A Star Tribune serialized novel by Richard Horberg
Chapter 24 continues
The story so far: As the performance looms, the cast starts to panic.
There were to be two performances, one on Friday afternoon for kids in the lower grades and one the big, paid performance, for the adults in the evening.
On Friday morning, Allen woke before his alarm clock went off, saw that the room was still dark and wondered why he was awake so early.
But it wasn't early. It was raining outside, he saw when he pulled up his shade, the skies dark and gloomy.
Since senior high classes had been cancelled for Rural Day, he had hoped to be able to polish up a few scenes in the morning. But buses were late because of the heavy rain, some stuck in the mud, and cast members showed up at random. They were able to practice only a little bit, half-heartedly.
As soon as the afternoon performance began, Allen realized that it was going to be another disaster — his little talk having done no good. He could only hope that the failure of the cast was really the fault of the audience, schoolchildren who had come to have some fun — to see the Homecoming Queen kiss the captain of the football team, to see teenagers pretending to be adults, to see one of their classmates with a fake mustache. They laughed not at Henry Antrobus but at Royal Knudson. They laughed when Ramona Bjorn came on stage carrying a baby (a doll), they laughed when Bill Erickson lunged at Royal, intending to kill him. At one point the cast itself began laughing, interrupting the play. Allen was furious.
When the play was over and the cast had gone home, to return at 7 p.m., Allen sat on the stage with one of his stagehands, Sam Linder, resting after several hours of work. They didn't say much, just sat, discouraged.
Then some kid he had never seen before walked by and said something to the effect that it was a lousy play. Sam glared at him. "You're so damn dumb," he said, "you wouldn't know a good play if you saw one!" Which made Allen feel better. He told Sam to say the same thing to anybody else who made similar comments.
When the time came for the evening performance, the mood of the cast had changed. Allen sensed it at once. They were serious, workmanlike, and, barely glancing at their lines a final time, ready for the stage. They knew that the afternoon performance had been bad and had resolved to do better. It was like the last two weeks of rehearsal all over again. They had put the audience out of mind and entered their own characters.
Just before the curtain went up, Allen saw that someone had brought a pint of whiskey, which was being passed around furtively. He took it away from them. But as one of them said to him afterward, "Every little bit helped."
Perhaps it did. For the final performance was beautiful — not flawless, certainly — there was a little prompting in the third act, together with a forgotten cue, but marvelous nevertheless. The cast was superb. When the actors came off stage after completing a scene, Allen felt like hugging them all. The audience appeared spellbound, surprised certainly, listening to every line and laughing at the right times. When Sabina looked out the window in the first act and said that an iceberg was moving toward them, they appeared to shudder. When Henry attempted to kill his own father, they drew back in horror. (Allen thought it was the most dramatic moment in the play.)
And when George Antrobus, home from the wars at the end of the third act, proclaimed his willingness to try again to save the world, they applauded earnestly, even with a few tears.
When the performance was over, Allen let the cast finish off the bottle of whiskey, even taking a small sip himself. He told them that he was prouder of them than he had ever been of anybody. Ramona Bjorn came up and kissed him on the cheek.
***
On Monday of the following week, he received in the mail a small bill from Greg Schmidt:
Suit rental: $6.25
Express charges: $1.42
Material for head: $1.20
Labor: $0.00
Total: $8.87
Allen was pleased to send him $10 himself instead of asking Magnuson for more money. Not that the superintendent was dissatisfied with the performance. When Allen ran into him in the hall, he offered his congratulations. "The play made us all think," he said. "I'm not sure that we understood it entirely, but as far as I could tell, everybody was on the edge of their seats most of the evening."
Allen was very pleased. But flush with success as he was, he had no illusions about the play having a lasting influence. He could only hope that, 50 years in the future, some old-timer might say something like, "We had a young fellow here back in '49 or '50 who put on a pretty good class play. Don't remember his name. Don't remember the name of the play. Don't even remember what it was about. But it was different. It was pretty good."
Posterity.
Tomorrow: Chapter 25
