The prospective comeuppance of our feud with Richard, enormous as it loomed, was not the only thing weighing on my mind. Friday night was the night of the cast party; an hour after final curtain, most of Dellecher’s theatre students and the bolder ones from other disciplines would invade the first floor of the Castle to celebrate a good opening and drink to the coming close. Meredith and Wren, neither of whom appeared onstage after Act II, had graciously agreed to sneak back between intermission and curtain call to get everything ready for a night of riotous revelry. When the rest of us arrived, we would have nothing to do but give our thanks to Dionysus and indulge.
At half past six I closed my book and took the stairs down to the dining room. The table and chairs had already been cleared away to make enough space for a dance floor. A set of speakers surreptitiously borrowed from the sound booth was stacked in one corner, cables trailing along the baseboards toward the nearest outlets. I left the Castle and began the long walk to the FAB with a fretful, anxious feeling that became more and more like dread with each passing minute.
It must have been showing on my face by the time I opened the door to the dressing room, because Alexander grabbed the front of my jacket, hauled me out to the loading dock, and stuck a lit spliff in my mouth.
“Don’t get jittery,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
(I’m not sure anyone has ever been so wrong.)
I puffed obediently on the spliff until there was only a half inch left. Alexander took it, sucked it down to his fingertips, threw it on the ground, and led me back inside. My misgivings faded to a vague paranoia at the back of my brain.
Time moved slowly as I put on makeup and costume pieces and went through the motions of a vocal warm-up. James, Alexander, Wren, Filippa, and I leaned on the wall in the crossover, hands splayed on our diaphragms, chanting, “Howl, howl, howl, howl—O, you are men of stones.” When a first-year with a headset appeared to tell us we had five minutes to places, my personal time lag collapsed and everything started to move as if on fast-forward.
The second-years vacated the dressing rooms and scrambled to find their places in the wings, hastily buttoning shirts and cuffs, or hopping down the hall as they tried to get their shoes tied. Filippa threw me in a chair in the girls’ dressing room and attacked me with a comb and a tube of hair gel as the lights came up and the first lines of the play crackled through the backstage speakers.
Flavius: “Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home:
Is this a holiday?”
Filippa gave me a smart little slap to the forehead. “Oliver!”
“Fuck, what?”
“You’re done, get out of here,” she said, scowling down at me, one hand on her hip. “What is the matter with you?”
“Sorry,” I said, as I climbed out of the chair. “Thanks, Pip.”
“Are you high?”
“No.”
“Are you full of crap?”
“Yes.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, but didn’t reprimand me further. I wasn’t entirely sober, but neither was I entirely stoned, and she probably knew that Alexander was mostly to blame. I left the girls’ dressing room and loitered in the crossover until Richard brushed past, taking no more notice of me than he did of the paint on the walls. I followed a half step behind him, emerged into the glaring lights, and said, with as much sincerity as I could muster, “Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.”
Acts I and II passed not unlike the first rainy front of a hurricane. There was rumble and bluster and a sense of impending peril, but we and the audience knew that the worst was yet to come. When Calpurnia entered, I watched from the edge of the wings. Richard and Meredith seemed to have overcome their difficulties, or had at least put them on hold for the duration of the run. He was rough with her but not violent; she was impatient with him but not provocative. Before I knew it, James was shaking me by the shoulder and whispering, “Let’s go.”
Act III opened with the silhouette of the colonnade against the scrim, which glowed scarlet—a raw, dangerous dawn. Richard stood between the two center columns, the rest of us arranged in a ring around him as Metellus Cimber knelt in the Bowl and pleaded for his brother. I was standing closest, so close that I could see the tiny tic of a nerve in Richard’s jaw. Alexander, waiting with predatory, feline patience on the opposite side of the circle, caught my eye and flicked the front of his jacket open to reveal the paper knife tucked in his belt. (They were more in keeping with the theme than daggers would have been, but no less threatening.)
Richard: “I could be well moved, if I were as you:
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”
He looked around at the rest of us with bright gleaming eyes, daring us to contradict him. We shifted our feet and fingered our narrow blades, but kept our silence.
Richard: “The skies are painted with unnumber’d sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place:
So in the world; ’tis furnish’d well with men,
And men are flesh and blood and apprehensive.
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion: and that I am he!”
His voice filled every corner of the auditorium, like a crack opening in the earth’s crust, the boom and tremor of an earthquake. On my right, Filippa raised her chin, just barely.
Richard: “Let me a little show it, even in this;
That I was constant Cimber should be banish’d,
And constant do remain to keep him so.”
Cinna began to object, but I had no ears for him. My eyes were fixed on James and Alexander. They mirrored each other’s movements, turning slightly downstage so the audience could see the steel glinting on their belts. I licked my bottom lip. Everything felt too close, too real, like I was sitting in the front row of a movie theatre. I squeezed my eyes shut, fist clenched on the hilt of my knife, listening for the five fatal words that would spur me to action.
Richard: “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?”