Idlewild, p.11
Idlewild, page 11
On Friday afternoon, the full cast met in the Meetinghouse Loft for the first read-through. Wanda seated us all in a circle and began, as she liked to do, by asking the leads to describe their characters. Bottom went first: “When he’s not on the battlefield or giving a speech, Othello is secretly very unsure of himself.” Daylily Jones went second: “Desdemona is very trusting, and she always sees the best in people. If something goes wrong, her first instinct is to blame herself.” That sort of thing.
“Now, Fay, in your audition,” said Wanda, “you spoke a bit about feeling a connection to the character of Iago. What does he mean to you?”
As a perennial bit player, I usually considered this exercise a tedious waste of time. But now that I was a lead, I fancied myself to be under intense scrutiny from my castmates. I cast a pained glance at Nell beside me, but she looked lost in thought, no doubt preoccupied with her own impending précis of Emilia.
“Well,” I said, looking around the circle of faces, “Iago is evil, for sure. But I don’t think he would be evil if he lived in a time when it was socially acceptable to be gay.”
There was scattered laughter.
“Seriously,” I said. “He wouldn’t need to fuck up Othello’s marriage—”
“Please, Fay: screw up,” said Wanda. That was what passed for school-appropriate language at Idlewild.
“He wouldn’t need to screw up Othello’s marriage if he could get married himself. Iago, I mean. Like, to another dude.”
I was flagrantly bluffing. These were not my authentic thoughts on the nature of Iago. I did not truly believe that Iago would cease to be evil if the Venetian government legalized gay marriage—though gay marriage was itself such a pie-in-the-sky abstraction in 2002, even at Idlewild, that I invoked it mostly as a rhetorical device. Still, the shallowness of my argument embarrassed me even then. I resorted to it only because (a) I couldn’t find the language to articulate precisely why I did perceive Iago as a queer character, and (b) I knew it would create sufficient discomfort to preempt any follow-up questions.
The gambit worked. With a briskness just shy of sarcasm, Wanda said, “Thank you for sharing your thoughts,” and moved on to the other Iago. “What about you, Theo? Do you agree with Fay?”
“Uh,” said Theo. “Not so much.” He was sitting rather bizarrely in his black plastic chair, his spine twisted in a catlike contortion so that one arm remained draped over the back of the seat even as he turned to face Wanda. His legs were crossed, and one foot jiggled madly in the air, creating a slight breeze that rippled the fringe of the scarf around his neck. He was, on the whole, a strange combination of excess energy and total languor. “It’s not that deep,” he said. “I think he’s just a dickwad.”
The cast laughed. My face burned.
“That’s no way to speak about your character,” said Wanda. “No one is just a dickwad. Is there anything about Iago that you can personally relate to?”
On the chair next to Theo, Christopher Korkian (who was cast in the role of Friday night Cassio) said, “The fact that he’s a dickwad.”
The cast laughed. Theo pretended to be outraged. “Bitch-ass mothafucka, I’ma choke you out,” he said, doing one of his character voices. He pulled off his scarf—it was a camel-colored tartan, the Burberry pattern, though I didn’t know that at the time—and approached Christopher as if to strangle him with it. Christopher leaped off his chair, and Theo began to chase him around the room, scarf brandished. People giggled and shrieked and ducked for cover. As Wanda struggled to restore order, Nell muttered, “This is why you don’t give leads to sophomores.”
It took quite some time before we were able to begin the actual read-through, which itself was even slower going. Wanda, a strict Shakespearean constructionist, was not in the habit of making cuts for length or comprehensibility, and she was determined to read through the full text in one sitting. Apart from Othello and Desdemona, all roles had been double-cast; for fairness’s sake, Wanda instructed the role-sharing actors to take turns reading alternate scenes, which was exactly as confusing and inefficient as it sounds. Through the window, the sky darkened. The cast’s excitement turned to torpor. And as I read aloud my Iago lines, alternating scene by scene with Theo, distress set in.
How vividly I could visualize what I wanted my Iago to look like! How clearly I saw his wickedness externalized as telltale sissy traits that set him apart from everyone else: the effete flicks of the wrist, the lightly sibilant pronunciation, the fine dark clothing that clung suggestively to narrow hips. Eyeliner, perhaps. The image set my heart racing with joyful narcissism, a full-body epiphany that this was it—with “it” existing simultaneously as “the physical manifestation of what I like best about myself” and “that which I most wish to fuck.”
But this queer-coded villainy relied on a gender transgression that moved in only one direction. During that first read-through, I made the sickening discovery that I could not perform effeminacy—I physically couldn’t. When I flicked my wrist for emphasis, I saw myself as a hand-flapping teenybopper ditz. I pictured myself in eyeliner and realized I would be indistinguishable from Juniper Green or Rollerblading Maddy or any other average-faced girl in drugstore makeup. Tight trousers and half-unbuttoned shirts would only draw attention to my breasts and stomach and other excess flesh so anathema to the gaunt Iago of my Platonic ideal. I’d so looked forward to delivering lines like “My lord, you know I love you” and “I am your own forever,” but when I did so I heard my own voice, shrill and pink, and wanted to weep over the wrongness of it.
How unfair, I thought, gazing across the circle at Theo. He had no ear for the rhythms of iambic pentameter. He mispronounced carrack and hyssop and other words I’d gone to the trouble to look up in the dictionary beforehand. He rattled out his longer speeches at the machine-gun clip that always betrays the novice Shakespearean actor (see Romeo + Juliet, 1996, dir. Baz Luhrmann). And yet he was better suited to the role of Iago than I would ever be, simply by virtue of his boyness—his slim-hipped, snakelike body, twisted impossibly in that black plastic chair; his black turtleneck and cashmere scarf and sleek hair that flopped asymmetrically over one eye; his arm draped indolently over the back of Christopher’s seat, creating on first glance the illusion that his arm was around Christopher’s shoulders. What a waste. Theo Severyn didn’t know what he had.
After the read-through, walking west across Union Square in the windy dark, I tried to explain all this to Nell.
“If you can’t be effeminate,” said Nell, “maybe you can be manly. Combat boots, dog tags. Shave your head. You’re supposed to be in the military, right?”
She didn’t understand, I thought. But then neither did I. “I don’t know,” I said. “I really think Iago should be pretty.”
“Well, you’re pretty,” said Nell.
“Sure,” I said. (I never thanked Nell for anything. There would come a time, later, when I wanted to, but by then the backlog was too vast; I didn’t know where to begin.) “But a girl is supposed to be pretty. I want Iago to be pretty in a way that feels creepy and wrong, so the audience will get that he’s gay.”
“You think being gay is creepy and wrong?”
Of course I didn’t. Did I? Unable to formulate a counterargument on the spot, I hesitated.
“Oh my god, you’re a homophobe,” she said. “I see it now. You want to turn all the gay guys straight so they’ll do you.” It was a joke. Nell often defused real problems by presenting them as jokes. At the time I failed to appreciate what a talent it was.
The wind blew harder. We paused at a sidewalk kiosk selling winter accessories—cheap hats and gloves and pashminas that would no doubt unravel within hours after purchase. Nell was drawn to the newsboy caps; the surly vendor provided her with a hand mirror so she could check herself out as she tried them on. Idly, I examined the cloches, the berets, the scarves. I picked up a slate-blue scarf with a long fringe. Experimentally, I flung it over my neck.
“Hey, that looks nice,” said Nell. She held up the mirror so I could see myself. Only my face was visible in it, not my body, and visibility was low in the orange light of the streetlamps. My first thought, upon seeing the reflection, was that I looked like someone else.
Another cold gust tore through Union Square. I tightened the scarf around my neck. In the mirror, I saw the fringe ripple in the wind.
“Five dollars,” said the vendor, and I bought it.
From that night onward, using the scarf, I began to practice. I did it alone, after Nell had gone home for the night, or on weekend mornings after I got out of the shower. Standing in front of my bathroom mirror, I tossed the scarf over one shoulder and recited my lines, making my voice as deep as it would go. “My lord, you know I love you,” I droned. “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly.” I flipped the scarf, beheld myself from another angle. “It’s not that deep,” I told the mirror. “I think he’s just a dickwad.” I tried again, pushing my voice even lower. “Just a dickwad.”
It hurt my throat to speak this way for more than a minute at a time. I figured that my vocal cords, like any muscle, needed to be trained and strengthened. Night after night I pushed them past the point of pain, hoping the exercise would pay off in time for the play.
F&N, 2002
“Gather round, little lambkins,” says Wanda. “I have an announcement.”
It is six o’clock on a Friday and rehearsal has just ended, so it is not without some grumbling that the whole cast settles into a circle on the gray-carpeted floor.
Wanda strides to the center, her scarves fluttering behind her. “It’s my great pleasure,” she says, “to share a special treat with you.”
The underclassmen perk up, unaware Wanda is a serial abuser of the word treat.
Wanda says, “I’ve cooked up a new prologue for the play!”
The underclassmen try and fail to hide their disappointment.
“It was inspired,” she says, “by a conversation I had recently with Devi Saxena. She told me that at the time Shakespeare wrote Othello, the very concept of race didn’t yet exist! Can you imagine?” (We can, because Devi gives the same spiel to her sophomore English class every year.) “The word Moor, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t mean black in the modern sense. Rather, it refers to the Muslim people of North Africa. Othello, if he were real, would be an Algerian or Moroccan fellow—quite a bit more light-skinned than he’s usually depicted.”
A freshgirl named Kendra Kwok raises her hand. “How come all the characters keep describing Othello as ‘black’?”
“Ah, those of you who were in Midsummer last year should recall the answer to that. Jennifer, you were our Hermia, the ‘raven’ to Helena’s ‘dove’—can you tell us?”
Juniper Green says, “In Elizabethan England, if you called someone black, that just meant they had dark hair. Or, like, a tan or whatever.”
“Brilliant. Now, this poses a bit of a pickle for modern audiences! How do we convey that this play takes place in a world without the concept of race? Last night—eureka!—it came to me. What we need is a framing device, so that the audience can see us departing to a world before race. And so I’ve set the prologue in the antebellum South.”
We the F&N unit, having nearly zoned out, do a double take at those last two words. The rest of the cast looks similarly thrown. Daylily mouths to Juniper, The what?
“It will be performed in dumb show”—we the F&N unit resist the temptation to crack an obvious joke—“but it will establish the characters through pantomime and tableau. Iago is the cruel slave master, Desdemona his lovely wife. Othello is their prize slave”—her eyes shine with excitement as she reveals the twist—“and he and Desdemona are having a forbidden love affair.”
She pauses for breath, overwhelmed by the drama of a situation she just made up.
“Iago comes upon them together,” she continues, “and beats Othello unconscious. That’s when the lighting and sound cues will tip off the audience that we’re entering a dream sequence—and from that point onward, the play unfolds as written. You see, the entire play is this slave’s dream. A dream of a world where he can be a general and marry who he wishes.”
She clasps her hands together and beams around the circle.
Here’s the thing: we the F&N unit don’t dislike Wanda. We wish she’d favor us as she favors Daylily Jones, but everyone favors Daylily Jones, so we don’t take it personally. Wanda’s attention, while distributed unevenly, is always kind in nature. When we call her Wanda the Witch, it’s only because we really do suspect her of possessing magical powers, especially in the moment when the opening-night curtain goes up and the previous eight weeks of chaos somehow resolve, against all reason, into something quickbright and alive. We love that she flounces around bedecked in sequins and fluttering silk scarves. We love her cat’s-eye glasses and dangly earrings and many hands’ worth of oversized rings. We especially love that she’s British, so much that we have a half-serious conspiracy theory that she’s actually just a regular American who’s been faking a British accent this whole time because it commands such awe from students. But this prologue is strong evidence for her foreignness.
Daylily Jones, upon whom we can always count to miss the point, is the first to break the silence. “Wait,” she says, frowning. “So Iago and Desdemona are married?”
“In the framing device, dear,” says Wanda. “Not in Shakespeare’s text.”
“But … how should that inform my performance?”
We the F&N unit roll our eyes. But this question, which will surely occupy Wanda for the next five minutes as she answers it in detail in front of an entire crowd of people to whom it does not apply, gives us valuable time to assess the mood of the room.
Of the highest interest to us is the reaction of Bottom—but of course Bottom is perfectly aware of this, and being the accomplished actor he is, he manages to keep his face perfectly neutral. We can’t even catch his eye.
Juniper Green, on the other hand, is employing her acting skills (such as they are) to the opposite end, her mouth agape in a theatrical mask of horror. Though this may be only because her character, Emilia, has no role in the prologue.
Daylily Jones is a vision of quizzical loveliness, her alabaster brow furrowed in confusion, but this is most likely an issue of basic comprehension.
We survey the underclassmen and make accidental eye contact with a number of them. They’re likewise studying us to gauge our reaction.
Christopher Korkian is sitting across the circle from us. We’re pretty sure that he’s reading the GQ magazine perpetually tucked into the binder that holds his script, and that he didn’t hear a word Wanda said.
And at his side, as always, is Theo Severyn. Theo sits on the gray-carpeted floor with his knees pulled up to his chest. His face is hidden in his hands, and his shoulders shake. For one confused second, it appears to the F&N unit that he is weeping. But then he looks up and lowers his hands to reveal his eyes, which triggers the following chain of events:
1. He makes direct eye contact, across the circle, with the F&N unit.
2. We the F&N unit see that he’s not crying, but laughing—or, rather, trying so hard not to laugh that his face is bright red with the effort.
3. Caught off guard and vulnerable to contagion, we the F&N unit reflexively get the giggles, which we attempt to muffle with our hands.
4. The sight of us stifling our giggles causes Theo to burst out laughing.
5. This causes the F&N unit to burst out laughing.
Heads swivel toward us in perplexity. Wanda, who has been expounding this whole time, casts us a sharp look. “May I ask what’s so amusing?”
We the F&N unit struggle to collect ourselves. We mutter apologies, as does Theo. “It’s a cool idea,” he says. His voice is calm—how did he manage to regain his composure so quickly? “Dark, but I like it.”
“Well, then,” says Wanda, “if there are no further questions, I suppose that wraps up today’s rehearsal.” She strides to the door. “If you have any character questions you’d like to discuss, I’ll be in my office until half six.” The door swings shut behind her.
The instant Wanda is out of the room, Juniper Green jumps to her feet. “Cast meeting!” she shrills. “Cast meeting! Um, can we talk about that prologue?”
Murmurs fill the rehearsal room as our castmates clamber to their feet and surround Juniper. We the F&N unit join them with foot-dragging reluctance. Such a cast meeting is probably a good idea, but who died and put Juniper Green in charge of it?
Bottom glances over his shoulder toward the gray wall that separates the rehearsal room from Wanda’s office. In an uncharacteristically small voice, he says, “Can we have it somewhere other than here?”
Eager to undermine Juniper’s authority, we the F&N unit begin to chant. “Starbucks! Starbucks!”
Theo joins our chant. “Starbucks! Starbucks!” Christopher does too, and the underclassgirls join in—“Starbucks! Starbucks!”—until, in frustration, Juniper relents.
Five minutes later the full cast of Othello crowds the Starbucks on the corner of Fifteenth and Third, with the leads crammed around a tiny chessboard-patterned table. There aren’t enough chairs to go around, so we the F&N unit squeeze onto a single chair, tiny Juniper perches on Daylily’s lap, Theo and Christopher sit on the table itself, and Bottom stands gallantly with the underclassmen.
“So,” says Juniper. “That prologue is retarded, right?”
The cast replies in near-unison.
F&N: “So retarded.”
Theo and Christopher: “So retarded.”
Bottom: “Yes, I have some concerns.”
Daylily: “I don’t think it’s so—” She corrects herself just in time. “So retarded!”
