Page 84 of Back for More
I clench my teeth and refrain from saying anything caustic. “She does pay me a stipend. But I need a lump sum, right away. Can you just say yes or no please? I’ll have to figure something else out if you…”
“Yes. But this is the only time. The whole point of giving you the job was—”
“Thank you!” I run back out. “I have to go—I’ll be back later tonight. But I appreciate it. Thank you!”
* * *
If I can’t be in bed with naked Wes Carver telling me he loves me, there’s really only one other place I’d want to be, and that’s in a big room with a bunch of theater nerds like me.
A Midsummer Night’s Dreamgets produced a lot, all over the world, especially in the summer, but Shakespeare’s comedies are never really given the respect they deserve. Honestly, this one is pretty silly, but I love it. Plays are always broken down to “Who wants what and what do they do about it?” This play doesn’t really explore love in the way thatRomeo & Julietdoes, but it still comes down to: “Who loves who and what do they do about it, but what happens when magical forces beyond their control interfere and everything goes wrong but then in the end everything’s perfect and there’s a play within the play and everyone’s super happy.” I mean why not, right? “The course of true love never did run smooth,” but wouldn’t it be nice if the juices of a magical flower could make people wake up and fall in love with the first person they see? When I was fifteen, I focused more on the running away from her father part of Hermia’s character. Now I see that she’s more about the running awaywith Lysander.
Sunday’s rehearsal is a read-through of the abridged version we’re staging, with the full cast—including the lady who’s playing Titania the queen of the fairies. She is basically the Helen Mirren of Southern Oregon. We also have a nine-year-old Puck and little kids playing the minor fairies, and the sixteen-year-old girl playing Hermia has got her work cut out for her. She’s adorable—literally the opposite of me when I was her age: petite, wide-eyed, curious, sincere, and about as much fun as a root canal. She’s way more fixated on the text than she is on the boy playing Lysander, and I have a page full of notes that I’m dying to give her once the read-through is over.
My assistant director binder is a beautiful thing. I’m working the highlighters. I’ve color-coded my Post-it Notes. I’ve got every act, scene, and character indexed. I’ve got a separate section for technical notes and for Mrs. Naylor’s comments… I might be slightly more excited by this than commercial real estate. But…it’s a hobby. It’s nice to have a hobby.
As soon as Puck is done with his closing monologue, Wally the stage manager turns off the timer on his phone and shows it to us, and Mrs. Naylor, who’s sitting on the other side of me, sticks an orange Post-it Note on my binder. It says:Please talk to Hermia re.everything.
I give her a smile. “On it.”
“Okay, everyone,” Mrs. Naylor says as she stands. “That was wonderful. Let’s take a fifteen-minute snack break and then do some exercises.”
Clarissa, the actress playing Hermia, stays seated at the read-through table, her brow furrowed. She takes a sip of water and stares at her book. I take the empty seat next to her and wait for her to acknowledge me. When she doesn’t, I say, “Hey, Clarissa. That was a good read-through, huh?”
“It’s weird how Hermia just sort of disappears at the end of the play, right?”
I laugh. “Yes, it’s weird. It may have just been an oversight on the playwright’s part, but some people think of it as a delayed punishment for disobeying her father at the beginning of the play.”
She scrunches up her face and looks at me, confused.
“But I’m not saying we should look at it that way!”Shit, I’m already blowing it.“How are you feeling? About your part?”
She blows out a long breath. “I just think that Helena’s a better part. She has better lines. There’s more for her to do.”
“You know, I remember thinking that. I don’t know if Mrs. Naylor mentioned this, but I actually played Hermia when I went here.”
“Oh yeah,” she says, totally unimpressed. “I think there’s a picture of you in the theater lobby.”
“Yeah, there is. Anyway, it would have made more sense for me to play Helena because I was tall, but I wanted to play Hermia because she’s seen as a strong female character because she defies her father and the patriarchal system by running away instead of marrying the man her father promised her to. Or becoming a nun.”
“Yeah,” she says thoughtfully. “I get that. But, I mean, I like my dad. I just don’t understand how she could run off with this guy just because she’s in love with him. Like, what if they fall out of love? Then what’s she going to do? She’d have to either go back to her dad and marry Demetrius or become a nun.”
“That’s a very valid point, but in the world of this play, she is in love with Lysander, and being in love is enough of a reason.”
“But like, the play makes being in love seem so lame because what’s the big deal about falling in love if a fairy can drop magical flower juice in your eyes while you’re sleeping and that makes you fall in love with the first person you see, even if you were in love with someone else before you went to sleep?”
Well, shit. That’s another good point, kid.“But I think that one way of looking at it is that being in love is like having a magical charm put on you. And it makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do. Like give up everything you know for the person you’re in love with.” I mentally high-five myself, because yay Team Love! I would not have had this kind of insight a couple of weeks ago.
“Okay,” she says, straightening up and turning to face me. “But it would be so much more interesting if the fairies put a curse on the people because they were jealous of them. Like they were in love with one of them and couldn’t have them, or they were jealous because they couldn’t fall in love themselves or something. Or like, if Lysander was a hot, brooding vampire and Hermia’s dad is a vampire killer. Then I’d be like, yeah. I get it.”
Dammit, I would totally watch that movie.“Sure. I totally see where you’re coming from, but one of our jobs, as actresses, is to work with the text as it’s written. Not as we wish it would be. And sometimes that’s how it works in life too, right? You gotta work with what you got. Play the hand you’ve been dealt. And you’ve been dealt the lead in a really popular Shakespeare play, so maybe you should be grateful for that and try to understand the character. Is there anything about her that you can relate to? Let’s focus on that.”
She rubs her lips together. “I mean, she’s petite.”
“Yes. Good. Anything else?”
“Honestly? No.”
“So you’ve never felt like running away?”
