Jack Gibson waits for hiscue. As soon as the commodore delivers his last line and exits stage right, Jack is to run, quick as he can, and prepare the set for the play’s final scene.
When the theater company’s artistic director, Alexander Placide, pulled everyone together earlier this month to announce that the company would stage Louis Hue Girardin’s translation ofThe Father, the actors had groaned. Shakespeare, Goldsmith, and even Sheridan were crowd-pleasers, but according to the troupe’s old-timers, Diderot was nowhere near as popular. “The French can’t hold a candle to the Brits,” shouted one of the actors, William Anderson, as Mr. Placide prepared to distribute parts.
Placide is French and smart enough to know when he’s being lampooned. “Mr. Anderson,” he said in his thickly accented English, “if you have such an affinity for the British, you’re more than welcome to return to that fair isle. Please give King George my regards.” That got a good chuckle out of everyone, and most of the actors accepted their parts without further complaint.
“Placide is brilliant,” Anderson explained to Jack later. “Diderot’s plays are no good, nothing compared to his essays, but it’s Girardin and not Diderot who will pack the house. People love supporting a local talent.”
Anderson is right about everyone in Richmond loving Professor Girardin. Jack, for his part, adores him. Girardin runs the Hallerian Academy, which Jack attended until two years ago, when his father got sick. Jack’s mother had died in childbirth, so after his father was gone, Jack went to live with his uncle Douglas, who wasn’t the least bit interested in raising a child, much less paying his school fees. Thankfully, Girardin continued to loan Jack books and periodicals and to invite him for supper, and last winter, when things got bad at his uncle’s place, Girardin had offered him a bed in a cottage at the rear of his property. “Just until you can find a more suitable position,” he said as he showed him where to shovel the coal he’d need for his stove.
The arrangement lasted the better part of a year, until October, when one of Placide & Green’s stagehands quit, and Girardin convinced the theater’s manager, John Green, to interview Jack for the position. Jack had always dreamed of a career on the stage, and here was a chance to get his foot in the door with one of the best theater companies in the country. In the interview, he tried to convey his unbridled enthusiasm for the role, but his audience with Green was disturbingly brief: Green wanted to know if Jack could carry a quarter barrel and tie a bowline knot. Then he asked if Jack had a problem with heights, and when Jack said no, Green told him he was hired.
The job pays two dollars a week and comes with room and board at the Washington Tavern, which is where most of the unmarried actors stay when the company is in town for the season. But the best part of the whole arrangement—by far—is that Jack gets to read all the plays he wants. Three nights ago, while the company got oiled in the Washington Tavern’s back room, Jack snuck a copy ofThe Fatherupstairs and read every word of it by the light of the moon. As soon as he was finished, he read his favorite scenes again.
At fourteen, Jack is hardly a literary critic, but he thinks this Mr. Diderot tells a nice story. The main character is a kindly father named Monsieur d’Orbesson, who spends much of the play trying to decide whether to grant his son permission to marry a girl of no means. The way Jack figures it, d’Orbesson loves his children dearly, and his only flaw, aside from trusting his no-good brother-in-law, is that he thinks he knows better than his children what will make them happy.
From his position in the wings, Jack is able to peek out at the audience. He’s struck by how crowded the theater is. The gallery is practically bowing under the weight of so many bodies, and the boxes are packed. Even the pit seems particularly rowdy.
“My baubles are turning to icicles,” says Thomas Caulfield, who is stuffing his hair under a rather ridiculous pompadour of a wig. “Can we not get so much as one stove back here?”
All the actors ever do is complain. To Mr. Placide, they complain about their parts and the price of their costumes. To Mr. Green, it’s their pay. To Jack, they complain whenever he fails to put a prop or costume piece away, or if—in putting the item away—he makes it harder to find. To anyone whowill listen, they complain that the managers have moved all the available stoves into the auditorium to keep the audience from freezing to death—at the expense of the actors backstage.
Jack tries never to complain. He has worked any number of odd jobs since he quit school, and this one is by far his favorite. He likes all the hubbub backstage and the easy way the actors rib each other—like they are part of a big family—and he is convinced that if he works hard and shows he can learn, the company will take him back to Charleston at the end of the season.
“Kid,” says Anderson, nodding his head in the direction of the stage, “you missed your cue.”
Jack springs to attention and sprints onto the stage, repositions a handful of chairs and removes a small table. When the set looks approximately as it did during rehearsals, he scuttles offstage again.
“Watch it,” says Billy Twaits when Jack skids into him. Twaits, who is tall and broad enough to make an intimidating commodore, isn’t someone Jack wants to upset. “Sorry, sir,” he says quickly, ducking behind one of the stage flaps, where he hopes he won’t draw any attention. He takes his official orders from the theater’s managers, but it is hard not to do the actors’ bidding, too. And if he is sent off on some errand right now, he’ll miss seeing the grand reconciliation between d’Orbesson and his three children.
In the final scene, d’Orbesson banishes the commodore from his home, then gathers his children around him. “I will do everything that I can for the happiness of all of you,” he says as he gives them his benediction. Jack is impressed with Mr. Green’s performance—he really does come off sounding like a devoted father—and, for a moment, Jack misses his own father so much, it hurts.
The play ends, and a loud round of applause swells from the audience. The senior stagehand, Clive Allen, lowers the drop curtain, and while he and Jack and a few other members of the crew ready the stage for the pantomime, they can hear Tommy West’s baritone, accompanied by a plucky fiddle, on the other side of the curtain.
The audience expects the company’s musical interludes to be raunchy, but West has outdone himself this time. The song’s lyrics are so crude that, at one point, Jack laughs out loud. Placide, standing nearby, shoots him a stern look, and Jack claps his hands over his mouth.
“Perry!” says Anderson when the carpenter walks past, carrying a faux stained-glass window. “Did you get a chance to look at the chandelier?”
“Briefly,” says Perry, who isn’t a machinist, but is the closest thing to it. “It looked all right to me.”
“It’s the pulley,” Anderson says. “Goes up fine, but when I tried to bring it down, it just rode in a circle.”
“What were you doing bringing it down?” says Clive, who never likes the actors trying to do his job for him.
“Excuse me for lending a hand,” says Anderson, and stalks off.
Placide, who is playing the Baptist in the pantomime and has been fussing with the belt of his costume, overhears the discussion. “Is that pulley giving you issues again?” he says, and while Clive fills him in on the situation, Perry hurries off to install the window.
“Doesn’t matter how gently I release the rope,” says Clive, “it pops right off the wheel.”
The chandelier’s pulley hasn’t given Jack any problems, and if he were a more established member of the company, he might say so. The backdrops actually give Jack the most grief. Each backdrop—and the theater company owns nearly three dozen of them—is fifteen feet high and nearly twice as long. They’re made from bolts of hemp, which are stitched together and painted on at least one side, if not both. There is a bucolic village, a medieval city, a farmyard, and a seascape, not to mention a forest and a castle interior, which Jack remembers that he needs to cue up for the pantomime.
The bottom of each backdrop is secured to a heavy, round batten, and it falls to Jack and Clive to raise and lower the unwieldy buggers using another system of pulleys installed in the rafters. Provided Jack can get Clive to count off and ease the ropes at a steady pace, it is possible to use the pulleys effectively. But if anything goes wrong, or if Clive can’t be dug up, Jack must scramble up into the carpenter’s gallery to release the backdrop manually. Whenever he does this, the bottom of the backdrop hits the stage floor with a loud crash that shakes the stage boards and startles the crew.
From Jack’s perch in the carpenter’s gallery, among cut-out clouds and stars, a sun, and three moons, he can hear Mr. Placide’s daughter, Lydia, take the stage for the sailor’s hornpipe. Lydia is only a couple years older than Jack, but she is a good four inches taller than him, with a smile thatnever leaves her face and breasts that bounce up and down when she taps her feet to the fiddle music. She runs around with Green’s daughter, Nancy, and Jack is too scared to talk to her most all of the time, but he loves to watch her dance. Even now, with Lydia on the other side of the curtain, he can feel the pounding of her hard shoes on the stage floor, and the vibrations make him heartsick. As the song reaches its crescendo, Lydia’s feet begin to fly, and the audience’s applause is thunderous.
“Oy, Jack,” says Clive from the bottom of the ladder that leads to the carpenter’s gallery, “help me out down here.”
Once the pantomime is underway, Jack doesn’t stop running. There are backdrops to be swapped out, set pieces to move, props to place. And, as usual, none of the actors can do anything for themselves. Caulfield thinks he’s meant to be carrying a sword, but there was no mention of one during rehearsals; West has misplaced the shoe polish he’ll use to blacken his face for his role as the old servant; and Mrs. Green, who will soon take the stage as the bleeding nun, can’t find the bladder of pig’s blood Jack specifically set aside for her. “Have you looked in the back?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. It will be quicker to find it himself.
