Could Saskia act? Impossible to know. But something happened to her in that play. At its midpoint, Thaisa gives birth to Marina on a ship at sea during a storm and, seeming to have died, is tossed overboard in a sealed casket. This washes up in Ephesus, near the home of a doctor named Cerimon, whose servants discover it, carry it into his house, pop the lid, and marvel at the beautiful corpse. Recognizing all the signs of a Shakespearean resurrection scene, Cerimon calls for his medicines, bids the viol play, and lo! Thaisa wakens and speaks. If you’re playing Thaisa and you’re a bad actor, it’s an easy scene, because you’ve only got thirteen words. If you have hopes of someday being a good actor, it’s terrifying—you’ve got only thirteen words in which to blaze forth a miracle, make the audience gasp, swoon, and then wake, as you, reborn.
Rehearsals of the scene had focused on practical issues. Since she had to be in the casket when they carried it in, much time was devoted to figuring out how to bang her around less. Also, if the platform they put her on was too low, Cerimon had to crouch, which didn’t look solemn, but if it was too high, it called to mind an operating table, thus Frankenstein. Should they position the casket so that the audience could see her while she was still lying in it? Should Cerimon touch her in some way, as part of the wakening process? As a result, the only time they played the scene straight through was at the dress rehearsal.
On opening night, twenty-five indulgent souls showed up and the imaginary curtain rose. Thaisa’s first scene is undramatic and kind of dumb—a pageant of knights crosses the stage, each bearing a shield that Thaisa describes at length to her father, King Simonides. The king was being played by one of the talentless duffers, whom Saskia wanted to poleax. The audience was a lump of clay and all her lines seemed inert and abject. Then she had her brief bit with Pericles in which he wins a tournament and dances with her and steals her heart. Then there’s the sea-storm, Thaisa dies without a word, and lies on stage like an obedient dead woman while Pericles eloquently mourns her. After that, it’s into the old box with her and over the side, heave-ho. (Which would make her jetsam, rather than flotsam.)
So—although this was Saskia’s largest role to date, she was beginning to realize, as it flew by in performance, that there wasn’t much to it. Well, of course, that’s why they gave it to her. Virtually all she had left for the night were those thirteen words. She was in tears in the half-gutted, junk-filled side room they called “backstage.” But she had only ninety seconds between getting carted off on a bier and carted back in in a box, so she blew her nose and thumbed her eyes, while First Servant patted her shoulder and said, “Hey, hey,” but wasn’t experienced enough to add, “You’re doing great!” She threw on the Salvation Army moth-eaten magnificent “cloth of state” and lay down. First and Second Servant put in the bags of dried leaves that were the spices, the gilded plastic crap that was the treasure, then dropped the lid onto the Velcro strips and lifted her. She was swayed and bumped up the stairs.
“So; lift there!” she heard through the plywood. (That would be First Servant.)
“What’s that?” (Cerimon.)
“Sir, even now did the sea toss up upon our shore this chest. ’Tis of some wrack.”
“Set’t down, let’s look upon’t.”
With a final pitch and a yaw she came to rest. She closed her eyes.
“How close ’tis caulked and bitumed! Did the sea cast it up?”
“I never saw so huge a billow, sir, as tossed it upon shore.”
“Wrench it open: soft! It smells most sweetly in my sense.”
“A delicate odor.”
“As ever hit my nostril. So; up with it!” The lid was removed. “O you most potent gods! What’s here, a corpse!”
The audience couldn’t see her (Blocking Decision #2), but she kept her eyes closed so as not to distract the players. (If she’d been an old hand during a long run, especially if British—those blokes play rough—she’d have crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue just as Cerimon bent over her.) Maybe her disappointment in her performance so far made it easier for her to believe that she was someplace far away from upstate New York, so why not on Ephesus’s shore? She had been an actor on a troupe ship, and they’d hanged her for incompetence. But the currents had been merciful, directing her shoreward, and a handsome young serving lad (long naked tanned torso, loincloth, hint of pubic hair peeking out, hello!) pulled her casket out of the surge. She was being given a second chance.
Cerimon had lifted her right hand out of the box, and was massaging it (Blocking Decision #5). “Death may usurp on nature many hours, and yet the fire of life kindle again the o’erpressed spirits.”
Charles was one of the former Equity actors, having trod the boards in minor roles in New York and a couple of major ones in Philadelphia. When he was sixty, he’d moved to Ithaca with his partner—now husband, yay!—to enjoy a quiet life gardening and occasionally directing plays in the summer. He
