Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

“Good. You’re hired. Pack your stuff.”

“Right now?” I ask.

“Yeah, friend, now. You think we’re spending another night in Mormonville?”

Gasps rise from the chorus. Saints, latter day or otherwise, are well represented.

“But I need time to prep my understudy.”

“Okay, you have fifteen.”

“Days?”

“Minutes.”

The company gathers. Trinculo clasps my shoulder. Prospero strokes his rayon beard. I know then, truly, that we are a cohort. Family. Bound by a love of the theater, through long practice and a reverence for craft.

“I’m sorry, but I cannot leave Caliban midrun.”

Ms. Arbuckle uncaps a marker, writes something across my palm.

“What’s this?”

“Your salary.”

I slide books into a duffel bag, fold a few ratty leotards. Miranda, with whom I’ve spent three months sharing both a cot and a stage, eyes me dolefully.

“You said you didn’t care about material things.”

“I’ll write.”

“You said you were composing a poem cycle about us.”

“It will culminate with the twin themes of distance and longing.”

She grabs a towel, removes her makeup with a swipe. Beneath is the expression I once saw on the face of a man who’d been stabbed with a pen over a game of dice.

“Were you always this much of a liar, or have you just stopped acting?”

Miranda really is lovely, a touch plump but with sad brown eyes, like something from a Bob Dylan ballad about a West Village depressive who spends most of 1963 nobly expiring of tuberculosis.

“I’ll put in a good word with the Arbuckles. Perhaps you can join me later.”

“Perhaps you can eat shit and die.”

The rear exit is dark. I channel my character’s sense of loss, his quiet regret. It’s not just the money; lucre can always be had. It’s not the exposure, although an audience of more than a dozen would be a welcome change. It’s that I saw my reflection during morning dress, looked into eyes without direction or purpose. After all these years, just a player among other players. After all these shows, owner of nothing but a mildly Victorian bearing, the face of London’s usurper class.

Even though I’m from Queens.

After midnight a panel truck arrives, Night Dreams painted across the side. I step into the hold, which smells like canvas and cooking oil. Huddled forms slumber along the metal floor. In the corner a bearded man notches triangles of pear, swallows them from the tip of a knife.

“You must be Grimwald.”

“Who is that?”

“The villain, of course.”

“I have not yet been cast.”

“And yet you appear born for the role.”

I put down my things.

“Who are you, the cook?”

“My name is Rhydderch.”

“So take it up with your parents.”

He smiles grimly.

“I play the Hero. I will also be your instructor.”

Taking It in the Chassis

For three days we cross the length of mercenary Nevada, bounce over desert ruts, bodies folded and then clamshelled open again like so much empty luggage. We eat Vienna sausages, piss into thirsty sand, tarantulas and armadillo skulls crunching beneath our boots. At dusk there are often rude whispers, low voices around the fire. The company is primarily Welsh, an extended family, cousins and stepsisters and third removes. They accost the driver, demand cold sodas and rum, threaten to bundle their things with twine and slip into the moonless night, jump a crab boat back to Wrexham or Llangollen.

“You will not,” Rhydderch says.

The whispers cease.

By dawn we arrive at a warehouse on the outskirts of Babylon, half the cast already ensconced with stew pots and bedrolls. Crones gather kindling. Children squeal with murderous glee. Above the campfires a neon haze looms, as rehearsals begin without delay.

For some.

The company juggles cleavers and executes tuck rolls while I am made to unload trucks.

“You have a back for acting,” says a strapping Taff, who carries six boxes to my two.

“And you have a face for radio,” I say, half-hoping he doesn’t understand.

Jack Arbuckle finally arrives and gathers the cast. Crowbars are found, crates wedged open. Oohs greet each bolt of fabric, aahs the frightening masks. There are waterproof dresses and robes, wetsuits made to look like period costume, faux velvet and mock muslin and skeins of blood-red Nu-grosgrain. If the Arbuckles have spent a penny at all, it is on these ingenious garments.

Although mine appears to be a large rubber glove.

“Try it on,” Jack Arbuckle says.

It slides easily over my left hand.

“Over your head, genius.”

I unzip the side and roll it past my ears like a green condom. The nostrils are plugged, the horns inverted. It’s excruciating.

“The genius doesn’t fit his shit,” Jack Arbuckle says. “We got anyone is 20 percent less a gangly disaster?”

“But I thought you took measurements.”

Ms. Arbuckle uncaps a marker, writes something across my palm.

FUCK OFF.

I decide they can unload their own trucks. It’s not too late to hitchhike back to Salt Lake, wrest Caliban from the understudy, present a sheepish but lyrical poem to Miranda.

And then a woman emerges from beneath the stage, knifes into the pool, gracefully strokes its length. She is tiny, elfin. Her hair has no color, as if it wouldn’t deign to be blond. She is like an advertisement for silk pajamas, a castle on Lake Como, someone else’s decidedly better life.

“No, please. I can make this work. Just give me a moment.”

“Fine, Shakespeare. You got sixty.”

“It will not require an hour.”

“Seconds.”

Costumers yank. Seamstresses flit. I spin upstage, fangs bared, channel the pain of ill-designed latex and a newly compressed spine.

Come to me now, oh fire of my loins, and I will stretch your canvas, paint you a masterpiece of pleasure and sweet suffering!

Hey, I didn’t write it.

Ms. Arbuckle claps and twirls.

Some of the other players join in.

“Now that’s a Grimwald,” Jack Arbuckle says, knuckling the scalp of a passing gaffer. “Can this guy do Totally Feral, or what?”

Piper breaks the surface, sloshes water across my toes.

“Who are you?” I whisper.

“The Woman in Peril, of course.”

“You mean I am to play your opposite?”

“I guess so, yo.”

As she turns and swims away, a man in a purple robe grips my shoulder.

“The lizard would do well to be less inflamed, for she is also Rhydderch’s wife.”

Three-Sixty-Five of Rehearsal Crammed into Seven

Ten hours a day in the pool and then a final walk-through at night, Jack Arbuckle’s voice a constant stab.

“Fifty percent more erotic! Sixty percent more wanton!”

Nymphs frolic harder. Swordsmen cross weaponry. Ladies- in-waiting lie in costume, ready to be taken in the shallows.

“Grimwald! Eighty percent more evil! Ninety percent more bend-overish!”

It is not easy to balance lust with a piteous mewl.

Especially since it is my role to seduce Piper underwater.

And then hold her there.

Forever.

“Release the Night’s Guard!”

Players drop from the rafters around us, tethered by wrist and ankle, swing in ovals and figure eights. If the sequence is even slightly off, they tend to collide, spears and wings and golden helmets splashing into the pool.

“Wind it up again!”

Guy-wires snap. Harnesses break. Bruises rise like dark flora.

In the midst of this madness I am expected to act. But Rhydderch is always there, with his enormous jeweled codpiece, quietly suggesting, calmly teaching, appallingly decent. Rhydderch is always by my side, whispering instructions, brandishing his sword, gripping my arm in the throes of choreographed violence that is really closer to a form of love.