, contrasting violently with his lemon-yellow sweater. His hands curled into fists so tight that I feared for the structural integrity of his cell phone. “We have a contract!”

I exploited his shout, lowering my own voice for greater contrast. “I am well aware of that.”

“You’ll never see a penny of my third check!”

“We don’t expect to.”

“I’ll sue!”

“And I’ll accept service of your complaint, right here.”

Hal stepped forward. “Or I will.”

Ryan wasn’t about to be outdone. “Or I.”

We stood there, like the three musketeers. Out of the corners of my eyes, I could see the cast gather closer. A few actually wore their Popcorn King T-shirts, and the fluorescent colors almost threatened to steal my attention from the apoplectic man before me. Almost.

“I—!” he shouted. “You—! They—! We are through here! You’ll never see another penny from me! And I intend to see you repay every single cent I’ve given you so far!”

Ronald J. Barton, the Popcorn King, turned on his tangerine-clad heel. He slammed the theater doors behind him and, by the sound of things, crashed through the lobby doors as well.

Shaking, I turned to look at Hal. His lips were stretched thin, his jaw practically wired shut. I only realized then how much he had longed to speak out, to interrupt Ronald’s tirade, to berate the Popcorn King himself. He spared me a single nod, a tight, incontrovertible gesture of approval.

When I looked at Ryan, he was smiling. He raised his hands in front of him. He clapped once. Twice. And then the entire company joined in, filling the Mercer with the sound of applause.

I barely resisted the urge to take a bow.

NO ONE WOULD have clapped if they’d realized how much work it would be to cut loose the tentacles that the Popcorn King had wrapped around our production. Sets, costumes, programs, lobby—just about every aspect of the Mercer had been co-opted by our unholy alliance with Ronald J. Barton.

The first thing Hal ordered was for the set to be repainted. It took four coats of gray to block out the fluorescent glow of yellow on the corrugated roof of Fanta’s hut, but everyone agreed that the change was for the better. Even if we needed to adjust the lighting levels to account for the darker color, nudging everything up a notch or two. Even if the shift in lighting made it more obvious when the actors missed their precise marks for those tightly choreographed scenes in the second act. Even if the brighter lighting required a change in makeup design, so that everyone’s wrinkles and fatigue appeared more realistic.

It was worth it, just to be free from the all-smothering logo of the Popcorn King.

Similarly, it was worth the effort to rework costumes for the players who had been slated to wear orange and yellow souvenir T-shirts. Of course, Ronald’s fluorescent dyes had never faded as we’d hoped; his hideous advertisements had remained brilliant despite our best efforts to camouflage them into submission. Now, we threw out the promotional garbage, but we stuck with the same general concept in our costume redesign—the characters lived in rags, in donations from benefactors they’d never met. The new costumes were more subdued, defeated, grim, like the living conditions we showed throughout the play.

Everyone was grateful that we no longer risked migraines from staring at the mix of never-appropriate, brightly colored American ultimate-symbol-of-consumerism shirts.

Cleansing Ronald’s influence from our brochures and programs posed a bit more of a problem. We’d already laid out the written materials to include the Popcorn King’s two bargained-for ads. We were up against a tight deadline as it was, getting everything to the printer on time. I spent one entire sleepless night updating the programs, scrubbing every last reference to our supposed benefactor.

I was yawning the next day, but it was worth it to have everything correct.

We had a substantially easier time jettisoning the massive advertisements that Ronald had created for our lobby. Everyone breathed a little more freely when we were no longer assaulted by raging yellow and orange billboards every time we walked into the theater.

The transition wasn’t one hundred percent painless. The house manager had to scramble to rebuild our traditional lobby display for the actors’ headshots. She had to remove the performers’ staid black and white photographs from the riotous, circus-like foam-board frames that Ronald had provided. She restored them to the traditional, boring, easy-to-view white background that had served well enough for every other production the Mercer had ever hosted.

The dim burgundy and navy lobby might be boring, but it was familiar. It was home.

Kira even saved the day when it came to the refreshments we intended to serve before the show and during intermission. Weeks earlier, she had placed a triple order for soft drinks, recognizing that our patrons would likely consume more than usual—a lot more—as they attempted to wash down the Popcorn King’s heinous flavor combinations. Kira remembered the unusual order early enough to cancel it with a simple phone call to our supplier, reverting to our usual purchasing. At the same time, she arranged for candy bars, mints, oversized cookies—the usual snacks that our audiences expected.

Those treats might be boring, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about patrons getting sick on cruel and unusual flavors.

The last phase of de-popcorn-ification was the trickiest. We needed to review our accounting books to determine precisely how much of Ronald’s money we had already spent, and how much we could return to him. We combed through columns of assets and liabilities, through checkbooks and credit card statements, investing more attention to fiscal detail than Dean had likely spent during his entire tenure at the Mercer.

One calculation was simple: the Popcorn King’s entire third payment, the $50,000 we hadn’t yet received, was earmarked for advertising and promotion. With a few minor penalties, we canceled all of our radio spots, withdrew the splashy print ads that we had hoped would catapult the Mercer into the top tier of New York theaters.

Even so, our financial numbers were grim enough that I lost another few nights of sleep. A lot of Ronald’s money had been used for the theater’s day-to-day expenses. The Popcorn King had paid salaries for cast and crew. He had kept the heat and lights on. He’d covered the accent coach who had finally brought Fanta in line, after so many weeks of inappropriate Jamaican sojourns. Ronald’s funds had been invested in costumes, in the set, in the fine, dry earth that drifted over the entire theater, despite Kira’s best efforts to contain it.

Nevertheless, we juggled the numbers as best we could. Hal called an emergency board meeting, tapping into the directors’ pockets for donations that each was likely to make at some point during the year. He met with our banker. He convinced the cast and crew to take a ten percent cut in pay for the rest of the rehearsal period, for the entire run of the show. He called in the directors for the remaining three plays in the Mercer’s season, bargaining with them until they donated some of their shows’ funding to ours.

Ultimately, we wrote a check to Ronald for $75,000. We owed the man another twenty-five, but we were temporarily out of fundraising ideas.

With three days to go before preview performances, we’d exorcised the Popcorn King as best we could. Everyone in the company was happier. Jenn still thanked me morning, noon, and night for sparing her from Ronald’s constant phone calls and e-mails. The Mercer’s flirtation with orange and yellow was safely in the past, a nightmare that rapidly lost its hold as each of us came fully awake.

Throughout all of the changes, Ryan and I worked side by side, happily united in our common goal of expunging Ronald J. Barton from However Long. We also did our best to adapt the troublesome blocking, however belatedly. Ryan continued to be pained by every single change that Hal proposed; twice he absolutely refused to modify particularly poignant choices that he’d enshrined in his script. In the end, no one was totally happy. Ryan felt that the soft underbelly of his play had been ripped out. The actors felt that they were being asked to do the impossible. I tried to shrug off the ongoing conflict. Even the world’s best dramaturg couldn’t solve every problem in a production.

At least we didn’t bring the conflict home with us. Every night, Dani followed our theatrical exploits with interest. Ryan and I stopped by her apartment after rehearsal, and the three of us ate late dinners, sharing stories about our respective days.

Dani was busier than ever. She had become the official spokesperson for the Gray Guerillas, and her presence was in great demand. She had speaking engagements at schools, at churches, at office buildings throughout Manhattan. Overnight, guerilla chapters had become trendy; many had their own pages on Facebook and MySpace and a dozen other social networks. Page Six posted daily updates of celebrities who engaged in their own green guerilla stunts.

In light of Dani’s busy schedule, I was astonished to find her on the sidewalk outside the Mercer when Ryan and I took a lunch break one Tuesday afternoon. We’d spent the entire morning hashing through the tech rehearsal for the first act, adding in all the light cues, all the sound cues, all the final technical details that would bring our show fully to life. Although the work was absolutely necessary, it was tiresome, and there were many starts and stops. When Kira announced an hour break for lunch, I heard the siren call of a spinach and feta omelet singing my name, loud and clear from the coffee shop down the street.

I was so intent on procuring that lunch, complete with steaming hot French fries, that I actually ran into Ryan when he stopped dead on the sidewalk, a scant three feet outside the Mercer’s front door. “What—” I started to ask, but then I saw what had brought him to a halt.

Crocuses. A carpet of them, yellow and purple, nestled around the plane tree that grew in the grotty patch of earth between the sidewalk and the street. I glanced to my right. More crocuses, surrounding the next three trees. I turned to my left. Still more.

They were gorgeous in the spring sunshine, vibrant, defiantly challenging the grim tree trunk, the gray cement ocean around them. Only when Dani stepped out from behind the parked cars in the street did I realize what had happened. “Us?” I said, laughing. “The Mercer has been targeted by guerillas?”

She chuckled. “We figured it was the least we could do to help our favorite theatrical production. We wanted to spruce things up a little before preview audiences arrive on Friday. You know, since the theater itself is so drab these days.”

We laughed, all of us grateful for “drab” because that meant the Popcorn King’s orange and yellow had been vanquished. Ryan shook his head in amazement. “But they’re bulbs! They must have taken you forever to plant!”

Dani grinned like the Mona Lisa. “Ah, the wonders of peat trays.”

“Dani, they’re beautiful!” I said, truly touched.

Before I could continue, a man’s voice said, “Rebecca Morris?”

“Yes?” I turned around, half expecting to see a film crew on the sidewalk, someone who had been tracking Dani and the Grays and wanted to capture my reaction to their largesse.

A short man in a fawn-colored trench coat stepped forward. “Ryan Thompson?” he asked without responding to me directly. The fresh spring breeze ruffled the guy’s mousy hair as Ryan nodded. Through some sleight of hand, he produced two envelopes, touching each of us with a sharp paper corner. He avoided meeting our eyes as he said, “You’ve been served.”

A curse rose in my throat, and I took my envelope by reflex, ripping it open as Ryan fumbled with his. The process server disappeared down the sidewalk, not even sparing a glance for the riot of crocuses.

Ronald J. Barton… Popcorn King… Rebecca Morris… Ryan Thompson… Harold Bernson… The Mercer Theater… Temporary restraining order… Breach of contract… Conversion… Defamation… Slander… Intentional infliction of emotional distress… $25,000 in actual damages… Five million dollars in punitive damages…