Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

Beginning high on top of the island, a rough-hewn stairway of sorts has been incised into the rock. It appears near the pinnacle and then angles back and forth all the way down to the stage floor. This was designed to be used by arriving and departing actors, but Mrs. Shin has been worried about the stairway since long before the set was built, anxious that someone might fall through it and get hurt. She's decided, as she sets the action of the play, that the stairway belongs exclusively to Ariel, since Miaow is by far the lightest child in the cast. Miaow has tried not to look smug at having an entrance only she can use.

Rafferty is sitting next to Mrs. Shin, about eight rows back from the stage, feeling like he's entered an enchanted world. This is the first time he's seen the entire set with most of the lighting, and it's turned the auditorium into a sorcerer's stony realm, completely sealed off from the urban friction of Bangkok and the real-life drama of the past few days. The school's theater accommodates about four hundred people in rows of hard, fold-down wooden seats-another reason to shorten the play-set in front of a classic proscenium stage, complete with a small orchestra pit and a curtain. For The Tempest the curtain has been festooned with cloth seaweed in half a dozen shades of green and brown, with sparkles glued here and there. Some kelpy pieces are ten or fifteen feet high, extending all the way from the floor of the stage to the top of the proscenium arch. Mrs. Shin was not allowed to sew the seaweed to the curtain, so every now and then Rafferty sees the glint of safety pins.

He likes the safety pins. They seem appropriate to the production, a bit of inexpensive practicality in the middle of all the magic.

The boy playing Prospero, a Chinese kid named Luther So, is onstage now and is not having a good time portraying age. He's presenting Shakespeare's magician as a stiff-kneed hunchback who walks high-shouldered and bent over, leaning on his magician's staff and frequently grabbing his back as though in pain. Every time he takes a step, Mrs. Shin says quietly, "Oh, dear," and finds a way to keep him still.

"Why don't you just have him stand there through the whole play?" Rafferty asks behind his hand. "The other actors can hang hats on him."

"He speaks the verse very well," Mrs. Shin says. "He understands every word. And it's unusual for a ninth-grader to have such a strong lower register."

"And such a weak lower back."

"Shhh." But she's smiling.

Privately Rafferty thinks it wouldn't matter if the kid played the whole role stark naked on a unicycle, because no one, or at least no one who's male, will ever see him. Siri Lindstrom, who's been assigned the role of Prospero's daughter, Miranda, is an incipient heartbreaker, the kind of girl who seems to carry her own breeze with her. Her ash-blond hair, which falls to the middle of her back, is constantly in motion, framing a face having nothing wrong with it that's big enough to see with the unaided eye. The first time she came onstage, Kosit, sitting three rows back, said something that made Anand laugh. Mrs. Shin had twisted around toward them.

"My police escort," Rafferty said.

"What an interesting life you lead." Mrs. Shin looks up at Siri, who's huddled with Luther running through the lines of the play's eternal second scene, in which Prospero explains the whole backstory to his daughter, starting before she was born. It seems to take as long to tell as it did to happen. Siri's wearing a great many yards of muslin, draped in layers around her like she's just come from some celestial steam bath. All the actors are in working costumes, rough muslin approximations of their ultimate outfits, so they can learn how to move in them without falling on their faces. Siri seems to be having no problem with hers, but she could probably dance on pointe in full body armor. "Wait till they see her in the real dress," Mrs. Shin says, regarding her. "She's breathtaking."

"Miaow hates her."

Mrs. Shin nods matter-of-factly. "She's got a lot of company. Siri is not a girl's girl."

Rafferty says, "I'm just glad I'm not her father."

Mrs. Shin gives him a quizzical glance. "And Mia?"

"Well, Miaow's difficult sometimes, but it's a different kind of difficult."

"For the moment," Mrs. Shin says, and now it's Rafferty's turn to look at her.

"You think?"

"Absolutely. She'll probably never be tall, but she's going to be a beauty."

Rafferty looks up at the top of the rock, where he can just see the chopped-yellow crown of his daughter's head. She's sitting where she always sits, all by herself on the highest step of the metal stairway that leads to her entrance. "Really."

"Take my word. I'm an expert on how they'll grow up. I've been watching it for years." She leans forward and calls out, "Luther. Siri. Let's have it out loud and in your places." Luther hobbles downstage, and Rafferty can almost hear his joints creak. Siri drifts weightlessly toward center stage, which is her favorite place. "Ellen"-Mrs. Shin's voice is louder-"give me the cave lights."

The inside of the cave takes on a pale color halfway between a peach and the inside of a conch shell.

Rafferty says, "Pretty."

Mrs. Shin says "Shhh" again, focused on the stage. Luther has launched into the story, much shortened by Rafferty, of how his brother betrayed him and stole his dukedom, in connivance with the king of Naples, and how Prospero and Miranda wound up cast away on this benighted island. He is interrupted by dutiful interjections from Siri, as Miranda, who is herself interrupted by Mrs. Shin, who reminds her that the people in the back of the theater will want to hear her, too. It is, Rafferty thinks, one of the worst scenes Shakespeare ever wrote.

He says, "Still feels too long, doesn't it?"

"It's been too long for four hundred years." Mrs. Shin slips sideways out of the row and goes down to the edge of the orchestra pit at the foot of the stage. The actors break off and look at her. "I want you guys to pick it up by about ten percent," she says. "We'll move on now, but as soon as you're both offstage, I need you to run through it a few times, just speeding it up. Here's the motivation: Luther, you're eager to get through it so you can talk to Ariel and find out about the storm. Let the intensity speed you up. Siri, maybe you can cut him off with some of your lines, because as good a daughter as you are, you're a kid, you're impatient-"

"This is important material," Luther says. He was born to be forty. He's watched anxiously as his big opening scene has been snipped like substandard yardage. "The audience needs to hear it."

"They need to be awake, too," Mrs. Shin says. "You guys are doing great, but this scene is a big, indigestible lump of exposition, and we haven't solved it yet. Okay?"

Siri says placidly, "When will I get my real costume?"

"When it's finished," Mrs. Shin says, a bit shortly. She smiles, taking the sting out of it. "Siri, why don't you go backstage and think about how to hurry this scene along? That way you'll be ahead of Luther when he's finished out here."

Siri nods and floats off stage left, where a sun-dappled meadow probably awaits her. Even Luther, whose developing sexuality seems to be taking an interesting direction, watches her go.

"Okay," Mrs. Shin says, clapping her hands. "Lights ready? Ellen?"

"Ready!" a girl shouts.

"Mia?"

Miaow stands up, high on the rock, looking even smaller than usual, and says, "I'm here," and then disappears again.

"Then let's go."

Mrs. Shin backs up the aisle, still facing the stage, with her right arm behind her back, fingers crossed. The peach color inside the cave is replaced by a chilly steel blue, and the cyclorama darkens ominously to slate gray. A bright spot of light hits the top of the rock, where Miaow had been standing, and Mrs. Shin calls out, "Ellen. Not till you see her. Where's our sound?"