The Golden Globe

And then the curtain rises... and usually the whole mad enterprise works. Nine times out of ten, anyway. There's no guarantee that anyone out there in the dark likes it, but it has all somehow come together. You and your fellow troupers have created something.

Then comes the final curtain on the final night, and everyone moves on. For a while you had a play. For a while it was a living, thundering thing, and now it's gone. It exists only in the memories of those who made it happen, and those who came to see it. You can't pop a chip into your player and watch it again, you can't rewind to your favorite scene. If you want to see it again you have to assemble a hundred creative and cantankerous egotists, scream and weep and laugh and sweat and work yourself and everybody else to a state near the edge of hysteria, and hope that once more the magic will happen.

It is a glorious madness.

And, like the man said, you had to be there.

Most accounts of the rehearsal and presentation of a work of drama end up sounding like a riot in a kindergarten. A very special kindergarten, attended only by the most precocious, self-centered, hyperactive, and vicious little five-year-old brats. Brats who are used to having things their own way and expect more of the same, now, or brats who have always felt they should have been catered to all their lives, never were, but intend to make up for lost time now.

It is the nature of the beast. Whether the production is full of talented people or people who simply think they are talented, an ego is the only thing that is an absolute constant in show business. Without one, you never pursue the Muse of performance at all.

Basic law of physics as formulated by Sparky: One ego is the only psychological particle that can exist peacefully. Two egos equal warfare. Three or more egos constitute a nuclear reaction. They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for that.

So, we battled, we shouted, we wept, and we clawed. And sometimes we made the magic happen. By opening night, it was happening pretty regularly.

One problem I had anticipated worked out better than I had any right to expect. Rehearsals had actually started four weeks before my arrival. The part of Lear was handled by my understudy. This is a bad way to start a production, with the star still swinging by the orbit of Jupiter. The rest of the cast assumes you're just too, too busy to share sweat with them. This might have worked for an Olivier, but for poor unknown Carson Dyle, it could be disastrous. The only thing that kept things going before my arrival was Polly's iron will and reputation.

"There is only one rule you need to remember to get along with me," she said on the first day, before my arrival. "I am God. You shall address all your prayers to me, and I will answer them. Worship another God, and I will kill you. It's as simple as that."

If she said I was good, most of the cast were at least willing to wait until I got there... and for about ten minutes after that. Naturally, they all professed happiness to see me, and privately hated my guts. The only thing that kept us going during the week after my arrival was my willingness to work twice as hard as everyone else.

But because I did work twice as hard, I earned their respect. And they all were experienced enough to see I was up to the job.

Once in a generation a director or playwright comes along with a truly distinctive vision. Twice, if you're lucky. Anyone can see it and few can describe it. It can't be imitated, though everyone tries, and in the process the course of art is slightly altered. Sometimes this person is a commercial and popular success: Shakespeare, or Alfred Hitchcock. More often he or she is best known among peers; the larger public just doesn't get it.

Not long after leaving Sparky and His Gang, Kaspara Polichinelli became that director for my generation. Since then, she had made one film or staged one play every five years or so. She made a lot of money in her first decade, then moved into less popular areas. The public knew her work always drew critical raves, that she was mentioned along with the greats... and usually stayed away in droves.

That never bothered her. She wasn't doing it for the money.

In the theater, being a legend in your own time has one big advantage. The top people in the field will always work for you, no questions asked. Major stars will slash or waive their astronomical fees. People who had never showed any evidence of talent will suddenly, under the eye and the tutelage of this director, find depths within themselves they never suspected. "Who knew?" the critics write, and the next thing you know a washed-up matinee idol finds himself with a supporting actor Oscar nomination.

This was that sort of cast. All Polly needed to do was send out the call. The best in the business would break contracts, postpone more lucrative projects, for the privilege of being in a Polichinelli production. Hell, it brought me all the way from Pluto.

There is really no use in introducing a whole cast of characters at this late stage of my tale, any more than filling in all the details of the rehearsals. Even the spear-carriers were good. (You think that doesn't matter? Frank Capra always gave each extra on his productions a little bit of business, even if it was just something to think about as he walked through the scene, some problem to worry over, some destination beyond the other side of the set. And it shows.)

Everyone was professional. The major players were all superb. The set designer and the lighting director and all other technical people were friends of Polly, people who had worked with her many times in the past, and it all went as smoothly as these things ever go.

And in the center of it was Polly. Polly's vision of Lear.

That had worried me. The Five-Minit Bard had been fun, but it was meant to be ridiculous. Many Shakespearean productions over the centuries have been hilarious without intending to be.

I have no objection to taking a story by Shakespeare and using it as the basis of an entirely new production. The great Kurosawa did it several times, in Japanese. And I don't object, per se, to setting the plays in other places, other times—if something can be gained from the exercise. If something new can be illuminated, or if a fresh perspective can be obtained. But in seven hundred years some pretty ridiculous stuff has been tried. I've seen Coriolanus performed by people dressed up as cats. As You Like It set in a Stone Age cavern. All-nude productions. The last King Lear I saw was staged in a disneyland, and the storm scene got out of hand and blew away the stage and half the bleachers.

And yet, you don't want to re-create the Globe Theatre, either. It's been done, a hundred times.

Polly made it clear from the begi

I settled in comfortably at Polly's shack. I even got used to the daily commute in the little pirogue, and in time came to understand a few words Beaudreaux was saying.

I warmed Toby up, took him to the vet for maintenance. He became the production mascot, everybody's best friend, and gained three pounds from all the treats people smuggled to him.

I fell in love with our Cordelia, a lovely young woman named Je