Stage Lights and Second Takes

The bus to Copper Hill runs twice a day from the county seat, and I was on the afternoon one, which meant I got to sit behind a farmer who smelled like hay and gunpowder and talk about nothing for forty minutes. His name was Zach. He told me the feed-and-seed had changed hands twice since the old man died, and that the doughnut shop stayed open till ten during festival week, and that the theater people were mostly harmless except the one who directed the musicals, who once threw a clipboard at a sound guy. I thanked him for the briefing. I mean that. Small towns run on that kind of intelligence.

I was forty-two years old and I had come back to a barn.

Well, not just a barn. The Copper Hill Theater Festival lives in a converted dairy barn on the edge of town, population 3,200, and the stage floor still slants a little toward where the gutters used to run. Nan Thompson, who runs the whole thing now and has since she was twenty-seven, had called me in March and said the words every working actor over forty waits for, which were, "Rob, I have a lead with your name on it if you can get here by the first of June." She was forty-two now and had been my roommate in college, twenty years ago, and she had never once in twenty years made me a promise she didn't keep.

So there I was, duffel bag in one hand, printed script in the other, standing in the back of the barn while a stage manager I had not yet looked at directly ran the crew through a preset check.

I want to back up a minute and explain the guilt, because it arrives before anything else does.

Twenty-one years ago, when I was twenty-one and she was twenty, we were in the same summer theater workshop at the state college. There was one night after the final showcase when we were the last two people in the greenroom, and we shared exactly one kiss, standing up, both of us grinning like idiots, and then I got a call that same night about a touring gig that paid actual money and I left without saying goodbye to anyone, including her. Including her most of all. Priscilla Draper. I learned later she had waited around the dorm lobby for an hour that last morning, which Nan told me maybe four years ago at a wedding, in the tone of a woman handing you a live grenade with the pin already pulled.

I did not know Priscilla was here. Nan had said stage manager, she had said, "you'll like her, she's good," and I had said sure, fine, whatever, thinking of some efficient stranger. The universe has a sense of humor and it is not a kind one.

Because when I finally looked up from the crew scrambling around the lighting positions, the woman at the tech table with the headset around her neck and the pencil behind her ear was Priscilla Draper, and she had gone very still in that way people do when they have been caught off guard and refuse to show it. Forty-one, hair cut short now, same jaw, same way of holding her chin up like she was daring the world to start something. She was looking right at me. I felt it in my chest before my brain finished the arithmetic.

"Rob Douglass," she said, and her voice was even, which somehow made it worse. "They actually got you here."

"Hey," I said. Very smooth. Twenty years of craft, right there. "Hi. Priscilla."

"Stage manager now," she said, like I might have confused her with someone else. "You're in the main show."

"The lead, yeah."

She wrote something on her clipboard. She did not look at me while she did it. "We read at seven. Community hall, since the barn's being reset. Coffee's bad and there's no food, so eat before."

And she turned back to the crew and that was my welcome home.

Nan found me twenty minutes later sitting in my rented room above the hardware store, which is a real thing they do here, rooms over the stores, and she sat on the end of the bed and looked at me with the expression of a woman who has committed a crime and wants to know if you'll press charges.

"I forgot to mention it," she said.

"You forgot."

"I didn't forget. I just didn't say it. There's a difference and I stand by the difference." She was grinning, the monster. "I figured you'd want to know she's good, Rob. She's the best stage manager I've ever had, and she keeps this place from burning down, and you were going to have to work with her, so."

"So you ambushed me in a barn."

"You've been ambushed in worse places." That was true. I once did a dinner theater in a place where the salad course arrived during the second act monologue. "Listen. It's been twenty years. People change. Or they don't, but they decide the old thing doesn't matter anymore. Either way, you're professionals. Do I need to worry?"

I told her no. I believed it about sixty percent.

The read-through was at seven in the community hall, which is a room with folding chairs and a piano that has not been tuned in this century. The cast was small, five of us plus the director, plus Teddy Hopkins, who is twenty-eight and plays the other lead, a kid who came out of drama school at twenty-three and moved here on purpose, which nobody could explain. He was charming in the way that makes you tired. He had already read the whole play twice and wanted everyone to know it.

Priscilla sat at the side table with her script and a legal pad, and she called the read with a crispness I remembered from twenty years ago, when she was the only person in that workshop who could tell a director the truth without flinching. Some things hold. She'd say "page fourteen, we're waiting on you, Teddy," and "that line cue overlaps, pick it up faster," and every note was short and exact and landed where it was supposed to land, and I sat there holding my script and finding it very hard to look at my own pages because my eyes kept drifting left.

Here is the thing about a read-through. It is the least glamorous thing in theater. Nobody's performing yet, everyone's just finding the shape of the thing, half the cast is mispronouncing words they'll own in a week. And I have sat through a hundred of them. This one I could barely get through, because every time she spoke I was twenty-one again in a greenroom that smelled like cold coffee and dust, and the guilt showed up on schedule and sat down next to me and would not leave.

We got to the end of act one and the director called a break, and Teddy Hopkins came over and shook my hand like we were closing a business deal.

"You're the guy from the Chicago thing," he said. "The one with the long review."

"There was a review?"

"The one where the critic said you were 'quietly devastating' in a show nobody saw." He laughed. "I found it online. I read everything before I work with anyone. It's a thing I do."

"That's either flattering or alarming."

"Both, probably." He was already wandering off toward the coffee, which Priscilla had warned us about, and which was, in fact, bad.

I looked over at the side table. She was writing on her legal pad, fast, the pencil moving, and I crossed the room because twenty years of not saying anything seemed like enough.

"The notes are good," I said. "The read is really tight."

"Day one is always tight. Day three is where it falls apart." She didn't look up. Then she did, and she studied my face for a second like she was checking a prop against an inventory sheet. "You look the same."

"I'm older."

"Everybody's older. You look the same anyway." She closed the legal pad. "We'll be doing cue-to-cue in the barn Thursday afternoon. Be off book on act one by then or Nan will hear about it and I won't be the one telling her."

"Understood."

She almost smiled. Almost. It was there and then it was packed away, like a prop between scenes, and she picked up her headset and went to talk to the kid running the sound board, and I stood there in the middle of the community hall with my script and my bad coffee and my twenty years of unfinished business, wondering exactly how long a person can stay in one town before the past catches up.

Answer, apparently, is about six hours.

I walked back to the hardware store in the dark, past the doughnut shop with its lights still on, and I bought two old-fashioneds from a teenager behind the counter, and I ate them both walking, and I thought about the lobby of a dorm twenty-one years ago and a girl waiting an hour for a man who never came down the stairs. Then I sat on the bed and read act one until I could say it with my eyes shut. Not because Nan would hear about it.

Because I wanted the notes. Her notes. I wanted to be in the room where she was paying attention, and the only way into that room, as far as I could tell, was to be good.

Two mornings later I was at the doughnut shop at nine, and so was she.

I could claim I engineered that, but I didn't. I was there because the coffee in my room over the hardware store was worse than the coffee at rehearsal, which I hadn't thought possible, and the doughnut shop is the only thing in Copper Hill with a machine newer than 1994. The town has one of everything. One feed-and-seed, one hardware store, one diner, one doughnut shop open till ten during festival week and till three the rest of the year. You want options, you drive forty minutes to the county seat, and the bus runs twice a day, so you'd better not miss it.

Priscilla was in the back booth with a legal pad and a mug, and she looked up when the bell over the door went, and I watched her make the decision in about two seconds. She could pretend to be busy or she could wave me over. She waved me over. I bought two coffees and carried them back like I was delivering a prop on cue.

"I figured you'd be at the barn," I said.

"I figured you'd be off book by now." She moved her pad so I could sit. "Teddy is. He made sure I knew it."

"Teddy would make sure the whole town knew it."

"He would, actually. He told the girl at the counter."

That got a laugh out of me, and she tried not to join it, and lost, and for about ten seconds it was easy, the way it had been easy in that workshop twenty-one years ago, before the greenroom and the kiss and the morning I left without a word to anybody. Then the laugh finished and we were two adults over bad doughnut shop coffee with a history, and she set her pencil down flat on the pad, which I understood was a signal.

"So," she said. "Are we going to talk about it, or are you going to keep buying my coffee until I forgive you?"

"I was hoping the coffee would do the work quietly."

"It's not that good."

"It really isn't."

She turned the mug in her hands once, twice. "You know I waited, right? That morning. In the lobby. Nan told you, I assume, since Nan tells everybody everything."

"She told me. Four years ago. At a wedding."

"Four years ago." She said it without much heat, like she'd already burned through the heat somewhere around year ten. "So for seventeen years you didn't know, and I spent seventeen years thinking you knew and didn't care. That's a fun thing to find out over coffee."

"I didn't know. I want that understood, I didn't know."

"Understood." She looked out the window at the feed-and-seed across the street, the one Zach had told me on the bus had changed hands twice since the old man died. "You want to know the stupid part? I wasn't even going to say anything. Ever. You were a kid from Chicago who kissed me in a greenroom and got on a bus, and I made a whole story out of it, and then you walked into my rehearsal hall on Monday with a duffel bag and a printed script and I had to throw the whole story out and write a new one in about four seconds, in front of Nan, who was watching me like a hawk, because Nan knows."

"Nan has known since the night it happened."

"Nan has known since approximately five minutes after it happened. She's never let it go. She thinks it's romantic. I think it's an inconvenience."

"You kept working here anyway."

"I kept working everywhere. Regional stuff, two years in Denver, a tour I hated. I came back when the stage manager job opened and Nan offered it, because this is a town of 3,200 people and I like being a big fish, and I am very good at my job, and I built a life that does not have a you-shaped hole in it." She picked the pencil back up. "And then Monday happened."

"I'm sorry." I said it plain. "I was twenty-one and I got a phone call about a touring gig at eleven at night and I was on a bus by seven, and I didn't tell anyone because I was twenty-one and stupid, and every year I didn't call made it harder to call, and then it was twenty years and there was no call that wouldn't have sounded insane."

"It would have sounded insane." She almost smiled again, that almost that I was already learning to read. "You should have done it anyway."

"Yeah."

"Okay." She closed the legal pad and pushed her mug aside. "You said it, I heard it, I believe you, which I didn't expect to do this morning, so that's something. Now go away, I have paperwork, and you have act two."

I went. I bought two more old-fashioneds for the walk, because apparently that was a habit now, and I thought about the phrase you-shaped hole, and whether she'd said it defensively or honestly, and whether there was a difference.

Thursday was cue-to-cue in the barn, and Thursday is when things went sideways.

The barn, if you haven't read that part, is a converted dairy barn on the edge of town, and the stage floor still slants a little toward where the gutters used to run, and the festival has made peace with both facts. The set for our show has a big practical element in act two, a hanging lamp on a pulley that the second lead pulls down in a fight scene, and it had been rigged by a volunteer named Emeka who was a plumber in his actual life and very confident about rope.

At four in the afternoon, with everyone else gone to dinner, the lamp's pulley jammed fifteen feet over the stage, and the counterweight line went slack, and the whole thing sat up there creaking in a way that