The Rehearsal

“You want psychobabble?”

“No.”

“Kid, you got good blood and a fine pair of shoes.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Did I tell you about my client who set herself on fire?”

“I heard you telling Roger.”

“Life advice,” said Stanley’s father, holding up his glass for a toast. “Right. I’ve got something good and nasty. Stanley, to mark your rite of passage I am going to tell you a secret.”

They touched glasses and sipped.

“Okay,” said Stanley reluctantly.

His father stroked his lapel with his fingertips, his glass poised and careless in his other hand. He looked rich and camp and deadly. “I am going to tell you how to make a million dollars,” he said.

Stanley had the hot frustrated feeling again, but all he said was Okay. He even smiled.

His father said, “Okay. I want you to think of your time at high school. Five years, right? During those five years, same as during anyone’s five years at any high school, there was one kid in your year who died. Yes?”

“I guess so.”

“Maybe he drove too fast, drank too much, played with guns, whatever—there is always one kid who dies. Did you know, Stanley,” he said, “that you can take out life insurance on a person without them knowing?”

Stanley just looked at him.

“And the premiums on school kids,” his father continued, “are really, really low. Provided they don’t have any reasons to think these kids are going to die. You can take out a million-dollar life insurance policy on a kid for something like two hundred a year.”

“Dad,” said Stanley disbelievingly.

“All you’d need to do is pick it. All you’d need to do is to get in there and do some research and get some information that would give you the edge.”

“Dad,” Stanley said again.

His father put his hands up like an innocent man, and laughed.

“Hey, I’m giving you gold here,” he said. “Think of your kid. The one who died at your school. Could you have picked it beforehand? If you could have predicted it, then you could have got in there and made something good of it. Here’s your life advice, Stanley: that is how people get rich. That’s the only secret. They see things are going to happen before they happen, and they pounce.”

Stanley’s father was smiling his therapy smile.

“I couldn’t have picked it,” Stanley said at last. “The boy at my school. He was hit on his skateboard coming home from the shop. Out of all of them, I’d never have picked him.”

“Shame,” his father said. He didn’t say anything further. He toyed with his fork and reached for his wine and watched Stanley over the frail rim of the glass as he drank.

Stanley fingered the drama school brochure unhappily. He was hot and uncomfortable in his suit jacket, like a chicken trussed up to roast. “What about me?” he said. “Can you see what’s going to happen before it happens?”

His father leaned forward and stabbed the tablecloth with a bony white finger.

“I can see,” he said, “you are going to have a great year. You’re going to be great.”

October

“Acting is not a form of imitation,” the Head of Improvisation said briskly, after the hopefuls had assembled in a ragged cross-legged ellipsis on the rehearsal-room floor. Near the door the Head of Acting was hovering with his clipboard, watching with a studied indifference and pinching his pen in his fingers as he measured the worth and quality of each student against the next.

The Head of Improvisation said, “Acting is not about making a copy of something that already exists. The proscenium arch is not a window. The stage is not a little three-walled room where life goes on as normal. Theater is a concentrate of life as normal. Theater is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behavior that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.”

The Head of Improvisation plucked a tennis ball from the canvas bag at her side and tossed it across the group at one of the hopefuls. The boy caught the ball in the heels of both hands. “Don’t look at the Head of Acting,” the Head of Improvisation said. “Pretend he isn’t there. Look at me.”

She held her palms open and the boy tossed the ball sheepishly back. The Head of Acting made a savage little note on his clipboard with his pen.

“Let’s think about the ancient world for a second,” the Head of Improvisation said, shifting to tuck her legs underneath herself. “In the ancient world a statue of Apollo or Aphrodite did not exist to trick people into thinking that the statue really was the god, or even that the statue really was a true likeness of the god. The function of the statue was simply a site of access. The statue existed so people could approach or experience the god at that site. Yes? Is everyone with me?”

She tossed a tennis ball to another hopeful, who flinched but managed to catch it and lob it carefully back. The Head of Improvisation caught it and held it in both hands for a moment, pushing thoughtfully at the balding fur, indenting the hard rubber of the ball and letting it snap back against her hand.

“So this statue is definitely not the real thing,” she continued. “The statue is not Apollo himself—anybody would agree with that, right? And it’s not a facsimile of the real thing either. It’s not a likeness of Apollo, a clue to what Apollo might actually look like, or what clothes he might actually wear. It’s neither of those things. The statue is only a site which makes worship possible. It is a site which makes it unnecessary to seek that particular connection elsewhere. That’s all. Why is what I’m saying important?”

She tossed the tennis ball at a girl across the group.

“Is it because that’s what theater is?” the girl said quickly, catching the ball neatly with her fingertips and pausing to answer the question before lobbing it back. “Theater isn’t real life, and it isn’t a perfect copy of real life. It’s just a point of access.”

“Yes,” the Head of Improvisation said, catching the ball and slamming it decisively into the palm of her other hand.

The girl smiled quickly and darted a look at the Head of Acting to see if he had seen her triumph. He wasn’t watching.

The Head of Improvisation said, “The stage is not real life, and the stage is not a copy of real life. Just like the statue, the stage is only a place where things are made present. Things that would not ordinarily happen are made to happen on stage. The stage is a site at which people can access things that would otherwise not be available to them. The stage is a place where we can witness things in such a way that it becomes unnecessary for us to feel or perform these things ourselves. What am I talking about here?”

The question was too specific, and the hopefuls frowned at her in silence and pursed their lips to show they didn’t know. The Head of Improvisation was almost quivering. She scanned their faces quickly but without disappointment, already pursed and half-smiling as if the answer was waiting to bubble up and out of her in a kind of overflow of joy.

“Catharsis,” she said at last, crowing out the word. “Catharsis is what I am talking about. Catharsis is a word that all of you should know. Catharsis is the thing that makes your job worthwhile.”

October

In the foyer there were two porcelain masks rising like glassy conspirators out of a porcelain basin filled with water. Comedy was turned away, staring with gleeful dead eyes down the corridor past the secretary’s office and the trophy cabinet and the loos. Tragedy craned upward. The tragic mask was supported by two brass pipes that ran up out of the water behind the jaw and the cheekbone and into the porcelain under-rim of each staring tragic eye. When the fountain was turned on, these pipes sucked the water up out of the basin and forced the