So, we battled, we shouted, we wept, and we clawed. And sometimes we made the magic happen. By opening night, it was happening pretty regularly.
One problem I had anticipated worked out better than I had any right to expect. Rehearsals had actually started four weeks before my arrival. The part of Lear was handled by my understudy. This is a bad way to start a production, with the star still swinging by the orbit of Jupiter. The rest of the cast assumes you're just too, too busy to share sweat with them. This might have worked for an Olivier, but for poor unknown Carson Dyle, it could be disastrous. The only thing that kept things going before my arrival was Polly's iron will and reputation.
"There is only one rule you need to remember to get along with me," she said on the first day, before my arrival. "I am God. You shall address all your prayers to me, and I will answer them. Worship another God, and I will kill you. It's as simple as that."
If she said I was good, most of the cast were at least willing to wait until I got there... and for about ten minutes after that. Naturally, they all professed happiness to see me, and privately hated my guts. The only thing that kept us going during the week after my arrival was my willingness to work twice as hard as everyone else.
But because I did work twice as hard, I earned their respect. And they all were experienced enough to see I was up to the job.
Once in a generation a director or playwright comes along with a truly distinctive vision. Twice, if you're lucky. Anyone can see it and few can describe it. It can't be imitated, though everyone tries, and in the process the course of art is slightly altered. Sometimes this person is a commercial and popular success: Shakespeare, or Alfred Hitchcock. More often he or she is best known among peers; the larger public just doesn't get it.
Not long after leaving Sparky and His Gang, Kaspara Polichinelli became that director for my generation. Since then, she had made one film or staged one play every five years or so. She made a lot of money in her first decade, then moved into less popular areas. The public knew her work always drew critical raves, that she was mentioned along with the greats... and usually stayed away in droves.
That never bothered her. She wasn't doing it for the money.
In the theater, being a legend in your own time has one big advantage. The top people in the field will always work for you, no questions asked. Major stars will slash or waive their astronomical fees. People who had never showed any evidence of talent will suddenly, under the eye and the tutelage of this director, find depths within themselves they never suspected. "Who knew?" the critics write, and the next thing you know a washed-up matinee idol finds himself with a supporting actor Oscar nomination.
This was that sort of cast. All Polly needed to do was send out the call. The best in the business would break contracts, postpone more lucrative projects, for the privilege of being in a Polichinelli production. Hell, it brought me all the way from Pluto.
There is really no use in introducing a whole cast of characters at this late stage of my tale, any more than filling in all the details of the rehearsals. Even the spear-carriers were good. (You think that doesn't matter? Frank Capra always gave each extra on his productions a little bit of business, even if it was just something to think about as he walked through the scene, some problem to worry over, some destination beyond the other side of the set. And it shows.)
Everyone was professional. The major players were all superb. The set designer and the lighting director and all other technical people were friends of Polly, people who had worked with her many times in the past, and it all went as smoothly as these things ever go.
And in the center of it was Polly. Polly's vision of Lear.
That had worried me. The Five-Minit Bard had been fun, but it was meant to be ridiculous. Many Shakespearean productions over the centuries have been hilarious without intending to be.
I have no objection to taking a story by Shakespeare and using it as the basis of an entirely new production. The great Kurosawa did it several times, in Japanese. And I don't object, per se, to setting the plays in other places, other times—if something can be gained from the exercise. If something new can be illuminated, or if a fresh perspective can be obtained. But in seven hundred years some pretty ridiculous stuff has been tried. I've seen Coriolanus performed by people dressed up as cats. As You Like It set in a Stone Age cavern. All-nude productions. The last King Lear I saw was staged in a disneyland, and the storm scene got out of hand and blew away the stage and half the bleachers.
And yet, you don't want to re-create the Globe Theatre, either. It's been done, a hundred times.
Polly made it clear from the beginning that this was to be straight Shakespeare, full text, no "updating." But of course it would have her stamp on it. That was good enough for me. I put myself in her hands.
I settled in comfortably at Polly's shack. I even got used to the daily commute in the little pirogue, and in time came to understand a few words Beaudreaux was saying.
I warmed Toby up, took him to the vet for maintenance. He became the production mascot, everybody's best friend, and gained three pounds from all the treats people smuggled to him.
I fell in love with our Cordelia, a lovely young woman named Jennipher Wilcox. Polly once told me I fall in love more often than some people change their socks. And it's true, I guess. But it always feels like love. I have never experienced that kind of love where you want to spend the rest of your life with one person. Frankly, I think it was almost always an illusion. I cite the divorce statistics. And today, with life spans that really amount to something, I think that sort of love is even rarer. Not one couple in a thousand is really capable of spending two, three hundred years together. Very few are capable of lasting as long as five years.
So don't give me any crap about love versus lust, okay? And keep your amateur psych opinions about my childhood rendering me incapable of long-term commitment to yourself as well. For my first thirty years my father demanded all the love I had to give. Since then, it would never have been fair to ask anyone to share more than a few months of my life. A cop, a private detective, or an Isambard Comfort would always show up and I'd have to move along.
I did love Jennipher, in my fashion. And we were great in bed.
And the opening night came.
And by the second act intermission everyone knew we had something special. Our spies in the lobby reported an astonishingly good buzz. People were actually hurrying back to their seats before the houselights flashed.
And the third act came and went. And the fourth act. We moved into the fifth act and I knew I'd never been better.
God, I was glorious. I was Lear.
Actually, only one thing happened to put a bit of a damper on the evening, though I swear to you, had you been there it wouldn't have affected your enjoyment of the play at all, Mrs. Lincoln.
Midway through the third act, Isambard Comfort showed up in my dressing room....
He was seated in the big, comfortable easy chair I had requested for relaxing between scenes when Lear wasn't onstage.
He had Toby in his lap. There was no one else in the room.
"Where's Tom?" I asked. Tom was my dresser. Oh, yes, I had once more come up in the world. This was not the closet aboard the Britannic where he and I had first fought, but a spacious, warmly furnished dressing room. A star's dressing room. It had a crackling holo-fireplace, a wet bar, and my own bathroom complete with a small spa. A big television screen showed the action onstage from a camera in the third row.
"Tom is indisposed," he said, and gestured toward a pile of costumes in one corner. I saw one shoe that looked like part of the pair Tom had been wearing. I couldn't tell if Tom's foot was in it.