New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Theater -- Fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
Just then, while Bruce-Banquo was speaking his broody low soliloquy on
stage, Miss Nefer cut in again loudly with, "Aye, Eyes, a good bloody
play. Yet somehow, methinks--I know not how--I've heard it before."
Whereupon Sid grabbed Martin by the wrist and hissed, "Did'st hear?
Oh, I like not that," and I thought, _Oh-ho, so now she's beginning to
ad-lib._
Well, right away they all went on stage with a flourish, Sid and
Martin crowned and hand in hand. The play got going strong again. But
there were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to be
more uneasy than caught up, and I had to stare consciously at the
actors to keep off a wavery-fit.
* * * * *
Other things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling.
_Macbeth_'s a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone except
Macbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches--or one of the
Three Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or two
of the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there'd been more
multiple-parting than I'd ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncan
beard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with his
normal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk,
pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossible
double of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for the
latter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor to
hide his Banquo beard. He'd be able to tear it off, of course, after
the Murderers got Banquo and he'd made his brief appearance as a
bloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself, _My God, has
Siddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers to
Elizabeth-Nefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue's gone
nuts!_
But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling and
tripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freya
forfend) was becoming a ricketty patchwork illusion with everybody
racing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And the
scenery-wavery stuff and the warped Park-sounds were scary too. I was
actually shivering by the time Sid got to: "Light thickens; and the
crow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droop
and drowse; Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse."
Those graveyard lines didn't help my nerves any, of course. Nor did
thinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softly
for her this time, "Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where.
Think you 'tiz stolen?"
_Greta_, I told myself, _you need a miltown before the crow makes wing
through your kooky head._
I turned to go and fetch me one from my closet. And stopped dead.
Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in the
gloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned at
that end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was Miss
Nefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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