Robby led the way to their seats; he slapped hands with a few boys and shook hands with a few fathers and mothers. Dory was stopped by students who still got a kick out of seeing their teachers after hours. She waved to the shy exchange student from Mexico. There was Marissa Clayborn’s family; her father was studying the stage bill with an intense focus, and he barely looked up. Marissa’s mother, Paula, quietly explained to Dory that even though Marissa had made “a radical choice,” the Clayborns wanted to show their support of the play, and of Willa.
Around them, other families and kids were waving and wanting to say hello to Mr. and Ms. L. There, Dory saw, was Paige Straub, of course not sitting with Dylan Maleska. The teenaged part of the audience appeared partly sex-segregated, Dory noticed. There had apparently been quite a few breakups, Leanne had told her, and everyone had drawn ranks around their friends. Boys protected wounded boys; girls used other girls for justification of their actions.
The house lights dimmed now, and Dory Lang slipped into her seat beside Robby. Their arms lay side by side on the shared armrest. In a moment, Ms. Heller’s distinctive voice warned the audience from somewhere about their cell phones, and dutifully, around the room, came compliant trills and flutters.
Please, Dory thought, let this go okay. At last the heavy stage curtains shooshed open upon ancient Greece, with a house and some columns and a gateway leading to the Acropolis. Fran Heller had wanted only one set; she thought the Acropolis was too fragile to be moved, so the whole thing sat there from the start. Dory was paying scrupulous, wild attention; beside her, Robby stared straight ahead, and she wanted to take his hand and hold it, but somehow she worried that the gesture would seem like a consolation prize. They sat waiting and watching as their daughter came onstage. When she appeared at last, she was beautiful.
“Oh,” Dory whispered.
That chiton was pitifully thin; it was made from Bev Cutler’s children’s bedsheets, and it must have made Willa feel so naked up there on that big, wide stage, in front of hundreds of people she’d known all her life. Dory wished she could throw a cardigan over her shoulders. Willa stood center stage, and she looked out over the room. Dory strained to catch her eye, but she knew that Willa couldn’t see her, and shouldn’t see her anyway.
Willa gazed straight out and began to speak, her voice flat and quavering, and at one point even sounding as though she were suppressing something digestive: Ah! If only they had been invited to a Bacchic revelling, or a feast of Pan or Aphrodité or Genetyllis! The streets would have been impassable for the thronging tambourines! Now there’s never a woman here—ah! Except my neighbour Calonicé, whom I see approaching yonder. . . . Good day, Calonicé.
At this point, the girl known to Dory mostly as Slut I appeared. Playing Calonicé, she began a conversation with Lysistrata about why Lysistrata had arranged for a gathering of the women. Calonicé, Dory realized with a little relief, was not so much better onstage than Willa. It was true that Willa sounded more nervous, but the other girl could barely project. The opening was stiff, certainly, but it was not humiliating, Dory thought; that was much too strong a word.
Then, as the play struggled along, something else began to happen, unknown to Dory and the audience: from an infinitesimal space between the vacuum-closed doors, a curl of cold wind found its way into the auditorium and fanned out through the rows. It was the spell, of course, which now entranced every relevant person whom it had previously missed. Here it was in its final visit, this spell that made women turn away from men, and which only began to appear during the lead-up to a high school production of Lysistrata.
As the two months of rehearsal had passed, the spell had spread quietly, changing everyone it touched. The Lysistrata spell was a phenomenon that very few people knew about, but it was real, and it was here.
In the twelfth row, on the far side of the auditorium now, the sixty-nine-year-old school librarian Mrs. Kessler suddenly thought: If Marcus wants to be with me that way again tonight I will tell him, “Don’t even think of it. We are much too old.”
Up in the balcony, Sarah Milkin thought: I am done with Todd Eberstadt forever.
In one of the very back seats, the head of the debate team, who just last weekend at a meet had sneaked into the hotel room of the head of the debate team from a school in Maine, thought: He was clueless about euthanasia. He and I are done.
All around the auditorium, the spell roared past and among them, beneath their seats, up the aisles, silent and powerful as it made its way. Onstage, after a little while, unaware of this, Lysistrata and Calonicé became slightly more comfortable and began to speak their lines a bit more naturally and with increased volume. Dory felt a vague loosening of her jaw, which she hadn’t even realized had been so tight and jutting. Lysistrata started to get to the point:Don’t you feel sad and sorry because the fathers of your children are far away from you with the army? For I’ll undertake, there is not one of you whose husband is not abroad at this moment.
Dory’s daughter seemed to be easing into the part, and the play was becoming more like a breakthrough rehearsal than a performance. It was like one of those rehearsals in which the actor gets it for the first time, and you see it happening before you, and as a result the other actors get it too. She flings the excitement and new understanding all around, and the director says, “Yes!” Except tonight the director couldn’t say anything, for this was a performance, with an audience; but Willa Lang’s mother, her posture now a little more that of a theatergoer than a sprinter about to spring, quietly said yes inside her head.
Dory felt herself relax further; she leaned back, and let the velvet curve of the chair receive her. The play began to go more swiftly past, with lines batted back and forth, though Dory could only really concentrate on Willa, who was now speaking some of the lines that Dory had heard Marissa Clayborn read on that very first day of rehearsals. The day of the night that Dory had ended up first refusing Robby in bed.
“ ‘We must refrain from the male altogether,’ ” Willa said, and the words were stirring, but more than that, Willa was stirring, and it seemed to Dory as if the rest of the audience felt it too. Willa said:Nay, why do you turn your backs on me? Where are you going? So, you bite your lips, and shake your heads, eh? Why these pale, sad looks? Why these tears? Come, will you do it—yes or no? Do you hesitate?
Dory felt sixteen years of shame concentrated into the opening of this play. She thought of how she had underappreciated her daughter, condemning her as average, not a big reader, just a constant user of Farrest, merely a regular girl, not one of the ones who knocked everyone out with their specialness. She had underappreciated not only Willa, but perhaps most of the students she taught. She’d always liked thinking of them as “the kids.” The young people were the kids, and the old ones were the adults, but really, she thought now, look at these people onstage; they stirred her and thickened her throat. They were not only emotionally affecting her and the rest of the audience; they were also clearly affecting one another too, and this in turn affected her further. She could see the way they shook a little as they spoke about changing the world through unorthodox means. People! teachers called out in the classroom to get their attention, and that word described them best.
Lucky them, those not really kids, who were constantly having experiences and would once in a while actually try to change the world. Lucky them, with their recent-vintage powerhouse bodies and their passions for all things electronic and fast, all things dissonant and inexplicable. Lucky them, for the public square. Dory had maintained that the world was worse now, for a world without intimacy—what kind of a world was that? And a world of glibness and shallow references only to events that had taken place five minutes earlier—what kind of a place was that? She felt that these had been inaccurate descriptions, or at least incomplete ones. There was shallowness all around her, certainly, along with exhibitionism and a preoccupation with the transitory and the dumb, but that wasn’t the whole tale. And yes, the public
square could be treacherous, but so were subways at night, yet teenagers from Elro went into the city and rode them anyway, transporting themselves in clusters, swinging from handrails, calling attention to their ecstatic, suburban selves. But also, lucky them for the future, and the love that lay waiting. They could make whichever analogies they chose: the love that lay waiting like a web page as yet undesigned, or maybe even like a forest as yet unwalked in. A bafflingly simple forest green and virtual, or one wet and dark and real. Lucky them.
She had underestimated them, and now she felt only regret.
Willa, full-throated, standing in what seemed a new posture, was speaking again:Oh, wanton, vicious sex! the poets have done well to make tragedies upon us; we are good for nothing then but love and lewdness! But you, my dear, you from hardy Sparta, if you join me, all may yet be well; help me, second me, I conjure you.
The girls onstage who had somehow become women were using their formidable sexualities to end the men’s long, long war. They were standing up to the men at last, and the room sat at attention. A female voice from the balcony—someone young—called out, “Show them, girl!” There was some laughter. One row in front of the Langs, two audience members began to argue, and the people around them began to shush them. The arguers, Dory realized, startled, were Ruth Winik and Henry Spangold. Henry’s voice was deep and urgent, barely a whisper. Dory heard, “Not exactly fair,” and “Maybe a little too relevant,” and “So I just have to sit here and listen?”
“Keep it down,” warned a woman nearby, and activity bloomed in that little front section of the auditorium. Henry, in shadow, stood up as if he was going to leave. Then he bent and said something furiously to Ruth. Henry, big and broad, lumbered past the other people seated in his row, and then he stood in the aisle, pausing there. All the while, the actors onstage kept talking, valiantly trying to remain unconcerned by the squall in the audience. But then Henry Spangold turned and leaped up the three steps onto the stage.
“Oh my God,” said Señor Mandelbaum’s sister from the wheelchair tilted and braked in the aisle.
Dory took in a hard breath as she saw Ruth’s husband go from silhouette to fully textured human being under the stage lights. “Look at this,” she whispered to Robby, and he shook his head slowly. She gripped his arm. Ruth’s husband had wild, uncombed hair, as if he’d been tugging at it in his seat.
“What is he doing?” Robby said. Willa and the other actors had recoiled from the sudden, surprise presence onstage of a man from the audience. They looked at one another, panicking. “He’s ruining the play,” Robby whispered. “I’ll kill him.”
Henry, in profile, faced the actors. “It’s not fair, this play,” he said to them. “I was reading the stagebill before. Apparently we’re all supposed to think that men are so warlike that they sometimes have to be denied. And someone out in the audience was cheering a little while ago, like everyone knows this is the truth about men—that we deserve what we get. That we’re just these violent, lusty animals who need our horniness placated. But it isn’t true. We’re not all disgusting, sex-crazed warriors. And what’s wrong with what we do want? Urges are normal. What’s so bad about them? I resent this whole play.”
Willa and the others said nothing; they stared at him, and the whole audience did too. Now Robby could no longer sit in his seat and let Willa’s moment be destroyed. He stood and pushed his way out of the row and into the aisle and then onto the stage. A few people clapped when he appeared, but mostly everyone watched in excitement. “This is my daughter’s play,” he said quietly to Henry Spangold, poking his chest with a finger. “And I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
There was applause. The sculptor backed away, but then he didn’t move. “Am I wrong, Robby?” he asked. “You don’t think everyone’s sitting here thinking, yeah, it’s true about men; I agree with the play. But maybe you don’t know what I’m saying at all. Maybe no one does. Maybe it’s only me whose marriage has gotten—” His voice broke off. “Oh, why am I going on about this?” Dory thought Robby would run him into the wings.
But Robby said to him, “No, you’re not wrong.”
His voice was a rough stage whisper. The other actors had by now retreated to the sides and rear of the stage, leaving the two men to face each other. They looked so young, Dory thought; they appeared like actors in a high school play. Dory watched as Robby turned and said, “Willa, just let me have a second, okay? Then you can go back to your play.”
As if.
Willa didn’t even want to look at him. She turned away, and her friends, who had been there to buck her up before the performance, tried to comfort her now. Robby looked out over the auditorium and said, “I’ve read this play, and I’ve seen it performed. It’s not my favorite Greek comedy, but I actually like it. I don’t mind it at all. What I mind, though, is that apparently something can happen inside someone you love—it can just happen somehow—and like magic she thinks that she’s had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone?”
Dory closed her eyes and tried to stay conscious.
“I want our life back,” Robby said to her from the stage.
She put her head in her hands. But then there was movement to her left, and the man sitting there—the husband of Gavin McCleary’s secretary—stood up too. He pushed past Dory and then there he was onstage beside Robby. He was squat, sweating. “Okay, fine, if people are taking this opportunity to say something, then I will too. Beth,” he said. “I know I can be such a schmuck. Please forgive me. Please, please come back to bed.”
The actors had fled the stage completely. Willa had been shepherded off by her friends, and surely she remained distraught; surely the kids were all in a huddle in the wings, talking about how these few men had gotten obnoxious and ruined the show. How her father, that beloved teacher, had been part of it. Where was Fran Heller in all this? Dory wondered. Surely at about this point, the drama teacher should be ordering someone on tech crew to close the curtains, and the house lights would go up and everyone in the audience would stand and say to one another, “What was that?” But Dory didn’t see Fran, and no one moved to close the curtains.
Then, rising up one by one and gathering courage, several other men quietly stormed the stage and the Acropolis—fathers, teachers, local merchants. Some of them were there to get the other men to leave—“You are ruining my son Zach’s play,” a father said sternly, taking another father by the lapels. But some of them were there to make pronouncements to their women.
“I feel bad about that lamp, Marie,” said a man.
“Will someone explain something to me?” asked Ron di Canzio. “How can the women of Greece actually ‘stop sleeping’ with the men, if all the men are away at war to begin with?”
Boys came up onstage as well, and they said their tender and sometimes inarticulate pieces, some with a swagger, some with tears, begging the girls to make love to them once more, to let them be together in the way they used to be. “This thing we had,” said Max Holleran to Chloe Vincent. “It was un-fucking-believable. Sorry, sorry,” he added, as if just now remembering where he was, and who would be listening.
Everyone was listening. The people who remained in their seats listened. Children turned to their parents in disbelief. “Is this part of the play?” a six-year-old asked his grandmother, who said she really wasn’t sure. The actors who had walked offstage had begun to gather together in the wings, or to return to the stage itself again, confused about what was happening here. Maybe the play hadn’t been ruined? Maybe it was some sort of postmodern success that Ms. Heller had planned all along? They didn’t really know, but they started to see that what was happening was very watchable.
Principal McCleary now approached the stage, clambering up awkwardly, and he adjusted his tie and looked out over the audience. Dory, who could barely think, felt relief knowing that Gavin was going to bring order. He was the princip
al, and that was what principals did. He had given a somber and surprisingly reassuring speech on 9/11, though that was already such a long time ago.
But when everyone both onstage and in the auditorium seats grew silent, McCleary announced, “I’d like to say tonight that I too am also in love with a woman who has been indifferent to me for quite some time. I need to say it now, despite how it looks. I cannot go on like this any longer. I need her to know I love her so much, and that I am sorry. I am sorry I am stiff and maybe unspontaneous. I just have to say it. Thank you, people.”
Dory put her hands to her head, as if ducking from a boom. Where was poor Leanne? Had she already died in her seat in the back? Suddenly a small woman came up onstage and joined all the men. It was Wendy McCleary, the principal’s wife, and she strode up to her husband, putting her arms around him. She was as tiny as a little girl.
“Gavin, I never meant for any of that to happen,” Wendy said. “I didn’t know it caused you such pain. I am here now, Gavin. Don’t worry anymore, I am here.”
The principal was briefly confused, but he bent down and let his wife hold him, and within seconds he had relaxed into the embrace. Soon he was looking into his wife’s eyes as surely he had done twenty years earlier, when they had first fallen hard for each other in their own way, somewhere, somehow. Everyone’s story of love had its own catchphrases and props that the couple would always remember and refer to tenderly. It was as if the principal was suddenly remembering now. He closed his eyes as he leaned against his wife, who held him steady. He let her take him, and he was relieved.
His example caused a few more men to climb the stage and publicly ask women to take them back. Some of them climbed up onto the Acropolis to get a better view of the audience and make themselves seen and heard. The structure, not built for this many people, began to split and crumble a little. There was Ed Cutler onstage, saying that he adored his wife more than she would ever know, and that he needed her. And there, almost immediately, was Bev Cutler. And Mr. Evans the old janitor, and his wife Mrs. Evans. “I don’t want to fight anymore. I’d like to be the way we used to be, Adeline,” he said to her in a slow, deliberate voice, so that the whole school finally heard the cafeteria lady’s first name. And there was Abby Means along with her boyfriend whom no one had ever seen; and, wait, Malcolm Bean, the foreign-car dealer, who had come to the play tonight hoping that he could get a glimpse of Leanne. And various teenagers, all of them reuniting in a heap, some of them starting to make out and grope each other. Lioness on the Cheese Grater? Maybe that would be enacted here, if someone didn’t stop it. Eli wasn’t anywhere to be found, Dory noticed momentarily.