It was good to have the coach along as they walked across the dark campus to Bradley Hall.
“Mr. McPhee?” asked Thomas. “Why does somebody like Angus do what he did?”
They walked in silence for a time, and Thomas thought that Coach McPhee was not going to answer.
“It’s a passion,” said Coach McPhee. “It brings us into marriages and splits us into divorces. Sometimes it goes bad. It’s a tricky force, Thomas. Right now in your life it would be better for you to stick to basketball and stay away from the ladies.”
He sounded just like Dad. You asked him a question about somebody else, and he gives you a lecture about yourself. It was always sensible advice, impossible to follow.
SCENE 8
They were having a terrible time killing off Desdemona.
It was Monday afternoon, and Benjamin Warden watched from the back of the auditorium. For such a brief and famous piece of stage business, the smothering scene presented an astonishing set of complications.
The blocking would not work. If Cynthia as Desdemona lay in bed, then her lines were inaudible to the audience, and nobody could see the anguish on her face. If she sat up in bed, then the Lipscomb boy as Othello had to push her down before he could smother her with the pillow, and the effect was more comic than horrifying. If she got out of the bed to have her final speech with Othello elsewhere in the bedroom, then the imagery of the scene disintegrated.
“Shakespeare wanted it to occur in bed,” said Dan Farnham. “He wanted to show an act of violence between a man and a woman in a bed. The parallels between Desdemona’s death and the sex act are obvious and disturbing. The only thing is, I don’t see how the hell it’s been blocked. People have been doing it for 350 years, and I can’t figure how to set it up.”
Warden was there to help and could offer none. Stagecraft was a mystery to him; what looked perfectly natural up close was either invisible or ridiculous from the viewpoint of the audience.
So far Farnham had been remarkably patient with the logistical problems. Warden was worried more about Cynthia, who seemed increasingly fatigued and desperate with each run-through. She really wants it to work, he thought. But she is exhausted.
Patrick McPhee and Thomas Boatwright entered the auditorium from the lobby. Farnham explained to McPhee why the blocking was forcing them to run behind with rehearsal.
The coach understood the problem immediately. “It’s like putting in an offense in basketball,” he said. “The one that works one season with one team just isn’t right for another.”
“You sound terrible,” said Farnham. “Are you getting a cold?”
“Lost my whistle,” said McPhee. “Too much yelling at these renegades.” He gave Thomas Boatwright a soft slap on the head.
The actors stood on the stage waiting for Farnham to get back to them. They were nearly motionless in a series of poses that the director might have carefully arranged to look casual. Cynthia sat Indian style on the bed, which had just been finished that afternoon and supported an old mattress from Stringfellow Hall. Greg Lipscomb leaned against the bed with his arms folded across his chest. Ginny Kaufman, wife of the dean and cast as Emilia and understudy to Desdemona, sat in a folded chair at the edge of the stage and read. She had graying hair which she wore in bangs, and she used large round tortoiseshell glasses to read. Nathan Somerville had on a white tee shirt and lounged back on the balls of his hands as he sat on the stage itself next to her chair. Thomas Boatwright sat in the front row of the auditorium. He wasn’t in this scene; his character was dead by now.
“Any suggestions, Pat?” asked Farnham.
McPhee asked why they had given up on kneeling. “We’ve never done it with Desdemona kneeling,” said Farnham.
“Maybe that was Maggie Smith in Olivier’s version,” said McPhee. “I’ve seen somebody do it somewhere.”
Farnham said Olivier’s was good blocking to steal.
“Why not? I steal basketball plays all the time.”
Cynthia asked McPhee to show her how.
He still wore his gray sweatsuit and basketball shoes from practice and vaulted easily up onto the stage. “Desdemona kneels at the edge of the bed. Othello faces her. She holds out her arms as if to embrace him. He grabs her by the throat and chokes her. Then he forces her down onto the bed, all the time climbing onto the bed himself, and finishes her off by smothering her with a pillow.”
They tried it.
“That feels right,” said Cynthia.
“No problem for me,” said Greg.
“It feels exactly right,” said Cynthia again. “I’ve tried it this way on my own. It’s what Desdemona would do. I should have thought of it myself.”
“The basketball coach sets us back on schedule,” said Farnham. “Of course, the smothering isn’t going to be enough. We want Othello to stab her, too. Get the knife, Greg.”
Greg left the bed and walked over to the props table offstage.
“I can’t find it,” he said.
Farnham groaned, not angrily. “Who has the knife?” he asked the group. Then, calling up to the light booth, “Landon? You got the knife?”
Landon replied that he did not.
Thomas reached into the right front pocket of his jeans and pulled out his red Swiss Army knife. He held it up from his seat.
“You can borrow this if you want,” he said.
Farnham waved it away. “We need something more authentic,” he said, and he walked over to join Greg at the props table. He found the dagger stuck to the taped handle of a fencing blade.
“Put this back in its spot when you finish,” he said to Greg. The dagger was about eight inches long and ended in a thin, tapering point. From Warden’s seat in the auditorium, it looked like a dangerous crucifix. Greg Lipscomb was wearing large floppy boots—part of his costume—and he stored the knife in the right-hand one.
“Not there,” said Farnham.
