Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Prospero broke his staff and freed his magic. At first no one saw any distinct difference in their surroundings. But the magic was receding. It was bleeding away, like the blood from a cut throat. The people now looked around them and saw that the trees were made of plastic. The fronds of the palm trees were made of green construction paper cut into the shapes of leaves. The birds sitting in the branches? Fake parrots, clearly purchased from a novelty shop, intended as accessories to pirate costumes, with marble eyes and fabric feathers, wired to their perches in the fake trees by their thin plastic talons. The snakes and frogs on the ground? Limp rubber toys. The ground was not ground either; it was a hard flat floor with a little dirt and sand scattered on it. The starry firmament above was represented by several strings of Christmas lights tacked to the ceiling. The skies were colorful lights projected against the whitewashed brick walls of an abandoned subway station. It was a large room, but far from infinite. The stage scenery was no more impressive than backdrops for a grade school play. It was silly — hokey to the point of kitsch in its cheap fakeness.

The members of the audience glanced around themselves and at each other’s faces in mild embarrassment. They cleared their throats, they shuffled their feet, they coughed and mumbled. When the play was over, the audience applauded politely, if too briefly, and then began to shuffle en masse toward the one point of egress, the elevator door. They did not even wait for all of the actors to finish bowing before they stopped clapping. They found the friends and loved ones in whose company they had come to the performance. The barefoot ones were the most embarrassed-looking; they irritably wiped the particles of sand clinging to their sticky feet and put on their socks and shoes. People shrugged themselves into their coats and jackets, casually noticing that their garments, being as they were drenched in the sea, held notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, seeming rather new-dyed than stained with saltwater. They checked their watches and snapped open their glowing cell phones (to check the time, not to make any calls, because we were too far underground to get any reception). They had been in this room for about three hours. All of them without exception needed to pee. We had no facilities available downstairs (though from the smell of things after the performance I suspect that didn’t stop some people); they crossed their legs and shook their feet in discomfort. The crowd bottlenecked at the elevator door. The elevator could only take people to the surface in groups of five or six at a time, so there was a long wait to get out. As there was no stage, there was no backstage, so Leon, Emily, and I and all the other actors had nothing to do but putz around awkwardly at the periphery of the crowd. We talked amongst ourselves, reassuring one another that the performance had essentially been a success. A theatre critic for the New York Times had been spotted in the audience. He was talking about the performance to someone standing next to him in the crowd waiting to leave. He was overheard to have grumbled the words “overblown” and “gimmicky.”

The magic was gone. The audience slowly filtered out of the room through the elevator.

There were supposed to have been five performances of The Tempest . However, apparently some “concerned” citizen who had attended the first night’s performance had alerted certain authorities, and before we could stage the second scheduled performance, while in rehearsal, we were paid a relatively brief and extremely unpleasant visit by two particularly vile men: a short old skinny one with a droopy mustache and glasses, and a big young one whose clean-shaven pink wad of a chinless head ballooned ridiculously from the confines of his shirt collar; the short old one wore a glossy zip-up jacket, a cap, and an official uniform of some sort, and the big young one wore a suit and a tie that had pictures of Looney Tunes characters on it. These two vile personages were, respectively, a public safety inspector and a fire code inspector — I misremember who was which. They did not even take more than fifteen minutes or so to tour the performance space before declaring that we would have to immediately and indefinitely cancel all future performances in this space, for, as they put it — as they had written in a judicious scribble upon some sheet of paperwork, and then tore from a clipboard a translucent yellow carbon-copied slip of whatever bureaucratic trash it was and handed it to us—“totally appalling”—I quote from memory—“totally appalling violations of fire code and building safety code.” These two were not done with us, though — they didn’t seem to be going away. These pathetic sots seemed to have more to say. They had things to say concerning law, and order, and money, and other cold things. They spoke of the elevator, I remember. Apparently the elevator had most recently been inspected in 1910, and the suit from the public safety department seemed shocked that it still worked. These two men kept trying to refer to the piece of paper they had given us, which Leon, dressed in his Prospero costume — his glittery blue lamé cape decorated with glued-on moons and stars of fuzzy white felt, and a matching pointy hat — was flapping in his fist like a battle flag as he railed at them, shouting every curse that is vituperative under heaven until his face was as purple as a plum. In the end, somehow we succeeding in getting them to leave. But we knew we were finished. They were shutting us down.

There were all kinds of other pungent turds of officialese gobbledygook buried in that litter box of a document — fines for violations of this-and-that, ADA compliance violations, lack of elevator operation permit, blah, blah, etc. and etc. — not, in short, the sort of corrosively base considerations to which free-thinking dreamers and artists such as Leon or I were wont to intellectually stoop. If we had paid any attention to this scrap of yellow garbage, if we had deigned to take it the slightest bit seriously, then I’m sure we would have discovered the Shakespeare Underground to be hopelessly bankrupt, and we ourselves to be financially ruined in a deeper way than the most dismal destitution. However, we elected on the one hand to begrudgingly comply with their crushing request to cancel the four remaining scheduled performances of The Tempest , and on the other to rip that piece of yellow paper first into quadrants, then octants, and finally hexadectants, which were flung from Leon’s fist and fluttered like yellow snowflakes into a gutter as we exited the theatre that afternoon. As for the first decision, it was a practical one anyway, for it seemed that in parting those two men had even turned Leon’s own beloved great-uncle against us; as we were leaving Mr. Locksmith shook his thin old delicate fist, mentioning in a loud hoarse voice something about even further financial reparations, lawsuits, legal action, criminal charges he threatened to press, for apparently these two vile men had informed him that he too was in a state of dire liability for allowing us to use the illegal space that he happened to have access to, which should never, they said, have been done. And I’m afraid to report that our business relationship with Leon’s beloved great-uncle came to a disappointing close right then and there, with bad blood expressed on the behalf of both parties, and Leon and I had to deem it wise to thenceforth avoid returning to those premises, which was, to say the least, inconvenient, as we still had quite a lot of stage equipment and whatnot in that room beneath his shop.