Bethel Merriday

XI

The first week of the Nutmeg Players, while they rehearsed their first bill, The Petrified Forest, and cleaned the theatre of its winter accumulation of dust and cobwebs and the smell of mice, was not so wearing. It was merely slightly hysterical.

There were so many characters in the Forest cast that all the men apprentices had to be used, though their theatrical experience may have been nothing more than singing 'I Love My Little Christmas Lamb' at the Congregational Church at the age of six. So it was that Bethel and Toni, themselves still uncast for a play, had the derisive agony of seeing Pete Chew and the lugubriously artistic Harry Mihick rehearsing as the two telegraph linemen.

During the moments when they could escape from errands and from the School, the two girls, looking owlish and chewing gum, perched in the highest seats of the theatre and glowered at Pete, trying to look lounging and easy at a café table (represented, during rehearsals, by a broken stool), and repeating the line, 'Oh, is God a Russian?' as though it were a funeral speech.

Roscoe Valentine, directing, was still patient so early in the season. He didn't do anything more temperamental than pull his nose and flap his fingers like antennae as he begged, 'Chew. Please! You're supposed to be derisive.'

'Derisive? . . . I see . . . Derisive!' whimpered Pete.

'God is a Russian, or he wouldn't let that hot-water bottle act! It's a plot!' snarled Toni.

The theatre school was opened on Monday morning. It consisted of a barn, a platform, some chairs, the sixteen apprentices (as many of them, at any given time, as were not running errands or rehearsing) and the teacher. The teacher had arrived that morning and, sitting down in the barn, Bethel gasped to discover that she was Miss Maggie Sample, that handsome and bitter character actress whom she had seen seven years ago with the McDermids in The Silver Cord. Miss Sample would be all of fifty-seven now. The pickle had not sweetened in these years.

Bethel was not yet aware of the basic rule of the theatre that if you ever act with anyone, you will act with him again; that if you played St. Clair's daughter in Uncle Tom's Cabin under canvas on the Dakota circuit in 1893, you must not be surprised to find yourself cast as St. Clair's mother in a Gotham Theatre Alliance comedy by Molnar in 1940, with one of the original walk-on bloodhounds now advanced to a Pekingese in the boudoir scene.

Maggie Sample did not remember her; looked at her bleakly as Bethel gave her name.

'Where from?' said Miss Sample.

'Sladesbury! And I saw you in The Silver Cord and Dulcy, Miss Sample.'

'Sladesbury? Where's that? And what was The Silver Cord? Oh yes. Was that the operetta about the Turkish harem? Where I tried to sing the part of the Oldest Wife? And got strangled with a silver cord? Was I lousy!'

'Between my own cultural view of the drama and the practical experience of my resident teacher and the numerous visiting lecturers, I think I may say that every aspirant in our School of the Theatre acquires a complete and at once emotional and scholarly concept of acting as an art,' Roscoe Valentine was saying, just then, to a reporter from the New Haven Journal & Courier.

And he may have been right. Maggie Sample knew her craft as thoroughly as she hated it. If only, Bethel sighed from time to time throughout the summer, Miss Sample wouldn't find it a consolation to assure all young actresses that they would soon be as old and lonely and wretched as herself, with breath as short and hearts that pounded with like terror.

Bethel was never going to be that old--not at ninety, she swore.

After a five-minute speech, which consisted entirely in directing them not to be fools and particularly not to suppose that, because they had been stars in little theatres or in colleges, they could act, Miss Sample assigned to the students detached portions of plays to present next Friday.

Bethel was to play Fanny in Hindle Wakes. She went off to study, and Maggie Sample to sleep. Maggie had spent the night, till five a.m., in sitting up with her mother, who was eighty-three years old, in a gas-smelling one-room flat in Harlem. She had supported her mother for forty years, and every day for forty years her mother had told someone or other that Maggie was a success and sent her so little money because she was keeping two lovers. Maggie hated the stage. Maggie's mother loved the stage. Maggie's mother hated Maggie. Maggie had always been too busy to think about whether she hated her mother. She had also been too busy to remember ever having played, in The Silver Cord, a part about too much mother.

The part of Second Lineman, to be enacted by Mr. Peter Chew in The Petrified Forest, contained exactly eighty words. But to Pete the part was longer than Hamlet's, and more confusing than the Theory of Relativity. The one speech, 'Sure! Go ahead, Pop. Change the subject', he could, without half trying and in the space of not over five minutes, render as, 'You bet, Dad, go on and change the subject', and 'Sure, Pop, go the subject', and 'That's right, pop the subject', and sixteen other versions, all fascinating.

Naturally, he cried for a lot of cuing. He got Bethel, Toni Titmus, Iris Pentire, Anita Hill, and four other girl apprentices, all young, to cue him, and with each of them (so they treacherously reported to one another, with details, laughing as women do) he found that it strengthened his memory to put his arm around her.

Between cuing Pete, avoiding Pete, going out to borrow chairs for the set, going to the bank and to the station for Roscoe, and learning her practice lines in Hindle Wakes, Bethel was hurled forward to Friday. Only once did she feel that she was getting something. She listened to a conference between the company electrician and Cynthia Aleshire and Fletcher Hewitt on the setting for Petrified Forest.

'You got to give me a better light than that bastard amber,' wailed Cynthia. 'I want more pink in it. I want to get the feeling of the whole, lonesome desert through that window.'

'Window too big anyway. Whole right wall of a barbeque lunch-room one big window. 'Tisn't realistic!' complained Fletcher.

'I don't care if it isn't. I want to get the feeling.'

Bethel crept backstage and looked at the ground row of cut-out cactus and mesas standing against the half-circle of the cyclorama; at the bank of lights on the floor of the stage and the border lights overhead. She peeped into Cynthia's thumb-greased manual of lighting and read, as though they were the names of the five sweet symphonies, about Opalescent Lamp Dips, Sprayed Coatings, Glass Colour Caps, Gelatin Colour Media and Sheets of Transolene. She looked up at the scenery hanging in the fly loft--a cañon turned upside down. She remembered, embarrassed, that she had been content in A Doll's House with scenery that had served before that for the interior of a Washington mansion in The Witching Hour.

She hadn't even known just what lights Miss Bickling had used. She remembered, guiltily, that she had thought then that the actors were all that mattered in a play. Now she saw all the people of the theatre--director, scene designer, actors, electricians, stagehands, stage manager, musicians, author (though she wasn't yet enlightened enough to include the audience and the wicked producer)--as a fraternity, the sincerest democracy in the world, united to create in a troubled world an illusion of strength and beauty and hope and honour and noble wrath that were more real than reality. In that mangy little wooden theatre by a pebble-scattered beach she was confirmed in her faith.

On Friday afternoon was the school recital from Hindle Wakes, with Bethel as the Lancashire mill girl, Fanny, who has been off on an illicit week end, and with Harry Mihick as her worried father, Marian as her shocked mother. Bethel had no notion of the Lancashire intonation, but then neither had the others, and they all played it in cockney, with overtones of Kansas and a dash of dry Vermont.

The set consisted of five chairs--two of them representing a table and a dresser--up on the barn platform; the audience, of Maggie Sample and five apprentices, all looking up with idiotic blankness, like six Supreme Court justices rehearing a tax case. Bethel did not mind. She carried her own fire and applause.

She had been devout in her study of the role; she had not merely learned the lines, but had, she believed, come to know Fanny and to love her. She had been surprised to encounter an English girl so independent and forthright, loving her family but directing her own life. Everyone said that only American girls were like that, and Bethel wanted to let the world know about this social discovery.

From the moment when she entered (from behind a chair) with a cheerful 'Well, you didn't expect me as soon as this, I'll bet', she was Fanny, not Bethel Merriday; and as Fanny she desperately justified her right to hide her sweetheart's name. When Roscoe Valentine and Fletcher Hewitt stumbled in and solemnly added themselves to her audience, she was not above the vulgarity of noticing them, but they made her only the more zealous to present her case.

What threw her was Harry Mihick.

Marian Croy was good enough as the mother, but as the father, Harry was King Lear played by a Marx brother in a red beard. He moaned, he staggered, he slapped his forehead. Bethel was so fascinated that she forgot to be earnest, toward the end, and merely fed in her lines, and did not realize that she had let down till it was over.

The three aspirants sat and prepared to be admired. Maggie Sample sighed, put on eyeglasses, sighed again and spoke:

'Miss Croy, you weren't bad. But a little less elocution and sweetness and melody. You're not a Y.W.C.A. secretary or a lobbyist for free tariff on canary birds. You're a Percheron-built housewife in an industrial town, and you worry about the taxes and the price of beer, and your feet hurt.

'Mr. Mihick, I take it that you know you can never get on the stage, anywhere, in anything?'

'Y-you think so,' groaned Harry.

'Don't you?'

'Well, maybe I can spread the gospel of the theatre through Missouri and Kansas.'

'Yes, you stick to that . . . And now you, Miss--'

'Merriday.'

'Miss Merriday . . . Where were you born?'

'In Sladesbury.'

'Where's that?'

'Why, right here in Connecticut. I told you. Don't you remember?'

'I do not remember! I'm surprised to find that you are a Yankee. For all their faults, such as suspicion of everyone that doesn't smell of wood mould and furniture polish, the Yankees do have a nice reticence. But you played this like an up-and-coming Middle Western girl who thinks the purpose of life is to yell at men and poke them in the ribs and keep on getting everything she can out of them--from Wrigley's gum and pineapple ice-cream soda to marriage lines and a trip to Los Angeles.'

Bethel looked down at the unsmiling apprentices, the kind but now expressionless Fletcher Hewitt, the rococo but now expressionless Mr. Valentine. She couldn't believe that this was happening to her. Her lifelong career as an actress was being ended, and her old friend Miss Sample was going on:

'You were too pert. You thought too well of yourself. Here you're supposed to be a North Country millhand who's independent only because she had to earn her living, but you acted as if you were a WPA investigator scolding a "case". Oh, Miss Bethel Merriday, you were ba-a-a-a-d!'

Into the grey silence swam Roscoe.

'Bethel, let me give you a few practical hints. Your voice--your projection. Don't try to do it all with your throat; use your lungs; use your diaphragm for volume. Every day, for ten minutes, I want you to do this exercise. Stand straight, with your belly completely drawn in; take the deepest possible breath, and exhale it, with a good loud hiss, between your closed teeth, so it won't go too fast.

'And voice projection is just as much mental as it is physical. Look up at the top balcony, way, way up there, and make sure your voice reaches them, and forget the carriage trade down in the pit.

'And when you sit, don't slouch. Let the gallery see your face, not just the pretty top of your head. No matter how relaxed you are, keep your spine firm, as an axis that you can revolve on in any direction. Picture it as a flexible steel rod, going right up through you and supporting you.

'But the biggest lesson in acting is never to do anything except for a psychological purpose. Don't walk over and open the door just because it's in the script. Why are you opening that door? Are you sore at somebody and walking out on him? Are you going uptown to buy some face powder? Are you afraid there's a dead man lying out there in the hall? Never do anything unless you understand why.'

Roscoe had risen. He whirled now on the five apprentices in the audience, who had all been staring at Bethel, half amused. 'And that goes for all the rest of you, d'you understand? Bethel was terrible, but the rest of you are just as bad. You're all terrible. If any of you want to go back to the soda counter, that will be all right with Miss Sample and me. Good day, young ladies and gentlemen!'

Fletcher walked with her to the dormitory.

He was to her the man who would always be there when she needed him, who would be always a little more understanding than anybody else and sometimes more intelligent, who, as stage manager, knew everybody's part and everybody's sorrows, whom she could almost love, and whom she would always forget the moment any more demanding male came in sight. She knew him deeply after this one week; she could never know him any better after thirty years.

'Well?' said Bethel to Fletcher.

'I thought you were going to be idiot enough to say "Here's where I go home",' said Fletcher.

'I did say it! But then I decided that's what I was here for--to get hell--to get training.'

'Good girl. Maybe some day you'll be an actress!'