Caesar
. She'd come with the costume designer, because his husband still disliked crowds. That was where she'd told me about taking the summer off, and that she felt that she could still give the world a definitive (her word) Juliet, in a big enough theater.
Cherri was my age, plus or minus, and as far as I was concerned, she was a knockout. She was tall and willowy with pale skin, thick brown hair, and curves which I found...provocative. Her eyes were large and green with long, dark lashes and heavy lids. Her nose was probably not original, but the work had been good. Privately, I suspected it was her mouth which had kept her from playing Juliet, even when she was the right age. It looked small, mostly because her lips were so full. And it gave her a look of...sophistication, and experience, particularly sexual experience. The combination was powerful stuff. She'd make an amazing Lady Capulet, wearing Tybalt out three times a week in the solarium while her old man is out on the tiles, but even twenty years ago, it would have taken an...imaginative director to cast her as Juliet.
And this was my Lady Macbeth, my "dearest partner in greatness," the woman who would spend the first act of the play using everything at her disposal--mind, heart, and body--to persuade me to commit murder. Well, nobody could say the next several weeks weren't going to be interesting.
5.
I had two potential reasons to tread carefully with Cherri, and neither of them was because she had a reputation for crazy. Crazy I could handle, if crazy she actually was. Crazy could mean she was a perfectionist. Fine. So was I. It could mean she was an attention seeker; that she took up too much time in rehearsals. I'd heard that Gil Marchese, our director, ran a pretty tight ship. Good. Rehearsal time management was his problem. Or it might just have been one of those snarky things that younger, less experienced actors say about more established performers, particularly female performers, because their process doesn't conform to one drama school dictum or another.
No. The first reason I needed to watch myself around Cherri was that I was crazy; crazy in lust with her. Some combination of her looks, the sound of her voice, the way she carried herself, the way she had of touching people, even casual acquaintances, and insinuating herself just past the borders of personal space, so that your senses could respond to the rustle of her dress or the scent of her perfume just made me want to jump out of my skin. And this was on maybe two hours' acquaintance. I'd seriously considered making a move on her at that opening night party all those months ago, but I'd held off. Beyond a little backstage gossip, I didn't know a thing about the woman. Maybe she was married, or in a relationship. Maybe I wasn't her type. Or maybe she just wanted to have a few drinks and congratulate some old friends, and didn't need some hormonally addled teenager in a middle-aged man's body sniffing around her all night long.
But now, we were going to be working together, rehearsing sexually charged scenes as husband and wife. Right. All the more reason not to think with the little head. Be professional. Be respectful. Be an ally. Pick up your cues, don't drop your line endings, return energy for energy, and when it comes up, ask before you touch. You need a little relief at the end of the day? That's why the festival gave you a one bedroom apartment, and why God gave you your right hand.
Wow, I had to get a hold of myself! I'd crushed on my fellow performers before this; maybe not as hard, but still... And occasionally something nice had come of it. After the job was over. Well, there was that one time...no! Stop it! Jesus, this woman had me talking to myself like I was some golden retriever puppy who'd just peed on the rug! I took a deep breath. I wasn't a puppy, or a child, or even a teenager. I could do this. Then I thought about the other reason for my initial "uh oh."
6.
After meeting Cherri at that party, I'd mentioned her to a director friend of mine, Diana Calder, who promptly blew a gasket. After I'd removed Diana's fist from the wall of my apartment, she'd told me the following story. It seems that, a year or so before I took the job at Oak Ridge, Diana had been directing a production of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
at a mid-sized theater in Atlanta. Cherri had auditioned for the lead--Merteuil: Glenn Close in the movie--but had been offered a smaller role and the opportunity to take over Merteuil for the final week of the run, when Melissa, the actress cast in the role, had a prior commitment.
It had been a troubled production from the start. The artistic director of the theater, male and married, had disagreed with Diana's ideas about the play, and had questioned her competence in front of the cast. Also, not long after rehearsals began, rumors began to circulate about an affair between the AD and Cherri. And many considered those rumors confirmed when, two weeks before opening, both Diana and Melissa were fired, and Cherri wound up playing Merteuil.
So from Diana, I had heard not only that Cherri was crazy, but that she was...and this is a word you do not want associated with your name in the relatively small world of American regional theater...difficult. And "difficult" was far from the only thing Diana had called her. Now to be fair, given what I knew about Diana, and what I had heard and seen then, and since, of Cherri, the two women were never destined to be soulmates. And at the time plenty of people made a lot of assumptions based on the behavior of an artistic director who was later fired for sexually harassing an underaged actress. Still, whatever the truth of the incident, and whether or not she deserved it, Cherri had, in certain circles at least, acquired a reputation for being selfish, sexually manipulative and devious.
So...pretty good casting for Lady Macbeth.
7.
The truth is that I wasn't worried about Cherri disrupting the
Macbeth
process in the way that she supposedly had
Liaisons
. She was playing Lady M, the female lead, so even if she had "maneuvered" to get herself a bigger part in Atlanta, there was no point in doing the same thing here. Unless she wanted to play Macbeth, and I figured we'd cross that bridge when, and if, we came to it. And while our director, Gil, was also married, his husband was our lighting designer, Magnus. So an affair with Cherri seemed unlikely on a couple of levels. Finally, pretty much everything I'd heard against Cherri boiled down to rumor and innuendo. Thinking about it, I started to feel bad for the woman. I didn't know how far the
Liaisons
story had spread, but I decided I wasn't spreading it any further; a decision which included a healthy dose of self interest. After all, this was my shot. I was playing the man himself, and I wanted the production to be good, which meant I wanted the rehearsal room to be happy, which meant I was not going to prejudge, snark about, or undermine my costar!
And I wasn't going to make a pass at her either!
Yeah. Maybe I should've gotten that last bit tattooed on my forehead.
8.
First rehearsal: a table read. I saw some old friends, Jem Hauptmann, (Duncan and the Porter,) had been Cassius in the Summer
Caesar
. Jem was 6' 3" tall, and 160 lbs soaking wet. You couldn't see the guy if he turned sideways. And there was Kal Masters, Antony in that same
Caesar
, and Charles the wrestler in
As You
. Kal was a gym rat: 6' 5" and 245 lbs of solid muscle. And the man was gorgeous. He was also Macduff, which meant he and I would be dueling to the death with broadswords. Fortunately he was supposed to win, because nobody would believe it the other way around. Sam Cabrerra, the Banquo, who I didn't know, was another mountainous guy. Okay. I was starting to see where Gil was going.
How do you cast Macbeth? Well, sometimes he's the biggest, buff-est badass in the room, because the first thing we hear about him, he's carving his way through a Norwegian army to the Scottish rebel chief, at which point, according to a wounded soldier who saw the whole thing, Macbeth "unseam'd him from the nave to the chops and fixed his head upon our battlements." But sometimes, he's a smaller guy, more of a street fighter, the kind of guy who kicks you in the balls, then cuts your throat when you bend over. The kind of guy, in short (pun once again intended) who might not be so confident of his position in the Scottish succession, and who might have considered murdering his buddy, King Duncan, even before the witches bring up the possibility.
