The Fourth Wall by Barbara Paul Read Free Book Online

sparkling in the daytime darkness and the decorated store windows invited lingering. I stopped in a bookshop and found a copy of the one Flashman novel I hadn’t yet read.
    In the hotel room I lay on my bed thinking about the rehearsal I’d just watched. It had been pretty grim, and I wasn’t quite ready yet to figure out how much of the fault lay with the plays themselves instead of with the direction and performance. It had probably been a mistake to grant permission for the production of these early attempts at playwriting. There were parts of both plays I was still half in love with; but there were other parts that were obviously the work of a beginner. If I expected any future productions, certain things would have to be changed. Was it worth the time and effort to start from scratch and rewrite both plays completely? Or should I just forget about them and go on to my next play, whatever it was going to be?
    I would put off deciding until after opening night, waiting to see how well the plays could shape up in their present condition. Right now a little distraction would be welcome. What did Pittsburgh’s Rerun Heaven have to offer? I switched on the box and immediately switched it off again. If I hear Mary Tyler Moore say “I’m getting nauseous” one more time, I’m going to have to agree with her.
    Later on in the evening I dropped in on the technical rehearsal. A thin birdlike man sat in the duke’s seat, that one point in the auditorium where the lines of perspective from the stage converge. He had a large drawing board propped against the seat in front of him; he was calling out lighting cues to his assistants backstage. On stage, three actors stood motionless. In one sense tech rehearsals are harder on actors than on anyone else. They just get rolling in a scene when someone tells them to freeze while the director or the assistant director or the technical director checks to make sure they’re all standing in the right places as the lights are adjusted or whatever. Then the actors have to pick up the scene and go on until they’re told to freeze again. The constant checking of the stage picture is a pain in the ass, but it has to be done. Consequently there’s no such thing as momentum in a technical rehearsal. In fact, the actors don’t really rehearse at all. Tech rehearsal is wearisome and nerve-racking; everybody hates it.
    Claudia Knight sat in an aisle seat, available to the crew people streaming back and forth from backstage with questions, problems, suggestions. I liked the set for the first play; I especially liked its Gordon Craig dimensions which tended to dwarf the performers on the stage. On the whole I had no use for any stage set that dominated the action, but in this case it was wholly appropriate—the play was about man’s preoccupation with myth making as a way of convincing himself of his own importance. (I said I was very young when I wrote it.)
    The birdlike man with the drawing board chirped, and the whole stage was flooded with a strobe light. Jay Berringer crossed from stage right to stage left, his body movements appearing to have that jerky quality found in the earliest motion picture films. Why a flicker light? I suspected that this particular lighting effect was used as often as not merely to justify the cost of the equipment. Sometimes a strobe made a valid contribution to a play—the ending of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano , for instance. But often it was used just for show, and it looked as if that was the case here. I was almost afraid to ask.
    â€œIt provides an external visual reflection of an inner conflict,” Claudia explained. “The character is uncertain of his values at this point in the play. His unsteady, dimly seen movement from one place on the stage to another tells the audience that change is not necessarily progress.”
    â€œOh,” I said.
    After a while I got up and wandered around