Duke and Pallace had known each other a week but they were both from Michigan.
The small New Hampshire town where I’d grown up was as white as Grover’s Corners. In my class at school we only had Aly, who came in the ninth grade. We treated her the way we might have treated an alpaca, which is to say with fascination and solicitude but no actual friendship, so while I could give a comprehensive description of her hair, clothes, and patterns of speech (she said pop instead of soda) I had no idea why her family had moved there or where they had come from or why they had left abruptly in the middle of our junior year, though that last one probably wasn’t such a mystery. The University of New Hampshire was only slightly better than our high school, and Hollywood was only slightly worse. The Black makeup artist at my first screen test turned out to be an anomaly. Hollywood had nothing on New Hampshire when it came to the intermingling of the races.
So I followed the dancer in the snappy Boy Scout shirt towards the building, running ahead to open the door because the way she and Duke were talking they would have walked straight into it. I was going to have a boyfriend who crackled like a downed power line and a girlfriend who was Black. I was even more of an adult than I could have imagined.
It turned out the summer stock in the middle--of--nowhere, Michigan, beat both the University of New Hampshire and a Hollywood backlot by a mile when it came to diversity. A low bar but still, Tom Lake won. As all of us hustled off to our various rehearsals, we nearly resembled an American city. Most of the actors came from Chicago and Detroit, a few had come from as far away as D.C. and Pittsburgh. The cattle--call auditions for summer stock—-the auditions I had been spared—-drew from conservatories and regional theater companies. Theater people were always looking for work, and while they might not have chosen to build a life in Tom Lake, they were happy to get out of the city for the summer. Gene, the assistant director of Our Town, was Black. Gene checked to see if we had our scripts. Did anybody need a script? Auden, one of the other understudies, was Black as well. He was also a dancer, and he and Pallace started dancing at the far corner of the stage, executing an intricate, old--fashioned swing without benefit of music. They looked only at each other and didn’t seem to care that we were watching. Whether they were rehearsing for something that wasn’t Cabaret (which I was pretty sure didn’t include swing dancing) or killing time because Uncle Wallace had yet to arrive, I couldn’t say.
I did know that diving into Our Town without a Stage Manager on the first day of rehearsal would be a trick, and after waiting for twenty minutes (in which we all finally just sat on the floor and watched Pallace and her friend dance, hypnotized by the regular squeak of their tennis shoes), Nelson dispatched Gene the A.D. to find out what the hell was going on.
“He might have misread the schedule,” Duke offered, even though the top of the schedule said REHEARSALS BEGIN PROMPTLY AT 9:00 A.M. in a typeface large enough to be scolding.
The collective desire of every person in that theater was for the play to succeed. Emily had skipped out. Emily had been replaced. New day, let’s get to work. The A.D. returned, too quickly I thought, and the director met him in the aisle for a brief consult. The director, Nelson, already looked tired.
“Okay, people,” he said, clapping twice even though he had our full attention. Pallace and her partner let go of one another’s hands. “We’re going to get started. Albert will be here momentarily. Let’s go ahead with the understudy. I want a full day. Lee?”
A man in a light--blue golf shirt raised a tentative hand.
“Do you need a script?” Gene asked.
We were all looking at him. “I—-” he said, then stopped and held up his script.
“That’s good,” Nelson said.
“I don’t know the part yet,” Lee said.
“It’s early. You’ll be fine. Hopefully you’re just going to read for a few minutes. Nothing gets an actor out of bed like the knowledge that the understudy is reading his part.”
Everyone laughed politely except the man in the golf shirt. We were meant to sit in the row of chairs on either side of the stage whenever we weren’t in the scene. We went to sit in them now, leaving Lee out there alone. When the moment came for one of us to talk at the kitchen table or the drugstore soda fountain or in the cemetery at the end, we were to carry our chairs across the empty stage and put them in places marked with gaffer tape on the floor, but for now everyone was sitting on either side, waiting. When we had taken our places, Nelson told the understudy to begin.
Lee was in his sixties, his hair gray, his glasses heavy. He had the sunburnt look of a man who took his golf shirts seriously. When the play opens, the Stage Manager is alone. “This is a play called Our Town,” he says. “It was written by Thornton Wilder.” He then goes on to name the director, the producer, the actors in major roles, but Lee read the script exactly as it was written. “Directed by A,” he said, and then later, “In it you will see Miss C . . .”
I’d seen a lot of people read the Stage Manager, but I had never seen anything that approached this. I wanted to go back to New Hampshire and tell those men with their handkerchiefs and pipes what a good job they’d done. Surely Spalding Gray was speaking these same words in a rehearsal now. I willed myself to hear his voice, even though I’d never heard his voice before. Here in Michigan, the words were clearly painful for Lee to say, and they stuck a needle into the confidence of every person in the room. Maybe I wasn’t the adult who’d won the lead at an important summer stock in Michigan; maybe I was a talentless kid who’d been hustled out of the room because I was taking up too much of the air. “Send her to Michigan!” is what they’d scribbled on their notepads during my audition. “She won’t know the difference.”
Duke, in the chair next to mine, ran one finger lightly up my thigh while looking straight ahead, slipping past the hem of my daisy dress like a spider on a mission.
Things were just about to get better in Los Angeles, that’s what Ripley had been trying to tell me. I was supposed to stay true the course, be patient. I had failed.
This was what a bad reading of the Stage Manager could do to the room.
So when Uncle Wallace miraculously appeared at the very end of the first act, I once again loved him the way I had loved him as a child: In the face of tragedy our uncle has come to save us. What did I care that he looked like an unmade bed, or that he was walking the line between hungover and still actively drunk? He was there to lead us into Act Two, and I would no longer have to listen to Lee in his golf shirt telling me that the sun had come up over a thousand times.
“Alarm clock malfunction,” Uncle Wallace announced, applauding generously for the man who had made him look like a Barrymore. “But I’m here now. We can begin.”