Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Leon and I began talking seriously about what would be the Shakespeare Underground’s first (and only — but I’ll get to that when the time comes) major production. There was a little — just a little, not much — discussion at first as to which play we should perform for our company’s debut production. We had our hearts set on The Tempest right from the beginning, but we briefly considered others.

“What about Lear ?” I suggested. Splayed open before us on the bar counter of Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, under the shadow of the giant rubber shark, was Leon’s battered and loveworn black leatherbound Gramercy Edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare , with gold-edged pages as thin as cigarette papers and a ribbon sewn into the binding for a bookmark. Leon’s pudgy fingers flapped through the pages of the book.

“That’s much too dreary for me,” Leon snorted. “I’m frankly not in the mood for it. About the only thing that doesn’t happen to Lear is getting eaten, but if the play had been given one more act, it probably would have. I played Lear once, you know”—Leon was in a wistful mood—“some years ago now…. I was a bit lighter then. I had the beard for it, but not the physique. They told me to lose weight. I did in fact manage to lose a little, but nevertheless the audience laughed whenever I came onstage. That was in the winter, and on the side I was playing Santa Claus in a mall on Long Island. Oftentimes I would get carried away and slip into Lear, and all the grubby little children would commence to sob in terror. They laughed at my Lear and cried at my Santa. The bastards.”

“ Othello ?”

“I like Othello . It’s got lots of casual chat. You don’t get casual chat in Lear , everyone’s too busy thinking about the universe. But I’m afraid that in this day and age it would be in poor taste for me to wear blackface.”

We discussed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Love’s Labours Lost , and Coriolanus , but rejected each in turn for various and sundry reasons.

“ The Tempest ,” Leon declared, “is really the only obvious choice for us.”

“Agreed.”

“We must get it absolutely right, though. The Tempest , of all the Bard’s plays, is the one that offers the most creative leeway in the interpretation of staging, sound, music, scenery: it is a veritable blank slate for mise-en-scène, which makes it both an exciting and a difficult play to produce. The first act is reasonable enough, and so’s the second, but the Bard seems to have dropped acid for the third and fourth acts. Really — just read the stage directions, they’re completely insane. Take this, for instance.” Leon cleared his throat and read: “ ‘Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy; claps his wings upon the table; and with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes.’ ”

“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 be around here somewhere.”

Leon piloted the wood-paneled Wagoneer through the narrow roads, runs, drives, lanes, and culs-de-sac of the posh Westchester suburb. One after another, we passed Tudor-style mansions surrounded by oaks and sprawling swaths of green lawn and topiaries.

“Ignorant baboon!” grumbled Leon. “How in the blazes could you possibly know? All of these stately pleasure domes look nearly identical to me!”

We had been driving around for hours, and it was about six in the evening when we rolled past the house, and the telltale wave of déjà vu I’d been hoping for finally came to trigger my recognition of it. There indeed stood the white and brown and brick Tudor-style house, which I was certain was little Emily’s.

“There! That one!” I shouted, the tip of my long purple index finger squished against the glass of the passenger-side window. “I’m sure of it!”

We parked a little ways down the street, out of sight around a bend in the road, in order to avoid raising any undue suspicions as to why two fancy Broadway casting directors should arrive in such a déclassé mode of transport as Leon’s ex-wife’s Wagoneer. The lights in the house were on, and there seemed to be human activity going on inside of it. We saw the shadow of a person moving in the ground floor windows. It was autumn, and the trees lining the road were ablaze with color. We hiked down the leaf-scattered road, past a mailbox — noting the name GOYETTE printed on the side of it — and up the walk that led through the lawn and garden to the front door, Leon with his hair neatly combed back and his beard freshly trimmed, the officious-looking attaché case swinging freely in his fat fist, and I beside him. Leon depressed a sausagelike finger into the doorbell, and soon that same tiny yellow dog appeared in the narrow frosted-glass window beside the front door, yapping its miserable little head off. In a moment a woman’s face peered out the same window at us, her hand cupped against the glass to see outside, her eyebrows knit in an expression belying confusion tinted faintly with apprehension. She opened the door just a tiny squeak ajar, and the dog shot forth as if from the muzzle of a cannon, and commenced to scurry circles around our feet, growling, yapping, baring every tooth in its small furry head.