1.
"So how would you stage it?"
Alexis Bishop looked over small wire-rimmed glasses at me. Her dark hair long and loose around her face, her large brown eyes serious, not to say challenging, and her full lips slightly quirked to one side in a half-smile, like she wasn't sure she was going to like any answer I came up with.
She was sitting in the corner of a blue denim couch in the living room of a small two-bedroom up in Washington Heights. She wore skinny jeans and a long loose sweater over an olive green t-shirt with a peace symbol across her chest. Her feet were bare, and her toes were painted the same deep red as her lips. The only other person in the apartment was snoring gently on the couch next to Alexis, with her feet in her roommate's lap; Cassie Bradshaw: a director friend of mine, who'd invited me to over to read a play.
The play in question,
The Changeling
, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley--younger contemporaries of Shakespeare--concerns a beautiful young noblewoman, Beatrice-Joanna (read by Alexis) betrothed to one man, but in love with another, who hires her deformed servant De Flores (read by me) to murder her fiancee so that she'll be free to marry the object of her affections. De Flores commits the murder, but demands Beatrice's virginity as payment for the crime. At the end of Act III, De Flores threatens Beatrice with exposure, and she, having threatened, cajoled, bribed and begged him to relent, finally submits to his demands. Of course nothing happens on stage, or nothing
need
happen on stage. What potentially
could
happen was one of the questions we had been discussing; first the whole cast, then--as people started to head home--a group of five of us, then Alexis and Cassie and I, and now...
"So...how would you stage it?" Alexis repeated.
And wasn't that a loaded question?
2.
I didn't know Alexis all that well. Cassie and I had been friends ever since we'd worked together on a mediocre production of
Romeo and Juliet
for a now-defunct company called--God help us--Eagle's Claw Repertory of the Classics. She'd stage managed, and I'd played the Prince and Peter. Six weekends in an unheated church basement in Alphabet City; nobody came...well, the director's mother did, five or six times, but nobody else.
But Cassie and I had become pals, and so one night she drags me to her roommate's improv show. Improv: I'll try not to get started...but seriously, improv for me...it's like the violin, or a legit soprano voice: it can't just be good; it's got to be off-the-charts holy-cow fuck-your-hamster a-fucking-mazing. If it's not I tend to spend most of my time wondering why I'm not doing something more productive, like stabbing myself in the leg with a fork.
So we're watching this "comedy" whatever for about ten minutes, and I'm wondering if any of the twelve people enduring this shit show with me happens to be carrying a fork, when this mad scientist gets in on the action. He's a tiny little guy in an Einstein wig and mustache, enormous black horn-rimmed spectacles and a filthy lab coat, and he's talking in this impossibly thick Euro-trash accent, and he's...good. He's not...I don't know, name your favorite stand up or sketch guy or gal, but he's better than anything else up there, and then there's some suggestion from the audience about erectile dysfunction, and this guy's come up with a cure that he's trying to test on gorillas and sporadic hilarity ensues.
After the show, we're hanging out in the lobby, and here comes the roommate: Alexis, maybe 5' 4" with a round face, the long dark curly hair gathered at the back in a scrunchie, the big eyes, and the wide mouth. She's wearing a collared blouse, denim skirt, boots and a bomber jacket, and she's...very attractive without being exactly pretty or...striking, or I don't know. It's hard to describe why she's so appealing but she is. She's also sexy. Again, I couldn't say exactly why. Her body--what I could see of it under the bomber jacket--looks trim, maybe even a little skinny, but her face, the way she moves...she's got energy, confidence, some...little something extra which makes it hard for me to stop looking at her, even standing next to Cassie, who is--probably by most lights--much prettier.
Cassie introduces us, and we shake hands. "So," she's got that half-smile which I would eventually come to recognize as her 'considering' expression, "how'd you like it?"
"It was good," for some reason, I felt compelled to be honest rather than effusive. "Tell you the truth, I don't see a whole lot of improv. And, you know..." I didn't want to be too honest, "you're pretty dependent on what the audience gives you, and I know there weren't very many of us...I really liked the mad scientist guy, but..."
"Och, zenk zhoo veddy mooch!"
"Wait a minute, that was you? Holy sh...I mean I did NOT recognize you at all. You were hysterical!"
Alexis laughed. "You seriously didn't know? I'll take that as a compliment!"
"You should. You were...I'm sorry, look, no reflection on your colleagues..."
She raises an eyebrow.
"Ok, maybe a little reflection on your colleagues," I say, lowering my voice, "but you really were far and away the best thing up there."
Her response surprises me. "Yeah," she sighs, "I probably was, tonight anyway. Tony--he's the guy who was doing the kind of redneck preacher guy--was kind of off his game. He'd been up for a TV thing and found out he didn't get it something like an hour before we went on...Anyway, he's usually pretty great. Wait a minute..." She was looking directly into my eyes. "Where do I know you from?"
I shrug: "Did you see that
R and J
down on F?"
Her face clears: "That's it. You're Saul. Cassie talks a lot about you. You were the servant, right? The one who couldn't read?"
I nod, "Yup," and pull a rueful face.
"Oh yeah," she agrees with my expression, "most of that was ba-ad, but you were really funny--production could have used more of you--and was it the Benvolio who was also pretty good?"
"You've got a good memory for crap Shakespeare."
"I played Lady Cap in college; my only ever Shakespeare, so..."
3.
We'd run into each other a few times since then, mostly in bars, hanging with Cassie or one or two other mutual friends. I'd always enjoyed talking to her, and I'd always found her...compelling, but we'd never done anything together, either socially or professionally, until that night, when we'd read
The Changeling
as part of Cassie's ongoing search for a showcase to direct on the cheap.
"So...how would you stage it?"
I looked at her, registered that we were for all intents and purposes alone. "You're talking about the end of Three, right?
"Yeah. It's the natural act break; last thing the people see before intermission. How would you do it?"
"You don't really have to do that much. I mean, what're the last lines?" I reached over for a xeroxed copy of the script which somebody had left on the table, flipped through to the scene in question. "Right, so De Flores says..."
"You say."
"What?" The interruption had startled me.
"Sorry," she had a kind of rueful smile on her face. "I had this teacher who always insisted that we refer to ourselves as our characters in rehearsal. She'd say calling a character 'her,' or 'my guy,' or whatever was a cop-out because it distanced you, made you safe...anyway, so you say what?"
"All right..." was this a rehearsal? "I say...well actually, Beatrice--sorry--you say: 'Was my creation in the womb so curs'd / It must engender with a viper first?' Which is not very nice..." I looked over at Alexis. She wasn't smiling. Okay. "Then I say: 'Come, rise, and shroud your blushes in my bosom;' then a stage direction: 'Raises her.' right...because you'd knelt to plead with me a few lines before, then 'Silence is one of pleasure's best receipts; / Thy peace is wrought forever in this yielding. / Las, how the turtle pants!' That sounds like you're trembling; not a surprise...then: 'Thou'lt love anon / What thou so fear'st and faint'st to venture on.' Then we've got an Exeunt, so the playwright--or playwrights--have them embrace and leave the stage."
"So," no impatience in her voice, even though this was her third time asking, "if you were directing, is that what you'd do?"
I looked at her, mirrored her half-smile. "Probably not."
She still looked thoughtful: "Yeah, me neither."
4.
"It's really a rape, isn't it?"
A few minutes earlier, Cassie had rolled over enough to half-wake herself up. She got up woozily, apologized, headed off into one of the bedrooms. I couldn't swear she'd been entirely conscious for any of it.
After the door shut behind Cassie, Alexis returned to my question: "It sure starts as one."
"Meaning...?"
"Well, I'm a virgin, right? I mean, I've just offered you everything I have if you'll leave me...um, intact." She giggled at her choice of words. "Are you, by the way?"
"Am I what?"
"A virgin."
"Am I a...? Oh, sorry, you mean is..." Alexis opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, I remembered her teacher's dictates. "Oh, right, sorry...um, am I a...? No, I don't think so. I mean I'm considerably older than you, right. I'm talking like I am, and I've been a soldier...I think..." Then an idea struck me. "I'm deformed, right?"
She said: "I was wondering about that. How are you deformed, or maybe that should be how deformed are you?"
"I looked up some production photos when Cassie first sent me the script. Some guys do a physical deformity like a hunched back or a clubbed foot or something, but a lot of them just kind of...fuck up the face, you know, so that your line, when you're trying to charm me into doing the murder, about making an ointment for my face makes sense. So...big port wine stains, scarring, like that. One African American...or no, this guy was at the National, so Afro-British?...actor had what looked like tribal scars across his cheeks, but..."
"Ok," she interrupted, "so you're physically off-putting somehow, but maybe not actually disabled in any way, which makes sense given how many people you run around murdering for me. What about it?"
