The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [197]
“How are we supposed to do that?”
“With magic, Bruno. Some plays want stark, minimalist staging in order to focus the audience’s attention on the human elements of the play. The Tempest is just the opposite. The Tempest is a song to sing beyond mankind. A truly great production of it must be an experience so seductively thaumaturgical that it is rivaled only by the erotic in the scope of human experience. What I envision is not only a play, but also a magic show. The ideal production of this play, of course—the only production truly worthy of the text—would have to employ not tricks, not mere special effects nor slights-of-hand, but real magic. This production shall aspire to come as close to that ideal as possible. It shall be miraculous, nearly a religious experience, really, though it won’t be overtly good for anyone’s soul. No true theatre is. Theatre, Bruno, is a secular miracle.”
So our production of The Tempest would have to involve a spectacular sensory overload of mise-en-scène, involving mysterious tricks of light and sound, smoke and mirrors, music and magic. Leon would play Prospero. I would play Caliban. The rest?—details.
We needed funding: always a problem. How did this wretched and life-denying civilization come to be?—how did we blindly, stupidly, collectively manage to erect an architecture for our world in which we waste so much of our lives fretting and worrying and sweating and losing our sleep and grinding our teeth and biting our nails in putrid consternation over the movement and circulation, over the having and the not having, over the keeping and the losing and the procuring of little pieces of metal and paper? Then I remembered Emily—little Emily! Little Emily, who had nursed me when I was wounded, who had sheltered me when I was hunted. I recalled how her parents so desperately wanted for their beautiful daughter the celebrated life of the stage and screen. Perhaps, perhaps…
I described to Leon in full detail my adventure that involved little Emily; how I was pursued, alone and hurt, how she gave me sanctuary and nursed me back to health. I noted that she was a young actress of both stage and film, and a gifted songstress as well, and that when I had met her, she was preparing feverishly for her role as the eponymous character in the musical Little Orphan Annie, which surely must already have come and gone by now. And I did not fail to mention that she appeared to come from a family of ample means.
“Perhaps,” I said aloud, “perhaps, perhaps…”
“Of course,” said Leon, licking beer froth from his mustaches, clapping and rubbing his hands together and slyly arching one eyebrow in villainous collusion.
The following day found Leon and me seated in Leon’s ex-wife’s Wagoneer, exploratorily driving around in the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, looking for little Emily’s family’s big house. We had put on our best suits and ties, and Leon carried an officious-looking attaché case he had dug out from the bottom of a closet for the purpose of looking officious. We kept reminding ourselves that we were not dressed up as fancy Broadway casting directors, but that we were casting directors. We were casting directors who happened to have seen little Emily’s (I cursed myself a thousand times for failing to learn little Emily’s surname) genius, dazzling, etc., performance as Little Orphan Annie in the musical play of the same name, and we hoped to cast her as Miranda in The Tempest, which would mark the debut production of the avant-garde theatre troupe the Shakespeare Underground, and by the way we are looking for backers, so perhaps, perhaps…?
“This is the neighborhood,” I said. “I remember it very clearly. I think I’ve seen that house before. It must