15. The Play

Hal was pacing in the aisle. Marina could see him from the corner of her eye. Clearly he didn't believe she could pull off this first performance in time without ruining the timing for his piece. She shuddered remembering yesterday’s technical rehearsal. Her piece had run almost two times longer than it should. Strangely, there had been no doubt in her mind that they would tighten things up and do the play in time. She’d timed it often enough during their rehearsals at the Settlement house. But Hal had grabbed her by the wrist and walked her behind the wooden bleachers. “This is fucking unprofessional. You can’t eat into my time.” Coked up asshole is what she wanted to say to him but she didn’t. She left him standing there and got back to work.
Good thing he was making her hate him.
Ori and Machi were sitting on the front row beside her. This play wasn’t the best play for a little boy to see but Ori felt it was more important for him to see what it was Marina did. She thought he meant, so he knows you left us for something. She watched her son looking fixedly at the two figures on the bed. She tried to ignore Hal’s exwife, Glynnis (or was she still his wife actually?), wearing one of the long dresses she designed and sewed herself. Glynnis was hard to ignore. All through the first segment, early love, she talked with Erroll Gate, right over dialogue taken straight out of her husband’s mouth. She sat with Gate two rows behind Marina. Gate, who had refused to do the score for Hal’s piece, came anyway because his lover was one of Hal’s actors. The day Hal got Gate’s voice mail he’d muttered after his third margarita. “Guess my play’s not avante enough for him.”
“I want to merge with you,” Ned was saying. She often wondered if Hal remembered saying this. This was the third version of the same scene, the one when the love was gone. Ned had already played it as passionate early love, as enmeshed oppressive love, and now as fifty ways to leave your lover. Ned was good. She had to remember to tell him how proud she was of him. This time his voice and his body, fully turned so that Carmela only saw his back, conveyed utter finality. Even she who had written it wanted to cry. Let this be a message to Hal, the message to Hal.
The women from her class sat in a row beside the stage dressed in black, looking at the bed. “I want to merge with you, I want to merge with you, I want to merge with you.” Marina still wasn’t sure about this chorus. Fuck Hal if he was embarrassed.
Manuela’s camera work was going well. She wasn’t losing track of the cues even though they’d had only one technical rehearsal, and now on the monitors set up on both sides of the stage there was a close up of Ned’s face, set in a mask of revulsion. Manuela held the now taped image of Ned’s face as he rose from the bed and walked over to the counter in the middle of the playing space that stood for the bar. Ned had a soliloquy there. “Am I soldier, surrogate or deserter?”
There had been a progression of scenes at the bar in between scenes on the bed. Ned had gone from dodging the draft to this, being forced to collude with the war. During one of those scenes there had been the barroom rape. Ned as everyman. Carmela as everywoman. The root of all raping the Island wars. That whole strand of the play she’d added at the last minute, about Ned being drafted for the Island wars, about Ned trying to buy himself a surrogate, or was it that Ned was being bought as someone else’s surrogate? She wasn’t sure this worked either. Or if it added to Hal’s embarrassment. But how was she going to ever learn if she didn’t take chances?
That’s what Ori had said after he’d watched the technical rehearsal. He’d given her more useful notes than Hal. He’d said, “This is a small production and it’s in a space reclaimed by the community, an old abandoned school that would be rotting if the community hadn’t seized it. Why should you go for slickness here? You get to take risks for truth.” During that rehearsal Machi ran around the space, played with his cars under the bleachers. Afterwards Carmela came up to Marina and said, “I thought you said you were broken up. You three are really a family.”
After the chorus came the final scene. Carmela, on the bed alone, writhed and moaned, replaying the rape in the bar she had made herself forget, while on the screen Manuela kept an image of Ned, who was offscreen, dancing with a cue stick for a giant penis, while the chorus repeated: not guilty, not guilty….” The chorus picked up the words and the stage went black but for the image of Carmela on the bed which suddently replaced Ned’s on the screen. She sat up suddenly and said, “The battle is in my mind. I refuse to be defeated. Rape does not define me.”
After her image was gone the women’s voices continued. ”The battle is in my mind. I refuse to be defeated….”
There was a moment of silence and then loud applause. Marina watched Erroll Gate applaud.
There was an intermission and then they all had to sit through Hal’s play, a parody of a game show. He hadn’t bothered to read her play, saw only a few scenes in rehearsal, knew only that it also required video equipment, and thought it made sense from a production end to have someone to split the cost of renting monitors. Truth was, after her play his stood out as almost idiotically superficial. Glynnis was mortified. She hadn’t come to any of Hal's rehearsals and must not have had any idea. Who was embarrassed now? Marina watched closely how at the end of Hal’s play Erroll pretty much sat on his hands and Glynnis scurried out. That was a fine example of standing by your man.