Seattle Press on Line - The Hidden Thespian

Writers' Corner

The Hidden Thespian

By Patricia Duff

Jan 03, 2002 -- It began whenever she would first step through the theater door. The theater, empty and to her inviting, exuded a force absolute and unseen. Walking across the naked stage to the dressing room, she would smile a deep, low-down-in-the-stomach smile that could be seen in more than just her mouth. Her head, shoulders, torso and even the movement of her legs and feet carried the smile, so that her whole being demonstrated her pleasure in being there. She climbed the ladder to the dressing room that was a kind of tree house hovering backstage, like some cloud that housed carefully costumed bodies with pencil sharp faces. Shortly they would rain down onto the stage to play out the fantasy of the playwright with meticulously chosen gestures, movements, forces of speech; creating a lovely world behind a fourth wall.

She sat sown in front of the little, portable mirror, pulled off her shirt and leaned bare-shouldered into the glass that gave back the reality of a face she would transform. It began with the first application of cream that she washed into the circle of fair flesh on her face. There was that drumming in the pit of her stomach very small, like the smallest of moths trapped and anxious to see the light of day. There, also, was the tiny twitch of her fingers that drew the black lines of pencil carefully and delicately above and beneath her half-closed lashes. When she swiped her rouge upward on to her round cheeks, they rose magically out of the shadows and into the light of color she laid on. The lips, lined perfectly in sharp angles of amber, gave themselves up to this conversion, so that the whole mouth came out of itself and created a red-brown circle that looked like a ripe fig on a cake dusted with powdered sugar. The tiny wings batted faster as she brushed back the waves of dark curls, her head tingling, the moth incessant, as she shot at her coif with hair spray.

"Twenty minutes!" yelled the stage manager.

"Thank, you for twenty." The chorus of the actors' voices responded, not in unison.

Getting closer now, she reached for her costume that hung from a nail in the ceiling of the tree house, so that her arms were satisfied in the stretch. She slid the tuxedo jacket around the smooth, feminine expanse of her shoulders and clasped the high-waisted pants around her small middle. Her stomach was growling now too, rumbling with the hunger that always came just before curtain, and that reminded her again of her whole metamorphosis and delight.

"Places!" came the final whisper from the stage manager, for now the house was full of people eager to be entertained. She touched the shoulder of her colleague affectionately as she descended the ladder to await her first entrance.

"Run, Gabrielle! Run!" She heard the whispered shout of her stage companion, and felt the pressure of a hand on the small of her back.

"What's the matter with you?" The desperate little whisper was annoyed, the moth on the verge of freedom.

"Go, for God's sake, go!"

"She ran. She ran through the black folds of the ten thick, velvet curtains that hung resolutely between fact and fantasy. She ran until she stopped under the hot circumference of light that signaled to the packed house that they were to look at her; only her. She felt their eyes on her like a herd of cows fixing a unified and cemented gaze on a lost dog. She could smell their breath breezing over her in a foul waft, and the sullen power of their silent anticipation petrified her like an old tree. Was she frozen? The other actors stopped any natural action, and began the painfully slow and self-conscious movements and speech that are inevitable when a fellow actor goes numb. They stared especially hard at her, without actually turned their heads wholly in her direction. She felt unable to turn hers, and actually had not moved at all since she arrived, as if she were mimicking the actions of the audience. The other actors began improvising more rapidly, hoping she'd come to her sensible, rehearsed self and allow them back into the safety of their perfectly timed stage lives. They were like loosed geese, straying pell-mell from the gaggle, becoming louder and spouting nonsense that was not responded to by their partners. Words that hung humiliatingly long in the undirected stage air. The playwright left to find the director.

Meanwhile, the powdered sugar-face in the tuxedo began to murmur. The pandemonium stopped. Every head turned to look at her. Up from the depths of her diaphragm rose the salvation of the company, her line.

"The news is good, indeed my lord. The King is alive!" With that the almighty Thespis, the great spirit of all theaters, sent a surge of thunderous applause and laughter up through the crowd as the little, fig-mouthed actor made her exit.

"But Gabi, is all that noise for you?" Her backstage friend was astonished at the roar. Gabrielle smiled almost imperceptibly, climbed the ladder to the tree house, undressed and washed the powder from her face to become, once more, the hidden thespian.

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