The bladder is sitting in a pail near the stage door, and when Jack takes it to her, he watches—enthralled—as she cuts a tiny hole in the thin membrane with her teeth. It takes only the slightest pressure for the viscous liquid to stream onto her white frock, and the effect is so gruesome, Jack begins to feel a little light-headed.
“How do I look?” she asks when the job is done, and it’s all Jack can do to nod his head and say, “Bloody marvelous.” That gets a laugh out of her.
The next thing Jack knows, the curtain has lifted, the carriage breaks down in the forest, and Raymond—played by Hopkins Robertson—stumbles out. The banditti—led by Placide—are waiting to pounce, and Jack watches him use a stage whisper to quiet his men. He really is a marvel, Placide. Perhaps the most compelling villain Jack’s ever encountered. Better than Claudius and Iago and Richard III combined.
“Jack,” comes a voice behind him. He turns to find Green gesturing at the stage. “Were you born under a threepenny planet?”
“What?” says Jack, glancing wildly around the stage. He’s not sure what he’s done wrong, but Green isn’t easily angered, so he must have done something.
“Why in the confounded hell is there a lit chandelier in the middle of the forest?”
Jack’s eyes drift upward, and sure enough, there the chandelier is, glowing in the dark. They’d needed it in the first three scenes, but Jack was supposed to extinguish it before Raymond set off on his ride through the forest. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I forgot.”
“You forgot?”
Jack nods.
“You are allowed to forget any number of things. But when six hundred people are staring at a chandelier in the middle of a forbidden forest, I expect to hear more than ‘I forgot.’?”
“It won’t happen again?”
“Get it out of there.”
“I can’t put it out right now,” says Jack, desperate to appease Green, but unsure how to do so without mucking up the whole scene. “I’d need to lower it onto the stage floor, and I can’t very well do that while the scene’s underway.”
“Then raise it.”
“What?”
Mrs. Green has come over to see if she can convince her husband to lower his voice, but it’s hard to take her seriously when she’s dressed in that ghoulish nun’s getup.
“Raise the chandelier,” says Green without so much as acknowledging his wife.
“But the candles are lit,” says Jack. “It could catch the backdrops on fire.”
Green looks up into the flyspace. “They’re a good six feet away. Just let it sit up there, out of sight, until this scene is through. Then you can deal with it.”
Jack hates arguing with Green, but he doesn’t know what else to do, particularly when he remembers the broken pulley. “It may not be so easy to get back down. There’s a broken pulley, and Anderson says—”
“Is Anderson running this company? Or am I?”
Jack looks at Mrs. Green, silently begging her to intervene.
“John, the scene’s almost over. Don’t you think, at this point, it’d be better to—”
He cuts her off, and pokes Jack in the chest. “I said, raise the chandelier.”
Jack nods, once, and darts off in the direction of the rigging, where he frees the chandelier’s rope from its anchor and watches as the prop glides straight up into the air. When the chandelier arrives in the flyspace, Jack anchors the rope back into place, then hurries to find Clive so he can explain the situation.
By the time Jack locates Clive, Robertson has been captured and brought to the castle, where he’s introduced to Margaretta—played by Placide’s wife, Caroline—and provided accommodations that he will soon regret accepting. Jack tells Clive about the chandelier, but he doesn’t seem concerned. “We’ll get to it,” he says. “Soon as this act is over.”
Jack watches from the wings as Mrs. Green prepares to make her entrance as the bleeding nun and close out the first act. She squares her shoulders and takes two deep breaths, and when she moves onto the boards, he could almost swear she is floating.
God, what Jack wouldn’t give to have a thimbleful of her confidence. He’s begun to dream of auditioning for a role in one of the company’s many performances; if it were the right part and he were smart about it, he could still keep up with his duties backstage. But what always stops him from even asking about it is the fear that he won’t be any good, that when he gets out onstage, in front of all those people, they’ll be able to see right through him.
Mrs. Green arrives at center stage and faces the audience. Everyone in the theater lets out a collective gasp, and by the time the curtain closes a few minutes later, she has stolen the show. The sound of the audience’s applause is deafening.
Jack is still shaking his head in a kind of bemused wonderment, when he looks across the stage and sees Roy in the wings, tugging at the same rope Jack only recently tied off.
