To The Power Of Three

Twelfth grade
33

Old Giff, as theater teacher Ted Gifford was known throughout the school, was not old, and his name was not Gifford. He had changed it legally at twenty-two, aware that the Polish surname he carried out of the western hills of Pennsylvania -Stolcyarcz-would never work for an actor. So he became Ted Gifford, a name designed to be so bland that casting directors would have no fixed idea of who he was or what he could play.

But the name change was not enough to transform him. Giff landed a few cop roles, playing middle-aged men while still in his twenties. Playing old made him feel old, which he did not enjoy. Meanwhile he was still too callow to play the parts he felt he was born to play, Falstaff and Lear. So he went back to school and got a teaching certificate. A thirty-something man could feel old or young surrounded by teenagers, and Old Giff felt young.

Or so he told his students every new school year when he launched into his long-winded explanation of why Glendale staged its musical in the fall instead of the spring, as other high schools did.

“Tradition is merely habit hardened into ritual,” he began. “We assume there must be a rational basis, but often there is none. Or if there was a reason, it disappeared long ago, became obsolete.”

There was simply no basis for the schedule used by most other public schools in the state, Gifford told his students, and many arguments to be made for its inversion. Students were fresher in the fall, energetic and more capable of concentration, especially those who had spent the summer in Sylvia Archer-Bliss’s theater program. The end of the year had too many competing interests, particularly for seniors. England had a long history of Christmastime extravaganzas, and a fall musical was a good substitution, as it provided a secular entertainment and bypassed the increasingly contentious debates over holiday programs.

“In England these productions were known as pantomimes,” he said.

Here, every year, every time, some budding class clown did his rendition of Marcel Marceau and the wall, or walking-into-wind. Griff would wait patiently for the laughter to die down, then explain that it wasn’t the same thing. A pantomime was actually a pageant, something bright and gay-he always let this word linger a little longer than necessary, as if testing his students.

“As the days grow shorter and darker, we need something bright and festive,” he continued. “So why not create a tradition with meaning, one tied to the calendar, to the earth’s natural cycles? At Glendale High School, we do our musical in the fall-and we let the students have a hand in choosing it.”

He didn’t bother to disguise his amusement at the debate that followed, with students trying not to reveal their self-interest as they lobbied for this or that play. They all attempted to sound altruistic, to pretend that their only interest was what was best for the drama department. The most vociferous were often the most deluded when it came to their own abilities. Some short, skinny boy with a merely decent voice was always pushing to be Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha, while terribly plain girls yearned to play the Gwen Verdon sexpots-Sweet Charity and Damn Yankees. If they could see me now indeed.

The fall of Perri’s senior year, she clearly was bursting with an idea, but she was shrewd and strategic, waiting for everyone else to speak first. Josie watched her, curious, for Perri had not confided in her or Kat what her plan was. Come to think of it, Perri had not spent much time with them since the school year began.

Man of La Mancha was touted, as it was almost every year, and Giff undercut it. “It’s not the right climate to have a gang rape onstage.” A new girl, a junior transfer, April something, had a Cats fixation, which was unfortunate for her, as everyone else knew that Giff hated, hated, hated Andrew Lloyd Webber. Still, he listed them all on the board-Man of La Mancha, Cats, West Side Story, Gypsy. (The last was clearly Giff’s preferred choice, and Giff’s favorite somehow always won, despite his seemingly democratic method.)

Then, just as he was about to close the discussion, Perri raised her hand, confident of being recognized despite the already full slate. She was Giff’s star student-not just talented but hardworking, too, willing to do all the grubby, behind-the-scenes tasks.

“Anyone Can Whistle,” she said. Naturally someone did-whistled, that is-but the boy, a freshman, was silenced by Perri’s withering look.

“Interesting,” Giff said. “Of course, if it’s Sondheim you like, he was the lyricist for Gypsy.” He ran his chalk beneath that title. “And it has such good roles for girls-Louise, June, the strippers. Mama Rose.”

He seemed to be trying, with his emphasis on the last, to remind Perri that she would be the obvious choice for that role.

“But you also need at least four boys who can dance behind Dainty June, and our guys are weak on dancing.” The males grumbled, indignant, but Perri seldom spared anyone’s feelings. “It’s true. We couldn’t let the chorus do the Charleston in The Boyfriend because our guys are so left-footed.”

“Make your case on the strength of your choice, not on the weakness of-” Giff almost said mine, then caught himself just in time. “Of Jill’s.”

“Well, given that three of the show’s original stars were not trained singers, its score is clearly within the range of what we can do. It has a large number of parts-within the mayoress’s cabinet, and the residents of the Cookie Jar-that can be played by either gender, which is always a plus for us. And it hasn’t been staged by any school in the state.”

“There might be a reason for that, Perri. The show was a spectacular failure on Broadway.”

“Yes, but that was the early 1960s,” Dannon Estes put in. “It was ahead of its time.”

“And a little behind now, don’t you think?”

“There are a few dated bits, but some of the satire is more relevant than ever,” Perri said. “A city that relies on one ‘miracle’ to draw tourists-that’s like all those cities that think ballparks are going to be their salvation, right?”

Everyone could tell that Giff was impressed by the last point. Perri had clearly prepared her case well.

“What about its attitude toward the mentally ill?”

“It argues that they should be assimilated. Is that so wrong?”

Giff could not resist needling Perri. “And I suppose you think you could play Cora, the mayoress.”

“Actually, I’d prefer Nurse Fay Apple, although I think I could do the speech and the song. I have the wind.”

Giff had created this monster. He had encouraged Perri in her love of Stephen Sondheim, and now, like every good Stephen Sondheim fan, Perri was steeped in all the backstage lore and trivia. Josie herself had been forced to listen to the original cast album over and over again, with Perri pointing out the highlights. Anyone Can Whistle had originally included a lovely ballad, “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” but it followed a long speech. The song had to be cut because the original actress couldn’t do both. Perri had always longed to sing “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” with its call for an ordinary hero who would arrive without fanfare.

“It depends on rights, you know. It could be very expensive.”

“It’s not,” Perri said. “I checked.”

The students knew that the decision, ultimately, was Giff’s. If he wanted Gypsy, he would somehow get the votes he needed. But perhaps he was swayed by Perri’s passion. Or maybe he was enchanted with the idea of staging a show that no Baltimore-area high school had ever attempted. Perri was a senior, and this would be her last musical. She had earned her star turn.

But he could not give her quite everything she wanted. He told her at callbacks that the part she longed for, the starchy Nurse Fay Apple, was not right for her. Perri was good at the starchy side, much less persuasive when she had to play the character’s alter ego, a sexy French actress. He gave Perri the part of Mayoress Cora, while making Kat Hartigan the nurse.

Under Giff’s usual rules, Kat Hartigan should not have gotten a lead at all. She had not tried out for a single show during her years at Glendale, despite repeated encouragement from the chorus teacher, who admired her pure soprano voice. It was clear to everyone that Kat’s sudden interest in the fall musical was all about sweetening her college applications, adding yet one more extracurricular to her résumé.

But Kat’s voice was strong and she was fetching, as Old Giff was heard to say to the band director. She wasn’t quite as fiery as she needed to be in the angry scenes, but Giff worked to bring that side out of her in rehearsals. Certainly her seduction of Dr. Hapgood was almost too credible. The only thing that was hard to believe was that someone as womanly as Kat Hartigan would really be drawn to the reedy, immature junior cast opposite her. That was the perennial problem with high-school shows. Most of the girls looked grown-up, while the boys were still skinny and unformed.

They were three weeks into rehearsals when the complaints started. Several parents found the show unsuitable, saying it was much too dark for high-school students. And what was the bit about communism, not to mention the exchange about taxes and nuclear weapons? It didn’t seem quite patriotic, did it, given that the United States had thousands of troops in Iraq? The show encouraged a disdain for authority and a distrust of government. Were those values they wanted to endorse?

No one suspected Dale Hartigan of making these arguments. After all, his daughter had the second lead. But Josie heard from Perri that it was Mr. Hartigan, working quietly behind the scenes, who was determined the show would not go on. The rumor was that Mr. Hartigan’s real beef was the mildly suggestive lyrics that Kat had to sing, “Come Play Wiz Me. ” Old Giff argued that she did it so freshly and prettily that it worked for the show in a wholly unanticipated way, underscoring the fact that the sexy French actress was Nurse Fay Apple in disguise. Still, when it was learned that an Equity company in Harrisburg was invoking the 150-mile radius and forcing Glendale to cancel its production of Anyone Can Whistle, gossip continued to blame Dale Hartigan.

Instead of canceling the fall musical, Giff chose Oklahoma!, because he could stage it in his sleep, and he gave Kat the lead. And all the drama students could see that the part of a sweet-but-stubborn Oklahoma farm girl suited her far better than did a two-sided temptress.

They all assumed that Perri would play Ado Annie, every girl’s dream role. But while a dozen girls had been called back for the part in the rushed-up audition process necessitated by the switch, Perri was not among them. She simply refused, and the absence of the obvious favorite stirred up a froth of longing and yearning that verged on hysteria. By the end of the audition, girls were weeping, on crying jags so intense that they had to bring in the guidance counselor, Alexa Cunningham, to calm them down. One girl cried and vomited until blood vessels burst at the bottom of her eyes, leaving her with the red-rimmed pout of a lesser monster on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She got the part, too, although it was hard not to wonder what Perri might have done with it.

Choosing the male leads should have been blissfully anticlimactic after that sobfest, but Perri threw Giff another curveball by showing up, breasts bound, and demanding a chance to try out for the part of Jud, the lovelorn ranch hand who turns violent at the play’s end.

“C’mon, Perri,” Old Giff said, treating Perri as if she were playing a practical joke. “That just can’t be.”

“But you’re the one who’s always talking about how unusual casting can make people see an old play in a new way, remember? You loved it when the Shakespeare Theater in Washington did Othello with a white actor as the lead and a black actor as Iago.”

“This is different.”

“I don’t see how. There needs to be something truly forbidden about Jud’s love for Laurey. When the play was first produced, they got that over with his love for dirty postcards. But those things seem pretty innocuous now. I wouldn’t play him as a girl, but the fact that I am a girl would inject that sense of menace that Jud’s character has lost over the years.”

“The songs are written for a baritone.”

“We perform with a piano, not an orchestra. It wouldn’t be hard to transpose the songs to a suitable key for me.”

As it turned out, there was something chilling about Perri’s version of “Lonely Room,” and a comic poignancy in her version of “Pore Jud Is Daid.” All the students who saw that audition knew that no boy in the school could touch her subtle performance. But even in the allegedly hate-free zones of Glendale High School, there were boundaries. If Dale Hartigan had been troubled by the idea of his daughter in a negligee, singing suggestively about her own body, how would he react to a girl-even a girl disguised as a boy-singing a love song to Kat?

Old Giff told Perri that she simply wasn’t large enough to create the physical threat that Jud needed to convey. She settled for the part of Gertie, a small but showy part, and Giff cast a wonderful baritone from the school chorus as Jud. This boy’s mother also complained, accusing Giff of perpetrating old stereotypes by having an African-American boy pine for a blue-eyed blonde.

Given all this drama, it was several weeks before anyone noticed that Perri wasn’t speaking to Kat, not outside their scenes together. She would deliver her lines with her usual professionalism but retreat between scenes, seeking as much distance as she could from Kat, giggling with Dannon, the wardrobe manager. And if Kat spoke to her offstage, Perri openly snubbed her.

Old Giff summoned Josie, who had signed up for dance troupe as she always did. It meant spending more time with Kat and Perri, and the dancers always needed someone little to throw around in the dance numbers.

“What gives?” he asked. “Is Perri mad at Kat because Whistle got canceled? Because it really had nothing to do with Dale Hartigan, no matter what everyone thinks.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” said Josie, who had asked Kat and Perri the same thing. But she asked them again, only to receive the same nonanswers.

“Ask Kat,” Perri said. “If she’ll tell you.”

“Perri’s just moody,” Kat said. “I didn’t do anything.”