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For instance, the Actor awakes to an empty bed. He has been drifting
in and out of consciousness and has followed the dead end trails of every
dream he might have dreamt reluctantly, even heartlessly. At the moment
he cannot sleep: his mind is attentive, less restless than focused, like
a microscope or camera lens, ready to render the angles of his life to
death if need be.
A voice within reminds him, "You're alone."
The Actor's response is a mumbled, "I don't care,"
while he stands and looks down at the messed side of his double bed. He
wants to be alonehe tells himself this surely and assumes he will
take advantage of his solitude to assess his career, which has spanned
eight years, as well as to find a way to come to terms with Leigh, his
lover of three. But he does not have time it is almost ten o'clock
and his scene partner, Carol, will soon arriveand he has yet to
make his living room into the set of Sean O'Casey's burlesque, Bedtime
Story, from which they will rehearse a scene for their acting class.
The Actor's body is stiff. Blinking, he wanders
into the living room and throws a white sheet over the coffee table, to
make it a bed, thumbtacks a dark sheet over the kitchen doorway, to make
it a front doorway, arranges pots squarely on the kitchen table, to make
it a stove, and puts two kitchen chairs together, to form a couch. The
Actor will play John Jo Mulligan, a bachelor, and Carol, recently a mother,
will play Angelica Nightingale, a gay lass. According to O'Casey, she
has spent the night or part of it and the ensuing action centers around
her leaving before dawn; however, Angelica's love is unrequited. She wants
their intimacy to be discovered. Spiteful, she sings, "I don't care what
becomes of me, I don't care cos' I'm on the spree," at the top of her
lungs, flustering John Jo, who is to be portrayed cyclicallyas flattered,
ambivalent, uninterested and expedient. Yet at the moment the Actor is
mad. He does not know Carol well but knows she works and acts and is married
and wonders if her husband is taking care of her baby. He surveys his
apartment: a cracked ceiling, an aqua rug, two dying plants, one plastic
shade, and concludes he does not want to be a house husbandhe does
not want to be a husband. He loathes thinking of himself as being anything
but an actor; but he is losing his confidence gradually, unmistakably,
senses its diminution as discontent and regrets it.
He lowers the shade and lights a candle. Its
flame blackens the wick, yet barely grows while he feels himself slide,
or fall, into character: his heart picks up pace, he holds his breath,
expectant. The doorbell buzzes. "Come in, lass," he tells Miss Nightingale,
and sees, when she does so, clutched in her hand, a yellow, white, orange
and blue bouquet.
"For me?" he asks.
Carol is taken aback by the sound of his voiceby its bright tone, which belongs to John Jo Mulligan. She blushes,
purses her lips and flutters her lashes, in character, before nodding
yes.
But while John Jo Mulligan starts to deliver
his next line, the Actor plainly sees Carol as Carol-being-insincere:
her emotions are false, her flowers for their scene. The Actor's concentration
breaks. He feels beside himself: twenty years younger or fifty years older,
less shocked than disillusionedretroactively disillusioned. That condition,
that circumspect burnout, makes sense to him and is seconded by lossesloss of youth, time, love. He is sweating. A cold point emanates from
his spine and expands into a chill, which spreads to all of his skin,
not to change, but to reclaim his facade. He wants to go back to his bedroom.
He has a line to deliver. He clears his throat, parts his mouth, but can
say nothing.
It is well known that Brando rode the subways, to study people, so as
to perfect his craft. At noon, the Actor takes the N train from the Theater
district, where he lives, to Bensonhurst, where his grandfather has lived
for forty years. During his ride the Actor eats his breakfast: a bagel
and an apple, reads unsolicited mail and studies the script of The Daring
and The Deceitful, the soap opera for which he will play a bartender.
In real life the Actor is a bartenderpart-time, at the Lincoln Center
Grill. He met Leigh there three years agoalong with the opera crowd
she and two friends came in, sat at the bar and drank marguerites. Leigh
did not drink, she talked to the Actorabout the ballet she had just
seen, about her apartment on Riverside Drive, about East Lyme, Connecticut,
where she had grown-up, about her mother, a title searcher turned real-estate
lawyer, and her father, also a lawyer, living in California. When she
left, she left her phone number on her check. The Actor was breathless.
Leigh was persistent. She moved in at the end of that year and appeased
his pride by letting him pay the larger share of the rent until his trust
ran out.
Today, the Actor avoids her calls (she is in
Dallas working on a bankruptcy proceeding), in order to find within himself
another character: Willie, a gay-basher who, in an up-coming NYU film,
comes to terms with his identity. But the Actor is forcing the part: he
can neither alter his perspective nor re-direct his emotions away from
himself or his failure, which he feels is realindeed, he feels he has
jeopardized everything he started with when he embarked on his career
during his last year at Yale. Since then he has spent his days looking
for work, his nights temping and his late nights preparing spaghetti dinners,
watching reruns of the local news and falling asleep to the munch and
beep of garbage trucks. Each morning he awakes late, rushes through a
rehearsal, a shower and a meal before he runs out in black boots or work
boots or penny loafers or whatever the audition requires. And each afternoon,
after he has been told he is not right for the part, he goes to the YMCA,
plays basketball with kids half his age, showers, buys a hero and returns
to his apartment to sit in front of the TV and tell himself there is no
purpose to his routine, no end, just this day and the next. As a result,
the Actor is mean when he is not distant or sulking. He reads great plays
incessantly, thinks about writing his own one-man-show or starting a theater
companyhe researches the government grants for which he is eligible,
but usually ends up napping with his papers spread about his bed.
At the moment, he bows his head. He would like
to be taken to a trading post, where he can swap his method for an attainable
goal and a good start, have his slate wiped clean and be allotted the
time he has lost. He would like it all done privately, too, so that no
one would ever know and he could forget. He closes his eyes, lets his
senses drift. The sound of the subway train, the thrust and unsettling
kachungt, surrounds him, confines him, as if he is a prisoner or an exilehe knows better how he got where he is than how he can get out.
The train goes over the bridge. Light in random
blocks falls across his chest, drawing his attention. Squinting, he looks
through the dirty window, across the water: blue, calm and rippled uniformlylooks at the farther and larger Twin Tower: candle-like, where his father
works. Less like a son than like a brother, or, say, like a friend, the
Actor thinks about being like his father. He would be a lawyer then, work
with people his own age, for people with families, make money. But because
he is disdainful instinctively or habitually of the work, he believes
being a lawyer is playing a part. His acting teacher, Stanislavsky, once
said, "You must live the part."
"How wise is it to live a bad part?" the Actor
wonders.
He has no answer. Rather, he has his experience.
And before he can compare that to the 'bad part', or even stand to change
his seat, the train goes into the tunnel and he notices his reflection
in the dark glass. There, he looks different: his hair appears jet black
and matted but is really brown and fine, his pupils have either expanded
or the whites have receded into the circles surrounding his now colorless
eyes, his nose, normally prominent, dominates his cheeks, which look glued
on and pale. He believes he is distorting himself purposely, testing himself:
his tolerance for himself, his ability to rationalize or transform that
which appears distasteful and ugly. The belief that his life will be different
if he changes is supplanted by the reality that his life will continue
to change if he stays the way he is. He wants to pause, cease and desist,
declare a truce between his thoughts and experiences so that he can formulate
a recovery, a rescue plan, write his own self-help book or pamphlet, so
to speak.
The train stops. Before him, a young mother holding
her daughter's hand barely makes it into the subway car, but leaves her
other child, an older girl, on the platform. The doors will re-open, the
Actor is sure. But they do not. So he stands. But the train moves, making
him stumble while he sees through the gray window the girl on the platform
freeze, her finger in her mouth, the sudden draft in the station making
her hair flutter. He is speechlesshe steps toward her, but then she
is goneor he is gone, into the tunnel.
Meanwhile, beside him, the smaller girl is screaming,
"Let me go, let me go, let me go!" while her mother pulls her off the
floor and into a seat. Also in the car are two men, old and raptly interested,
looking at the Actor in particular. He feels he has to do something. The
woman is oblivious to her crisis. The Actor touches her arm, tells her
what happened and offers to go back. But she takes her daughter and moves
to the other end of the car.
The Actor is stunned. He thinks she does not
understandthat she does not realize what she has let happen. At
the next stop he follows her off. But she walks quickly to a far bench,
where she sits and waits for the next train. The Actor: hunched, mouth
agape, mind locked into readiness, feels two-dimensional. He tries to
compose himself: to relax the muscles of his face, arms and legs, slow
his heartbeat, breathe regularly. But he becomes self-conscious and tense,
static and jittery in tandem spurts. He half-turns, as if he will turn
in-place (to take a second look), but sprints up to the street instead
and continues back toward the previous station, as if racing: arms bent
at their elbows sharply, knees rising straight and high, until he loses
his sense of direction and stops, catches his breath and lets himself
hate the woman for not having let him help her.
It feels good to hate her, good in his heart,
then badvery bad. The Actor believes he is guilty. He becomes nauseous.
He steps right, and then left and then right until he loses his strength,
bows his head and feels the high sun thicken his hair, making his head
feel heavy and his body feel small. The Actor was born in Brooklyn, but
moved to the suburbs when he was four; therefore, he is lost, or thinks
he is lost or feels lost emotionally. His spirit is low. Dejected, he
looks at the two-story, two-family houses: close together, row upon row
of red brick, for as far as he can see. Strangely, the uniformity, the
nascent familiarity, clears his mind, while his heart, which has been
running, slows to a regular beat. He feels fine, balanced, yet light on
his feet, as if drugged or sedated. In seconds, from someone, he finds
out where he is, and then walks past the houses, wondering how much one
might cost.
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the actor prepares
michael maschio
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