Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
"Miss Dane!" And then, when she appeared, bewildered, contrite. "You
_must_ attend to the rehearsal. Those other matters can be attended to
at some other time. If necessary, I can stop the rehearsal and wait till
you're at liberty. But I can't pretend to rehearse and be kept waiting."
She never made any excuses; just took her place with a nod of
acquiescence. But she often felt like doing as some of the rest of them
did; felt it would be a perfectly enormous relief to shriek out
incoherent words of abuse, burst into tears and sobs, and rush from the
stage. Her position--her new position, she fancied, would entitle her to
do that--once. And then the notion that she was saving up that luxurious
possibility for some time when it would do the most good, would bring
back her old smile. And Galbraith, lost in wonder at her already, would
wonder anew.
They followed the traditions of the Globe in giving _The Girl Up-stairs_
its try-out in Milwaukee--four performances; from a Thursday to a
Saturday night, with rehearsals pretty much all the time in between.
About all that this hegira meant to Rose was that she got two solid
hours' sleep on the train going up on Thursday afternoon and another two
hours on the train coming back on Sunday morning. She had domesticated
herself automatically, in the little hotel across from the theater, and
she had gone right on working just as she did at the Globe. Oddly
enough, she didn't differentiate much between rehearsals and the
performances. Perhaps because she was so absorbed with her labors off
the stage; perhaps because the thoroughly tentative nature of everything
they did was so strongly impressed on her.
The piece was rewritten more or less after every performance. They
didn't get the curtain down on the first one until five minutes after
twelve--for even an experienced director like Galbraith can make a
mistake in timing--and the mathematically demonstrated necessity for
cutting, or speeding, a whole hour out of the piece, tamed even the
wild-eyed Mr. Mills. The principals, after having for weeks been
routined in the reading of their lines and the execution of their
business, were given new speeches to say and new things to do at a
moment's notice--literally, sometimes, while the performance was going
on. Ghastly things happened, of course. A tricky similarity of cues
would betray somebody into a speech three scenes ahead; a cut would have
the unforeseen effect of leaving somebody stranded, half-changed, in his
dressing-room when his entrance cue came round; an actor would dry up,
utterly forget his lines in the middle of a scene he could have repeated
in his sleep--and the amazing way in which these disasters were
retrieved, the way these people who hadn't, so far, impressed Rose very
strongly with their collective intelligence, extemporized, righted the
capsizing boat, kept the scene going--somehow--no matter what happened,
gave her a new respect for their claims to a real profession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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