MUCH ADO, 23 SKIDDOO

My first Shakespeare. I was in a production of Much Ado About Nothing that ran throughout August at the 78th Street Theatre Lab, New York City. Company: The Manhattan Folding Chair Classical Theatre. I played Don John and Verges.

Most of the actors doubled up, or even tripled up. When there are eight actors and about sixteen roles, it becomes imperative. Some of the actors can't double because they have scenes with just about everybody else.

I'm still pretty new to all this. I first acted with the company in the autumn of 2004, in a production of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. It was the first time I'd acted in anything whatever since about 1987, when I was in a production of Lysistrata at Wells College. I'm a man, but Lysistrata is such a male/female play that the director, Betsey Drorbaugh, decided to import male actors for it, and her stage manager, Cynthia Breneman, was a friend of mine, and she suggested I audition, and I got the role of Kinesias. It was great fun. And I don't quite know why but that was it, for about 16 years.

Marcus Geduld, the director of the Folding Chair Theatre, has been a friend of mine since high school back in Bloomington, Indiana. We both happen to live and work in New York now. We fortuitously got back in touch a few years ago, and I've acted in his productions of Oresteia, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and now Much Ado. I stage-directed for him and David Jaffe last winter on "Night," a double bill of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Harold Pinter's "A Kind Of Alaska." That was unusually contemporary of us.

I seem to be a more or less permanent member of the company, now. I suppose I've become more confident as an actor. I still have these crises of confidence now and again -- I had one the first weekend of Much Ado, because the audiences were barely reacting at all, to anything, and I kept thinking, "I'm crap, aren't I? I'm crap." But the following weekend we got more sympathetic and appreciative audiences, including one which contained old family friends from Bloomington. My sister says they were raving about the show after she got back to town, and what a good actor I was, which is heartening, but I always remember Bill Goldman's remarks, in Adventures In the Screen Trade, about hot bodies.

Early in his Hollywood days, Goldman heard some people talking about how good the movie was that they were making and what a positive reaction the daily rushes had had, and this one guy said, "All that's good, but it doesn't mean a thing until you get hot bodies out there." When Goldman asked him to explain this, the man said "Hot bodies are people who don't know you and don't care whether you're good or not. Hot bodies are people who don't know your mother." So my friends, lovely though they are, do not count as hot bodies.

Now there were audience members who didn't know me (or my mother) and who told us we'd done an excellent job -- with varying degrees of enthusiasm. So we're good, but not good enough to take the town by storm yet. We'll have to work harder.

Though I still get stage fright, I find it much more manageable now. I've done a few of these shows, and by this time I know that if I just listen to my director, run my lines on a daily basis, run over the blocking in my head, keep my mind on what I'm doing when I'm out there, take care of my own part, as everyone else is doing, then everything else will take care of itself. Marcus's focus is on storytelling, he pays close attention to pacing, and his shows are usually like a well-oiled machine by the time they hit the boards, provided the actors don't take a whole lot of rehearsal time off, which I'm afraid many of us did. But we had things more or less notched in by the end of the first weekend.

A great bunch of people. I'll miss working with them, and I hope we get to work together again. It was great fun acting with Angus Hepburn again; he played Leonato, and last summer he was Professor Serebryakov in Vanya. And it was also great fun acting with Marcus again; he's the director and he doesn't usually act.

The audiences were really variable, as I indicated before. Sometimes they'd sit there like stones, and other times they'd laugh a lot, and gasp at the horror of the wedding scene and of my Limitless Evil (HA ha ha ha ha HA HA HAAAAH ha ha ha ha). A lot of people I knew came to see it. Everyone was pleasantly complimentary. I invited my old Shakespeare teacher, Professor Pinciss, but he didn't turn up. August is a month when a lot of people are on vacation. Marcus says he intends to never do a show in August again; we had some sizeable audiences, but never came close to filling the place. Oh, well.

My first Shakespeare! Joy unconfined! We'll probably do Ibsen or something next. Or Chekhov again.

I've been focusing on the play lately, and when I've been reading at all it's mostly been re-reading: the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, Lies by Al Franken, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books. But I have returned lately to a thing I meant to read some months back: Sex And Society In Shakespeare's Age: Simon Forman the Astrologer, by A. L. Rowse. It is research on Shakespeareana, because I'm interested, but also research for a fantasy novel I'm writing, because this Simon Forman -- a very interesting chap -- practiced magic. There are practitioners of magic in my story, and instead of cribbing from other fantasy writers, I thought I'd do what better writers have done before me -- go back and crib right from the source -- find out as much as I could about the actual methodologies of alchemists, astrologers, necromancers, and the like. I doubt that they genuinely defied the laws of physics, though I shall try to retain an open mind, but were mysterious and obliquely manipulative, and I suspect that such results as they might have produced would be capable of more than one interpretation. But what did they, in fact, actually do? With what tools and preparations? With regard to the alchemists, sadly, I have only been able to find books on their somewhat numbing philosophy; no alchemical lab manuals.

There's nothing too concrete in the Forman either yet, but I have to say it's a hell of a good read. If it was female, and moved, he would have sex with it, though he wrote it in his diary, for some reason, as "halek." If he didn't get off with the woman, he would write "non halek." He and Shakespeare had the same landlady, though apparently not at the same time. He went to see Shakespeare's plays at the Globe, and left written accounts of four of them. What I'd really like is to read his case books and papers, which have apparently never been brought out in their entirety, and are at the Bodleian. This book contains some nice little nuggets though:

"January, 1597: I dreamt that I was with the Queen, and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready. She and I walked up and down through lanes and closes, talking and reasoning. At last we came over a great close where were many other people, and there were two men at hard words. One of them was a weaver, a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily unto her, and at last did take her and kiss her. So I took her by the arm and did put her away; and told her the fellow was frantic. So we went from him and I led her by the arm still, and then we went through a dirty lane. She had a long white smock very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind. I took her coat and did carry it up a good way, and then it hung too low before. I told her she should do me a favour to let me wait on her, and she said I should. Then said I, 'I mean to wait upon you and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coat out of the dirt.' And so we talked merrily; then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. When we were alone, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me."

Forman is a very rare Elizabethan in that he actually left us an autobiography. But how many Elizabethans wrote down their dreams? Especially a dream like that?

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I wanna tell her that I love her a lot,
But I gotta get a bellyfull o' wine;
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl,
Someday I'm gonna make 'er mine, oh yeah,
Someday I'm gonna make 'er mine.
-- Paul McCartney