Still, Icarus’s Mother has good bits, and Saskia got to play Pat. She and the play’s four other characters—Bill, Howard, Jill, and Frank—are in a park overlooking an ocean beach, waiting for fireworks to begin. Bill and Howard, who seem to be the boyfriends of Jill and Pat respectively, continually mock the women in a revolting conspiratorial bromantic way, and Howard occasionally manhandles Pat. Meanwhile, there’s a jet circling in the sky, making everyone nervous. Each character at some point gets a monologue that indulges a fantasy, or attempts to delude the other characters (the Power of Story!), and these monologues gradually spin off into flights of crazed weirdness, à la Saint Sam the Badass in the wilderness dining on locusts and wild honey. Self-loving Howard gets the longest one, while his cowed girlfriend Pat gets the shortest, but hers is the best. She imagines an evening in which all the fireworks have failed, the crowd has gone home disappointed, the fireworks company departed in shame, while she alone remains behind in the darkness. Examining the launchers, she discovers there’s one firework left and lights it. It rockets skyward and explodes in glorious light and color, and she is the only one who gets to see it.
They performed the play five times and then the season was over. Saskia was surprised at how bereft she felt. It was her first experience of the bond one can form with fellow actors when you work together as a company, reveling in the good plays and struggling against the bad, sometimes loving each other, sometimes hating. Like a family, yes! Ohmygod, trust falls on stage, yes! To Saskia, the coming summer looked desolate. But it turned out that four of the five actors in Icarus’s Mother were going to be in town for the July 4 holiday, so Saskia, the dewy-eyed newbie, proposed that they mount a repeat performance somewhere outside, timing it so that the play’s fireworks would coincide with Ithaca’s real fireworks (which actually were always on July 2, when the city could get a discounted rate). The fifth actor was Jason, who played Howard, and though he was, one had to admit sub rosa, even if one loved him like family, a bit of a dick, he agreed to come up from New York City just for the one performance, for which hugs and kisses and trust falls forever. Allie, who played Jill, suggested they do it at Sunset Park, a quarter acre of lawn owned by the village of Cayuga Heights with a view over Ithaca and the lake. Judging from a certain previous experience she never fully explained, Allie doubted they could get a permit from the village police, and they didn’t want to put up with the hassle anyway (they would probably be told they needed two porta-johns, a security guard, and a medic with a defibrillator), so Allie and Sean (who played Frank) spread the word rave-style, the details of which Saskia was already too old to understand. Something involving cell phones.
Whatever it was they did, about forty people had shown up by 8:45 p.m. on the day, just as the sun was setting. The city fireworks reliably started within a few minutes of 9:45, and the play took forty minutes to perform, so they crossed their fingers and began at 9:10. It was as beautiful an evening as they could have hoped for, clear and unseasonably cool, with three stage-managed clouds above the western ridge turning, as they spoke the first lines, from rose to maroon. The location was perfect. Saskia wondered if the other actors, like her, only gradually realized how perfect it was. All the lines in the play that referred to the setting fit the actual setting. People frequently picnicked in Sunset Park, so their props—blanket and empty plates, tipped-over wine glasses, disarranged hamper—without changing a molecule, became real. The actors found themselves spontaneously adjusting the blocking. When Frank enthused about the beach and urged everyone to go down there, Sean moved to the lip of the slope, and gestured toward the lake. When Bill referred to the moon, Hayden pointed upward and lo, there she was in the southeast, a good trouper come up specially from New York City along with Jason to help out. For Pat’s monologue, Saskia lay down on the blanket, looked at the sky, and wished her bullying boyfriend would leave her alone. The only way she knew to protect herself was to retreat into childishness, to make her powerlessness more pitiable. “If none of them work except one, it will be worth it,” she said. “I’ll wait all night on my back.” Did the others realize that
