Someone connected with the production, of course, would have called the place half full. Optimism is necessary in the theater, more so than in most places. Having been the most popular form of storytelling from Euripides to Gillette, it is now a minority sport, superseded by movies and television, which not only share the theater’s basic attraction for the illiterate but also provide a fake reality the theater can’t match. It’s easier to pretend you’re watching two people alone in a motel in the American southwest if they aren’t actually in the same room with you. Every theatrical performance today, therefore, is an act of bravery; that’s really relying on the kindness of strangers.
This production, in the shadow of the well-established Coconut Grove Playhouse, was a fairly standard example of mediocre regional theater today; technically competent, methodical and accurate, but rarely involving. Only once or twice did those people stop occupying space in the same room with us, the audience, and take up residence instead in that bleak motel room two thousand miles away.
I often wonder what the people who attend such performances hope to get out of them. Culture? A change of pace from Rocky XX and Perry Mason number nine hundred and two? A chance to become involved in a story that hasn’t been artificially pumped up with unmotivated and irrelevant scenes of violence? Whatever it is, such audiences tend to seem quietly satisfied no matter what they get, laughing too little along the way, applauding too much at the end, retreating to their cars afterward without much fuss.
This Saturday night audience was as normal as the show; I joined their shuffling departure from the small auditorium at the end and then hung around the pocket lobby waiting with a few other friends of the cast, my Hawaiian shirt and nasty moustache keeping the others from looking at me.
And keeping Julie from recognizing me, when she came out ten minutes later in jeans and a T-shirt. She frowned as she looked around the lobby, her gaze sliding rapidly past me twice before I went over to stand directly in front of her and say, quietly, “Hello, Julie.”
She looked at me. Then she stared at me. “My God!” she said. “It is you!”
Which attracted exactly the kind of attention I didn’t want, so I casually took Julie by the elbow and said, “Let’s get out of here, okay?”
“Sure.” As we headed from the poorly air-conditioned interior to the humid night outside, she said, “Did you see the show?”
“You were terrific,” I told her. (I’m an actor, and I know this. We don’t want to know about the play, we want to know about us.)
“Thanks!” she said, beaming all over. “It means more, coming from another pro, you know?”
“I know.”
She hadn’t eaten before the show, so I followed her directions to a Cuban-tinged hamburger and beer place, where we ordered hamburgers and beer and then Julie sat back and stared at me and said, “It’s amazing, you know? It’s a whole different personality. And where did you get that car?”
“Borrowed it from a fella.”
“Well, it’s perfect,” she said. “It goes absolutely perfect with the image.”
I grinned at her. “Props and costumes,” I said. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
“I’m learning,” she told me. “I’m sitting here learning all the time.”
“Now it’s my turn to learn.” I took the play’s program from my hip pocket — a simple typed-and-Xeroxed affair — and put it on the table with its blank back upward. I took my pen from my shirt pocket, poised it, and said, “Dale.”
“Before we start,” she said, “I want to try to explain about his mother.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to, but I want to.” She was very solemn and serious, and I could see there was nothing to do but let her have her say, so I sat back and listened, and she said, “Dale was her whole life, she lived his career almost as much as he did, he was the only thing that was — I don’t know how to put it — that was interesting in her life. Now, it’s as though she’s the one that’s dead, and nobody will let her just, just go away and get buried somewhere.”
“I’m willing.”
“She’s mad at you,” Julie said, “because you look so much like Dale — not now, but usually — and you’re so much more successful than he ever was. And Dale’s dead, and you’re still alive.”
“And she thinks I killed him.”
“I’m not even sure about that,” Julie said, surprising me. “That’s the way she talks, I know, and I guess she believes it in some way or other. But I think the main thing is, you look like Dale, you rejected Dale, you’re more successful than he was, and you’re alive when Dale is dead.”
“Not things you can sue me for,” I said.
“I don’t know whose idea that was,” she said, shaking her head, her hair moving sorrowfully after. “Suing you. That wasn’t Laura’s idea.”
“Mrs. Wormley?”
“She’s not that sophisticated. I guess, when she was sounding off in the newspapers, some smart lawyer saw it and got the idea and suggested it to her.”
Something else to thank Feeney and LaMarca for.
“But the other part of it is,” Julie said, “now Laura’s got something interesting in her life again.”
“Ah,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that. She used to live through Dale, and now she lives through suing me. Almost makes it seem worthwhile, as though I should be able to take her off as a charitable contribution.”
“You know,” she said, “you’re sounding bitter. I didn’t think you would.”
“Neither did I,” I admitted. “But, I got involved in a little trouble tonight, and I realized just how far I’m being pushed away from my normal quite comfortable life, and I guess yes, I’m feeling bitter about it.”
“You’re entitled,” she told me, and grinned, and gestured at me, saying, “It goes with the new look.”
Which made me laugh, as it was supposed to, and I said, “Okay. Now let’s talk about Dale.”
“Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I said. “Well, all right, more specific. You mentioned a couple of things one time. That he’d been fired from a production of Li’l Abner, for instance. And that he’d punched a man from some movie company.”
“Paramount Pictures, when he was an extra.” Julie gazed at me. “You want to know the troubles in his life, you mean.”
“I want to know the people he rubbed the wrong way. I want to know who had reason to like him, or dislike him, or fear him.”
“Fear him? Dale?” Julie offered a sad laugh, and shook her head again. “Nobody had any reason to be afraid of Dale,” she said. “Not really afraid. He was bad-tempered and he got mad at things, but when I left him it wasn’t because I was afraid, it was because when he was mad and frustrated all the time he just sounded petulant, like a little boy, and I didn’t like to see him that way.”
“That’s about the only way I ever saw him.”
“He cared about his career, that’s all, and he thought he should have been farther along than he was. And then at the end, he thought he was finally just on the verge of his big break, and everything was going to be fine.”
“That play you mentioned, you mean.”
“Four Square, with Rita Colby.”
“What I don’t understand about that,” I said, “is how he could have been so sure, so absolutely certain, that far ahead of time, that the part was definitely his. It wasn’t the lead, and he wasn’t a star, and that’s usually the only two circumstances where casting is done that far ahead.”