New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Theater -- Fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
Why, I'd not only missed Sid's history-making-and-breaking Queen
Elizabeth prologue (kicking myself that I had, now it was over), I'd
also missed the short witch scene with its famous "Fair is foul and
foul is fair," the Bloody Sergeant scene where Duncan hears about
Macbeth's victory, and we were well into the second witch scene, the
one on the blasted heath where Macbeth gets it predicted to him he'll
be king after Duncan and is tempted to speculate about hurrying up the
process.
I sat up. I did hesitate a minute then, my fingers going back toward
my ears, because _Macbeth_ is specially tense-making and when I've had
one of my mind-wavery fits I feel weak for a while and things are
blurry and uncertain. Maybe I'd better take a couple of the
barbiturate sleeping pills Maudie manages to get for me and--but _No,
Greta_, I told myself, _you want to watch this show, you want to see
how they do in those crazy costumes. You especially want to see how
Martin makes out. He'd never forgive you if you didn't._
So I walked to the other end of the empty dressing room, moving quite
slowly and touching the edges here and there, the words of the play
getting louder all the time. By the time I got to the door
Bruce-Banquo was saying to the witches, "If you can look into the
seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will
not,"--those lines that stir anyone's imagination with their veiled
vision of the universe.
The overall lighting was a little dim (afternoon fading already?--a
_late_ matinee?) and the stage lights flickery and the scenery still a
little spectral-flimsy. Oh, my mind-wavery fits can be lulus! But I
concentrated on the actors, watching them through the entrance-gaps in
the wings. They were solid enough.
Giving a solid performance, too, as I decided after watching that
scene through and the one after it where Duncan congratulates Macbeth,
with never a pause between the two scenes in true Elizabethan style.
Nobody was laughing at the colorful costumes. After a while I began to
accept them myself.
Oh, it was a different _Macbeth_ than our company usually does. Louder
and faster, with shorter pauses between speeches, the blank verse at
times approaching a chant. But it had a lot of real guts and everybody
was just throwing themselves into it, Sid especially.
* * * * *
The first Lady Macbeth scene came. Without exactly realizing it I
moved forward to where I'd been when I got my three shocks. Martin is
so intent on his career and making good that he has me the same way
about it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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