The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [196]
For a time I sank into a malaise. I entered a period of melancholic yearning. I pined for a nose. I would lock myself in the bathroom and stare at my face for hours, imagining where my nose would be, how handsome I would look. It was not so much that I wanted to aesthetically improve my face, but that… that I felt incomplete without a nose. I felt that I had been born missing one, that my lack of a definitive nose was a glaring and unfortunate deformity that wanted surgical correction. I tried to hatch money-getting schemes with Leon, but Leon still refused to lend even his emotional (not to mention financial) support to my surgery. The money-making schemes I idly allowed to incubate in my mind veered into the fantastic, even the felonious: I would embark upon a life of crime! I would rob a bank! Smuggle diamonds! Of course such fantasies never came close to fruition. I even considered writing to the wealthy Mr. Lawrence in Colorado to ask for the money—after all, a mere seven hundred dollars would be a drop in the bucket to him—but I rejected the idea almost as soon as it had crystallized in my consciousness, for the obvious reason that I was still a wanted fugitive in the world, whose whereabouts were unknown. I was lost, without money or nose. For a long time, my heart was sorrowful.
XXXVIII
Leon and I began talking seriously about what would be the Shakespeare Underground’s first (and only—but I’ll get to that when the time comes) major production. There was a little—just a little, not much—discussion at first as to which play we should perform for our company’s debut production. We had our hearts set on The Tempest right from the beginning, but we briefly considered others.
“What about Lear?” I suggested. Splayed open before us on the bar counter of Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, under the shadow of the giant rubber shark, was Leon’s battered and loveworn black leatherbound Gramercy Edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, with gold-edged pages as thin as cigarette papers and a ribbon sewn into the binding for a bookmark. Leon’s pudgy fingers flapped through the pages of the book.
“That’s much too dreary for me,” Leon snorted. “I’m frankly not in the mood for it. About the only thing that doesn’t happen to Lear is getting eaten, but if the play had been given one more act, it probably would have. I played Lear once, you know”—Leon was in a wistful mood—“some years ago now…. I was a bit lighter then. I had the beard for it, but not the physique. They told me to lose weight. I did in fact manage to lose a little, but nevertheless the audience laughed whenever I came onstage. That was in the winter, and on the side I was playing Santa Claus in a mall on Long Island. Oftentimes I would get carried away and slip into Lear, and all the grubby little children would commence to sob in terror. They laughed at my Lear and cried at my Santa. The bastards.”
“Othello?”
“I like Othello. It’s got lots of casual chat. You don’t get casual chat in Lear, everyone’s too busy thinking about the universe. But I’m afraid that in this day and age it would be in poor taste for me to wear blackface.”
We discussed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Love’s Labours Lost, and Coriolanus, but rejected each in turn for various and sundry reasons.
“The Tempest,” Leon declared, “is really the only obvious choice for us.”
“Agreed.”
“We must get it absolutely right, though. The Tempest, of all the Bard’s plays, is the one that offers the most creative leeway in the interpretation of staging, sound, music, scenery: it is a veritable blank slate for mise-en-scène, which makes it both an exciting and a difficult play to produce. The first act is reasonable enough, and