David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

But what does he want?” Benji asked. He slung an elbow over the back of his seat and looked expectantly at the ball-capped boy slouched in the row of seats behind him. Brandon, who had received his learner’s permit the week before, was, by his own admission, prone to taking an occasional detour from considering Macbeth’s desires in order to imagine a well-plotted course over country roads in his father’s Celica. He stared dreamily at the front of the auditorium, but his focus seemed farther off than Cat, who sat cross-legged under the floodlights of the stage, or any of the eleven cast members who surrounded her. Benji waved a hand in front of Brandon’s eyes, a flagman at the finish line effectively bringing the race to an end.

“Yo, Mario Andretti. Where’d you go?”

“Have you ever spun donuts?”

“Your father’s going to want you to parallel park before he teaches you to spin donuts.”

A sheepish, “Right.”

“So tell me: What does he want?”

“He wants to be king.”

“Is that all?”

Brandon’s heavy-lidded blue eyes narrowed as they met Benji’s. He was a smart kid, but he didn’t appreciate trick questions. If a trick question it was. “That’s pretty much what he wants.”

“But if being king were all he wanted, the play would be over in act three, wouldn’t it?”

This line of argument piqued the boy’s interest. He took in Alluvia High’s musty little auditorium, with a stage too small to accommodate its marching band, and closed his eyes, considering the character he’d been charged with breathing life into. Benji and Cat had gone so far as to suggest that everyone treat his or her character, from the bloody but guilt-wracked queen to poor, taciturn Fleance, like a body he or she’d discovered on the beach. Limp. Lifeless. What did the body need to be revived?

On the first day of rehearsals, Ashley DiPetro, the mayor’s daughter, whose general sense of entitlement Cat believed would serve her well as Lady Macbeth, raised her hand and, as if pointing out for the benefit of everyone that she, Ashley DiPetro, was sitting on a floor in a room in Alluvia High School in Alluvia, New York, in the United States of America in the Western Hemisphere of the planet Earth, stated the obvious: “Um. The script? You say the words in the script?” The fact that her tone bent her sentences into questions did nothing to diminish her confidence in them as answers.

“But reviving a character from the page,” Cat explained, “isn’t about recitation. It’s about resuscitation .” The fourteen students looked at her as if she’d grown a second head, but eleven stalwarts returned the next day (undeterred by the doubts that Ashley voiced on the way out of the auditorium: “They’re not even real teachers. They’re like my grandmother teaching prisoners how to read. They’re not even being paid!”), and it was with these eleven that Cat and Benji began to unpack the “Scottish play.”

Those first weeks of rehearsal were a time of challenge and (unexpected) joy for Benji. At first, he thought he’d made a mistake rejecting his agent’s plea to take an audition for a new corticosteroid — a national commercial, she stressed, that could lead to bigger, better things — but pretending he had plaque psoriasis, much to his surprise, didn’t outweigh his desire to be with Cat or to help her where she needed help, even if it involved a dozen teens who sometimes made him itch as badly as the fake ailment he’d turned down. Not knowing how to redirect their more annoying habits, Benji allowed the trains of their pubescent scandals, their brittle and silly love affairs, to barrel through the middle of their two-hour rehearsals. He tolerated their tears, their shrill and hormonal voices, their labored decisions over the best way to respond to an unfollowed friend’s libelous tweets. He bit his tongue against the profanities he sometimes longed to hurl at them. He expected all of this, the mortification, the grandstanding, the giggling, the endless interruptions for selfies ! What he hadn’t foreseen was the satisfaction, an unheralded but trumpeting sense of accomplishment that came, say, when Josh Cooper’s drunken Porter, taking Benji’s note, stumbled onstage with his pants around his ankles. #whowouldhaveguessedit?

Agreeing to join Cat in the enterprise that she and the superintendent of schools had hatched at a protest at Compton’s Mound, Benji quickly found himself moving from observer to line reader to mentor. Once he and Cat had walked the cast through the basic fundamentals of plot, after they relaxed into a drum circle where they sat pounding out the complexities of the script, Benji found himself accompanying Brandon Wright on strolls to the back of the auditorium, pacing up and down the deserted rows like counsel to the ambitious young thane.

Brandon’s eyes, despite the heavy lids that always made them appear half closed, possessed an electrifying spark. At first glance he seemed little more than a solid B student, a second-string tight end for the Alluvia Warriors, an avid builder of model planes from World War II, who, outside of drama club, lived as a happy (or at least untormented) loner. But Brandon liked what he liked and took an exhilarating passion in it. His position on the football team earned him the currency a boy needed in a small-minded town to take up theater without being teased to death about it. He wasn’t prone to bullying or easily swept away by the currents of adolescent fads. He didn’t listen to Pitbull or Lil Wayne or really care for Street Fighter IV . In some respects, his classmates found him hopelessly out of touch. Who else but Brandon Wright came away from Mrs. Martin’s ninth-grade English class actually liking Shakespeare?

“Think about the witches,” Benji said. Lately, he found himself bringing the boy to the cave where the weird sisters brewed their brew, unveiling their apparitions, in the hopes that there, in the cauldron’s steam, Brandon would see what made the brutal Scot’s heart beat. “What do they show him?”

Brandon named the rival Macduff. And the bloody child. And the child holding the tree.

“Is he worried about Macduff?” Benji asked, taking them one at a time.

“Not really.” Brandon ripped his cap from his head, as if it were a hindrance to thinking, and put it on his knee. “He just kills him.”

“Then what does he see?”

Brandon described the next prophecies, the visions that Macbeth dismisses as impossibilities that circle back in the final act like snakes to deliver their deadly stings. This was where the boy got caught, where he, like most of the audience, became too entangled in Macbeth’s comeuppance, in the satisfying fall of a rabid king. Macduff was not of woman born, Birnam Wood did march to Dunsinane, but Macbeth was undone by a desire that curled inside the heart of almost every man.

“What else does he see?”

The kings. Brandon always forgot the kings. Benji gave the boy his script and, tap, tap, tapping his finger on the page, told him to read. When the boy finished, Benji pointed down the aisle, as if the descendants of Banquo stood there in a line, gold-bound brows and treble scepters glinting terrifically in the light. What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

Brandon pulled his hair back in studied thought, exposing a crop of small pink pimples on his forehead, while Benji, taking back the script, nudged him along. “Who are they?”

“Kings,” Brandon answered.

“Past kings?”

“Future kings.”

“‘For the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me,’” Benji read, “‘and points at them for his.’ They’re the children of Banquo. The sons of Banquo’s sons. Macbeth has no sons. So who is going to survive?”