Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

He scans the room. Familiar faces, veterans of his previous plays: these nod at him, offer half-smiles. New faces, blank or apprehensive: they don’t know what to expect. Lost boys all of them, though they are not boys: their ages range from nineteen to forty-five. They are many hues, from white to black through yellow, red, and brown; they are many ethnicities. The crimes for which they’ve been convicted are assorted. The one thing they share, apart from their imprisoned state, is a desire to be in Felix’s acting troupe. Their motives, he expects, are varied.

He’s read their files, obtained for him by Estelle through some mysterious process, although he pretends he hasn’t; so he knows what they’re in here for. Some are gang members taking the rap for a higher-up, some have been busted for semi-amateur drug-dealing. Theft, from banks to break-and-enters to cars to convenience stores. A boy-genius hacker, convicted as a for-hire purloiner of corporate information. A con man and identity-theft specialist. A renegade doctor. An accountant from a respectable firm, doing time for embezzlement. A lawyer and Ponzi scheme scammer.

Some of them are seasoned actors, having been in several of his plays. Technically they shouldn’t be able to take the course more than once, but Felix has sidestepped this stricture by adding a few spinoffs to his main offering, with how-tos and plug-ins downloaded from the Net. In “Technology for the Theatre,” they learn lighting, props, special effects, and digital scenery. In “Theatre Design,” they learn costume, makeup, wigs, and masks. In “Video Editing for the Theatre,” they learn how to make silk purses out of sows’ ears. He doles out academic credits accordingly. It all looks good on paper to the powers that be. Mr. Duke is such a bargain: four courses for the price of one.

Meanwhile he’s nurtured a number of skill sets he can call upon when needed. He’s got costume designers, he’s got video editors, he’s got lighting and special-effects men, he’s got tip-top disguise artists. He does sometimes wonder how the crafts he’s teaching might come in handy in, for instance, a bank robbery or a kidnapping, but he backgrounds such unworthy thoughts when they appear.

He gazes around the room, already casting the roles in his head. There’s his perfect Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, gazing at him with round, ingenuous eyes as if ready to fall in love: WonderBoy, the con artist. There’s his Ariel, unless he’s much mistaken, elemental air spirit, slender and adroit, scintillating with cool juvenile intelligence: 8Handz, genius black-hat hacker. A podgy Gonzalo, the boring, worthy councillor: Bent Pencil, the warped accountant. And Antonio, the magician Prospero’s treacherous, usurping brother: SnakeEye, the Ponzi schemer and real-estate fraudster, with his slanted left eye and lopsided mouth that make him look as if he’s sneering.

A moon-calf Trinculo, the fool, the jester. No obvious Stephano, the drunken butler. Various Calibans, scowling and muscular: earthy, potentially violent. He’ll have a choice. But before making up his mind about any of them he’ll have to hear them speak some lines.

He smiles confidently, the smile of someone who knows what he’s doing. Then he launches into a version of the speech with which he begins every new season.

“Good morning,” he says. “Welcome to the Fletcher Correctional Players. I don’t care why you’re in here or what they say you’ve done: for this course the past is prologue, which means we begin counting time and accomplishments right here, right now.

“As of this moment, you are actors. You will all be acting in a play; everyone will have a function, as the old hands who’ve done it before will tell you. The Fletcher Correctional Players only do plays by Shakespeare, because that is the best and most complete way of learning theatre. Shakespeare has something for everyone, because that’s who his audience was: everyone, from high to low and back again.

“My name is Mr. Duke, and I’m the director. That means I’m in charge of the overall production, and the final say is mine.

“But we work as a team. Each man will have an essential part to perform, and if someone’s having trouble it’s the job of his teammates to help him out, because our play will be only as strong as the weakest link: if one of us fails, we all fail together. So if a guy on your team has trouble reading the words, you need to help him. And you need to help each other memorize the parts, and understand what the words mean and how to deliver them with force. That’s your mission. We must all rise to the highest level. The Fletcher Correctional Players have a reputation to live up to, and what we create together will honor that reputation.

“You’ve heard me mention teams, and those of you who’ve been in one of my plays before know what that means. Each of the principal characters will have a team surrounding him, and everyone on that team must learn that character’s speeches. That’s because each main actor must have some understudies, in case of illness or any other…in case of unforeseen emergencies, such as early parole, for instance. Or a slip in the shower room. The play must go on despite everything: that’s how it is in the theatre. In this company, we back each other up.

“You’ll be doing some writing. You’ll be writing about aspects of the play, but you’ll also be rewriting those parts of the play you decide — we decide — could be made more understandable to a modern audience. We’ll be filming a video of our production; that video gets screened for everyone in the — for everyone in Fletcher. Our video will be something to be proud of, as our previous productions have been.”

He smiles reassuringly, consults a folder. “Next, you’ll need to choose a stage name. Many actors in the past did that, and opera singers and magicians as well. Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz, Bob Dylan was Robert Zimmerman, Stevie Wonder was Steveland Judkins.” He’s looked these names up on the Internet, searching stage alter egos . He knows only some of them: he adds a few younger ones each time he gives this speech. “Movie stars do it, not to mention rockers and rappers. Snoop Dog was Calvin Broadus. You see what I mean? So think up your stage name. It’s like a handle.”

There are nods and murmurs. The seasoned actors already have their stage names from earlier productions. They’re smiling now: they welcome the return of this other self of theirs, standing there like a costume, ready for them to assume.

Felix pauses, steels himself for the hard sell. “Now. This year’s play.” He writes on the whiteboard, using a red marker: THE TEMPEST. “So,” he says. “You’ve been given the playbook in advance, you’ve got my notes, you’ve had time to read up on it.” For a few of them this is true only in a manner of speaking, since they’re third-grade level at best. They’ll improve, however: their team will improve them. They’ll be hauled up the stairs of literacy step by step.

“I’ll start with the keynotes,” Felix continues. “These are the important things to look for when we’re figuring out how to present this play.”

Using the blue marker, he writes:

IT’S A MUSICAL: Has the most music + songs in Shkspr. Music used for what?

MAGIC: Used for what?

PRISONS: How many?

MONSTERS: Who is one?

REVENGE: Who wants it? Why?

Consulting their faces — stony, frowning, or blankly bewildered — he thinks: they don’t get it. Not like Julius Caesar , not like Macbeth ; they saw the point of those right away. Not even like Richard III , which had posed a challenge, since a few too many of them had sided with Richard.

He takes a deep breath. “Off the top, any questions?”