The Rehearsal: A Novel

  The hopefuls shifted awkwardly but nobody spoke.

  “My performance was a parody,” the Head of Movement said after a long pause. “It could only ever be a parody because I do not know this young man. I am old and comfortable and I don’t really understand his nervousness, or his uncertainty, or his hope. I cannot possibly understand these things just by watching him walk for fifteen seconds. In parodying this young man I disperse all possible complexity. I reduce him and I insult him. Your performances will be insulting too if you do not truly understand what you are pretending to be.”

  The gymnasium was very quiet. The Head of Movement said, “You cannot mime what you don’t understand. You cannot penetrate death, or God, or a woman. To attempt any of these things is to aim for sincerity rather than truth. Sincerity is not enough for students of this Institute. Sincerity is a word for hawkers and salesmen and hacks. Sincerity is a device, and we do not deal in devices here.

  “Mime,” he said. “We will begin very simply. Everybody up.”

  February

  “At the Institute we encourage our students to have sex,” the Head of Acting said. “You need to know your body in this profession. You need to know yourself. You need to explore all parts of you. However, graduates of the program will probably tell you it is not a good idea to sleep with each other. This is a small pool, and in any case, two actors together is always a terrible thing.”

  There was a little rustle of delight as the students looked around at each other to compress their lips and roll their eyes and giggle faintly at the prospect, and just for an instant any coupling, any combination of any pair among them, was possible. In this instant they all became potent, latent, cusping, even the ill-formed and sexless ones who would later be shunned or overlooked. Their hearts beat faster.

  “We encourage you to explore the reaches of your body, test its limits and its scope,” the Head of Acting went on. “We encourage you to get fit, to fall in love, to get hurt, to masturbate.”

  He enjoyed the collective flinch, manifested in a kind of sudden unmoving sternness, all of them looking gravely forward in silent straining proof that they were mature enough to hear the word out loud. Boys who, four months ago, would have snickered and reached for the collar of their nearest friend to swipe and then shove his head away, who would have yelled out a name at random, and laughed as the named boy scowled and flushed and hunched down further in his plastic bucket-seat, who would be swiftly and silently adding genitals to every conceivable diagram in the fifth-hand textbook spread open on his lap—these boys were silent and respectful and their eyes were wide.

  The girls in the crowd were silent too, holding their jaws rigid and their eyes still. Only boys could be wankers and tossers and jerks: boys were exponents of this solitary function by default, a common fact which softened the shaming, and prevented any indicted boy from being truly alienated or destroyed. For the girls, however, this territory remained inexplicably taboo. Four months ago they would have simply frowned, taken on a pinched and nauseated look perhaps, and shaken their heads very faintly, to forever banish the topic from their lunchtime circle on the dusty grass. Now they were uneasy: they heard the Head of Acting speak the word out loud and were suddenly fearful, lest such a flat and prudish denial of the act was somehow—in the eyes of a man they all sought to impress—wrong. Somehow in the short summer between high school and the world beyond, a cosmic dial had turned: self-knowledge was now a quality that lent a girl a kind of husky darkness, a careless self-sufficiency, an appeal that was worldly and yearning and jaded all at once. The girls sat stiff and tense on the gymnasium floor and tried to look as casual and as solemn as they could.

  This was the Head of Acting’s method: to make sacred everything these students might regard profane, and then challenge any one of them to blanch, or laugh. It worked. The students looked up at him, all of them without the usual proud mechanisms that would make them need to cry, Everybody masturbates but me.

  “Good,” the Head of Acting said softly. “Now everybody get up and form a circle.”

  In their haste to leap up and obey him they were clumsy and flat-footed and gauche. They scrabbled to unknot themselves and form a ring. The Head of Acting watched them fumble, and he smiled.

  October

  “What do you think, Martin?” the Head of Acting said, tapping his fountain pen against his cheek. “I thought Number 12 was very teachable.”

  “Willing,” said the Head of Movement. “Eager without being impatient. I’d say definitely a Maybe.”

  “Too many on Maybe,” said the Head of Voice, spinning the whiteboard so the others could see. “We need to start making some definite decisions or we’ll be here all night.”

  “It’s because there are more and more Maybes each year,” said the Head of Acting irritably. “The kids are losing something. Twenty years ago, kids were soft and supple and compliant. Now they’re like planks of wood. Everywhere you look you see fucking Maybes.”

  He threw himself back into his swivel chair, and the suspension caught him, buoying him back up again so he bobbed crossly for a moment until the momentum died.

  At the top of the whiteboard the Head of Improvisation had written Ambition, Teachability, Sociability, Talent in her cramped sideways hand. The words tapered as they advanced across the board, so Ambition was written much larger than the rest, and Talent narrowed to a spearhead against the raised silver lip of the frame. The Head of Acting tilted his head back and regarded the petering list down the length of his nose. Sociability was new. It had been Collegiality for a number of years, and Courage for many years before that. It had been Courage when he had first started teaching. The changes marked a devolution, the Head of Acting thought.

  “Teachability,” he said aloud. “For the boys, it means their potential to be taught about themselves, about their own bodies. For the girls, it means their potential to forget, to be able to forget everything they’ve been taught about themselves and about their bodies.”

  “Oh, come on,” the Head of Improvisation said. “You act as if the boys and girls are utterly different species.”

  “I’m just aware that there are differences.”

  “I don’t think the differences are that huge. How about this boy—Number 12. How are this boy’s chances and choices any different from any of the girls’?”

  She was cross with the Head of Acting tonight, cross with the pointed sulky air of profound disappointment that was his by rights, as Director of the Institute and possessor of the casting vote. He was sulking majestically, like a spoiled king.

  “Well,” the Head of Acting said, “he’s not concerned about his beauty, for one thing. He’s not concerned that every role he takes will flatter him, that every photograph will be backlit and soft focused, forever. He’s willing to be ugly for the sake of his art.”

  “Which is all very convenient,” the Head of Improvisation snapped, “because all the unbeautiful roles, all the character roles, are written for men anyway.”

  From across the table the Head of Movement watched them bicker, and wondered at his own stance. He thought he saw a surly vein of misogyny in the older man, swollen over the years into a bluish pucker at his temple that never quite disappeared, and he thought he saw an exposed nerve in the woman, some hypersensitivity, some indecent raw form of hysteria that made him want to wince and look away. The Head of Movement often felt like this: marooned between two points of view, suspended. He sighed.

  “Let’s not intellectualize this too much,” the Head of Improvisation said at last, repenting. “What’s important is that the boy is humble and receptive enough to be able to try different things, to stretch himself and grow, as an actor.”

  “Humility,” the Head of Acting said. “That’s what it should say then, up there. If that’s what we’re looking for.”

  The others were silent. The Head of Movement rubbed his face with his hands.

  “All right. This isn’t helping,” the Head of Voice s
aid. “We agree Number 12 is teachable. What else?”

  They observed the photograph of Number 12, affixed to his application form with a paper clip. He looked slightly wistful, wide eyed with long pale lashes and blond hair.

  “My note on Number 12 was Vulnerable,” said the Head of Improvisation.

  “I saw that too,” said the Head of Acting. “I wrote down Virginal.”

  “Nice,” said the Head of Improvisation. “We can work with that.”

  They were being deliberately polite with each other now. They’ll accept him in a moment, the Head of Movement thought. They’ll accept the boy and it will be simply for show: as a show of deference on his part, as a show of graciousness on hers.

  “I’d be prepared to make him a Yes,” said the Head of Acting. “Martin?”

  The Head of Movement shrugged. When he was younger this used to excite him, selecting the choicest students from the pool like a gourmand at a spice market, rolling the possibilities around on his tongue, full of hope and ambition for the year ahead. This year as he pawed through the application forms he felt bleak and even a little ashamed of himself, as if he was selling a product he knew to be without use or value. He had been teaching for too long.

  He nodded finally. “Yes for me,” he said.

  “All in favor?” said the Head of Acting, turning to include the others.

  They all raised their pens gravely. The Head of Voice nodded a curt satisfied little nod and pulled the whiteboard toward her. She uncapped her pen and wrote Stanley’s name in large square letters at the top of Yes.

  November

  Stanley clutched his Yes letter as he waited in the Green Room to be called upon. The other hopefuls sat around him, perched upon armchairs or stacked wooden forms, or on the swivel chairs that were fixed at intervals in front of the cracked and dusty mirror. Stanley caught sight of himself and realized how frightened he was, stiff in his pressed shirt with a new haircut and long bloodless hands. His gaze slid to the left and he made unexpected eye contact with the boy sitting next to him. They both looked away quickly, ashamed at having been caught observing themselves in such a private way.

  Stanley swung his ankles against the crossbar of his stool and looked about him. There was an even split between boys and girls. The final class of twenty always comprised ten of each, so neither the boys nor the girls really regarded the other as a rival: each sex was competing in parallel, vying only against their own. As a result the girls were cautious and deceitful with each other but bright and flirtatious with the boys; the boys, in turn, laughed loudly and publicly when they were addressed but in the meantime they sat apart from each other and watched the girls form their swift bonds of togetherness and false sympathy with something between bewilderment and scorn.

  Stanley was watching the girls now. Even as rivals they were pressing together, sowing shallow seeds of friendship and community: “I know it won’t happen,” they said, “but I hope we all get in. I hope we all do. Wouldn’t it be amazing, if the tutors came out and said, Let’s take them all?” The girls said, “Even if some of us don’t get in, we’ll stay in touch,” and some of them said, “I don’t have a chance, really. Not against you guys. I cried in the first audition when you did that piece about the hope chest. You’re so much better than me it’s not even funny.” The girls said, “Underneath it all I just want to be liked by everyone, liked and even loved.” One girl was massaging another’s shoulders. She ground the heels of her hands into the shoulder blades of her rival, her adversary, a girl whom she had only lately met, and in a low voice she said, “You’ll be awesome. You were awesome at the first audition. You’ll get in, no problem.”

  Later Stanley would arrive at the opinion that girls were naturally more duplicitous, more artful, better at falsely sheathing their true selves; boys’ personalities simply shone through the clearer. It was that female art of multitasking, he would conclude, that witchy capacity that girls possessed, that allowed them to retain dual and triple threads of attention at once. Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form and the substance. This double-handed knack, this perpetual duality, meant that any one girl was both an advertisement and a product at any one time. Girls were always acting. Girls could reinvent themselves, he later thought, with a sour twist to his mouth and his free hand flattening the hair on his crown, and boys could not.

  Which would be harder for the tutors, he wondered now, choosing between the girls or choosing between the boys? Did they have a different set of criteria for each, a different benchmark that took into consideration this fundamental difference between these unitary blunted boys and these many-headed Hydras, the girls? He realized with a kind of underwater flinch that all the girls in the room were beautiful, all of them glossy and svelte like variations on a theme. The boys, by contrast, were mostly odd and ordinary, not yet grown into their faces and their shoulders and their hands, some of them greasy and brash, some of them thin and spotted and hoarse. Looking around, it seemed to Stanley as if the boys were here to audition for ten different character parts in a play, and the girls were all auditioning for a single role. He got up and moved away.

  The room was a mess: costume racks, painted flats, trunks, scaffolds and ladders, swollen cardboard boxes, paint cans, shrouded furniture. On the auditorium wall there were shelves and shelves of faceless polystyrene heads wearing helmets and bonnets and crowns, and in the corner a rusted suit of armor standing with his pelvis forward and his hands upon his hips.

  Every five or ten minutes another number was called. The caller was a sharp gray woman who struck each name off her clipboard with relish, and watched them between strikes with pity and mild curiosity, as if they were gladiators dressed up to die.

  “Number 5,” she called now.

  Number 5 jumped to his feet and trotted nervously out of the room. The others watched him go.

  “What if this is part of the test?” said Number 14 once the door had shut. “What if they’re videoing us now and watching us on live feed just to see how we bond?”

  “What if there isn’t even an audition at all?” said Number 61. “We just get taken out of the room one by one once they’ve watched us for long enough, and then they tell us to go home.”

  “Like rats,” said Number 14, as if in summary. They fell silent.

  A few of the boys were pacing around the room, trying to stamp out their nervousness and peering at the framed photographs on the wall just for something to do. The photographs showed the class groups that had passed through the Institute, year by year, becoming sharper and more focused as the technology advanced, so the most recent groups shone wetly with a crispness and a brightness that the older classes did not possess. Stanley looked at the faces of all these people who had been opened up, awakened, broken and prevented from forming a crust, and wondered how many of them had now surrendered and become ordinary. In the photographs they looked hard and confident, bright in their theater makeup and their pinned-up costumes, and flushed with the thrill of opening night. He followed the photographs along the length of the wall and saw soldiers, monks, orphans, pirates, housewives, gods, samurai, and a group of silent watchmen in stern feathered masks that for some reason made him shiver.

  “Number 33, you’re up,” came the call.

  When they all had first arrived, the Head of Acting swept in, distracted and tilting his face oddly as if he was used to wearing bifocals.

  “One of the questions we are going to ask you today,” he said briskly, “is why you want to attend this Institute, and why you want to become an actor. I am telling you this in advance so you can think hard about your answer. Let me say that all I am looking for is a truthful answer to this question. I do not want you to tell me that the theater fills you with a noble and holy passion just because you think that is the answer with which you can win. I want you to tell me the truth.

  “Let me explain what I mean,” said the Head of Actin
g, still looking at them down the length of his long nose. “I auditioned for a place at this Institute nearly forty years ago. When I arrived for my audition and waited in this Green Room like you are all waiting here now, I was not filled with a noble and holy passion for the theater. I only knew that drama school sounded like more fun than university, and I thought it would probably mean less work. I was wrong about the work,” he added, and smiled faintly.

  “The real reason I enrolled in any tertiary education at all was that I knew that teenage girls always like university boys better. I had been a scrawny and awkward and unsuccessful teenager and I wanted a second chance. I thought I would enroll in some college, buy a car and try for a girlfriend.

  “I am telling you this about myself,” the Head of Acting said in his calm distracted way, “because I don’t want you to stand in front of the panel and lie. I want you to tell the truth, even if the truth is boring or embarrassing or contemptible. I don’t care what you say, as long as it’s you and as long as it’s real.” He swept a look over them all, smiled a tiny smile and said, “Good luck.”

  Stanley moved from the Class of ’61 photograph to the Class of ’62 photograph and suddenly saw the Head of Acting. He was young and a little thinner but wore the same unfocused expression, as if he was watching something over the photographer’s shoulder that none of the others could see. They were all dressed in military uniforms, and the Head of Acting was kneeling at the front with a rifle in his lap, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, showing a darkly oiled curl of hair. Stanley leaned in for a closer look, and wondered if this square-jawed soldier ever found a girl.

  February

  From the damp-smelling foam-lined pit underneath the trapdoor ran a low reinforced passage left and right, and beyond the orchestra pit was another passage that ran underneath the first rows of the stalls in the audience. These passages invisibly framed the orchestra pit, forming a kind of underground moat that offered two quick and unseen paths between the wings on either side of the stage. The outer passage crawled between the ancient foundations of the auditorium, lit along the floor by a dusty string of fairy lights that sometimes winked on and off if the control box was accidentally knocked. The tunnel was narrow and low, the mortar bleeding thickly from between the cement bricks and brushing rough on either shoulder as you passed, the dry itch candyfloss of under-floor insulation wisping out between the joists. The inner passage was lined with gib-board, and narrower still: if two actors met in the middle they had to perform a quick shuffling rotating embrace, like an animate turnstile revolving in the dark.