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“Doesn’t it occur to you he wanted to lose her and it would not be easy to pry her loose? He had to work on C-12 to want her and on the woman to want to be wanted-and he did it. He won.”
I thought about that. “But how could you have been sure? If the woman was as good-looking as you say she was-if she was smoldering so with sexuality, surely F71 would have wanted to keep her.”
“But F-71 was making her seem desirable,” said Johnson, grimly. “He aimed at C-12, of course, but with such power that the overflow was sufficient to affect me drastically. After it was allover and C-12 was walking away with her, I was no longer under the influence and I could see there was something hard and overblown about her-a kind of unlovely and predatory gleam in her eye.
“So I chose F-71 at once and he was all we could want. The firm is now where you see it is, and I am chairman of the board.”
Gold
Jonas Willard looked from side to side and tapped his baton on the stand before him.
He said, “Understood now? This is just a practice scene, designed to find out if we know what we’re doing. We’ve gone through this enough times so that I expect a professional performance now. Get ready. All of you get ready.”
He looked again from side to side. There was a person at each of the voice-recorders, and there were three others working the image projection. A seventh was for the music and an eighth for the all- important background. Others waited to one side for their turn.
Willard said, “ All right now. Remember this old man has spent his entire adult life as a tyrant. He is accustomed to having everyone jump at his slightest word, to having everyone tremble at his frown. That is all gone now but he doesn’t know it. He faces his daughter whom he thinks of only as a bent-headed obsequious girl who will do anything he says, and he ca
Lear appeared. Tall, white hair and beard, somewhat disheveled, eyes sharp and piercing.
Willard said, “Not bent. Not bent. He's eighty years old but he doesn't think of himself as old. Not now. Straight. Every inch a king.” The image was adjusted. “That's right. And the voice has to be strong.
No quavering. Not now. Right?”
“Right, chief,” said the Lear voice-recorder, nodding. “All right. The Queen.”
And there she was, almost as tall as Lear, standing straight and rigid as a statue, her draped clothing in fine array, nothing out of place. Her beauty was as cold and unforgiving as ice.
“And the Fool.“
A little fellow, thin and fragile, like a frightened teenager but with a face too old for a teenager and with a sharp look in eyes that seemed so large that they threatened to devour his face.
“Good,” said Willard. “Be ready for Albany. He comes in pretty soon. Begin the scene. “ He tapped the podium again, took a quick glance at the marked-up play before him and said, “Lear! “ and his baton pointed to the Lear voice-recorder, moving gently to mark the speech cadence that he wanted created.
Lear says, “How now, daughter? What makes that frontlet on? Methinks you are too much o' late i' th' frown.”
The Fool's thin voice, fifelike, piping, interrupts, “Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need to care for her frowning-”
Goneril, the Queen, turns slowly to face the Clown as he speaks, her eyes turning momentarily into balls of lurid light-doing it so momentarily that those watching caught the impression rather than viewed the fact. The Fool completes his speech in gathering fright and backs his way behind Lear in a blind search for protection against the searing glance.
Goneril proceeds to tell Lear the facts of life and there is the faint crackling of thin ice as she speaks, while the music plays in soft discords, barely heard.
Nor are Goneril's demands so out of line, for she wants an orderly court and there couldn't be one as long as Lear still thought of himself as tyrant. But Lear is in no mood to recognize reason. He breaks into a passion and begins railing.
Albany enters. He is Goneril's consort-round-faced, i
What is happening? He is completely drowned out by his dominating wife and by his raging father-in-law.
It is at this point that Lear breaks into one of the great piercing denunciations in all of literature. He is overreacting. Goneril has not as yet done anything to deserve this, but Lear knows no restraint. He says:
The voice-recorder strengthened Lear’s voice for this speech, gave it a distant hiss, his body became taller and somehow less substantial as though it had been converted into a vengeful Fury.
As for Goneril, she remained untouched throughout, never flinching, never receding, but her beautiful face, without any change that could be described, seemed to accumulate evil so that by the end of Lear’s curse, she had the appearance of an archangel still, but an archangel ruined. All possible pity had been wiped out of the countenance, leaving behind only a devil’s dangerous magnificence.
The Fool remained behind Lear throughout, shuddering. Albany was the very epitome of confusion, asking useless questions, seeming to want to step between the two antagonists and clearly afraid to do so.
Willard tapped his baton and said, “ All right. It’s been recorded and I want you all to watch the scene.” He lifted his baton high and the synthesizer at the rear of the set began what could only be called the instant replay.
It was watched in silence, and Willard said, “It was good, but I think you’ll grant it was not good enough. I’m going to ask you all to listen to me, so that I can explain what we’re trying to do.
Computerized theater is not new, as you all know. Voices and images have been built up to beyond what human beings can do. You don’t have to break your speechifying in order to breathe; the range and quality of the voices are almost limitless; and the images can change to suit the words and action. Still, the technique has only been used, so far, for childish purposes. What we intend now is to make the first serious compu-drama the world has ever seen, and nothing will do-for me, at any rate-but to start at the top. I want to do the greatest play written by the greatest playwright in history: King Lear by William Shakespeare.
“I want not a word changed. I want not a word left out. I don’t want to modernize the play. I don’t want to remove the archaisms, because the play, as written, has its glorious music and any change will diminish it. But in that case, how do we have it reach the general public? I don’t mean the students, I don’t mean the intellectuals, I mean everybody. I mean people who’ve never watched Shakespeare before and whose idea of a good play is a slapstick musical. This play is archaic in spots, and people don’t talk in iambic pentameter. They are not even accustomed to hearing it on the stage.
“So we’re going to have to translate the archaic and the unusual. The voices, more than human, will, just by their timbre and changes, interpret the words. The images will shift to reinforce the words.
“Now Goneril’s change in appearance as Lear’s curse proceeded was good. The viewer will gauge the devastating effect it has on her even though her iron will won’t let it show in words. The viewer will therefore feel the devastating effect upon himself, too, even if some of the words Lear uses are strange to him.
“In that co
“However, we’ve got to do something about Lear. The voicerecorder was on the right track by having a hissing sound in the voice-track. Lear is spewing venom; he is a man who, having lost power, has no recourse but vile and extreme words. He is a cobra who ca
The woman in charge of background was Meg Cathcart. She had been creating backgrounds for as long as the compu-drama technique had existed.
“What do you want in background? “ Cathcart asked, coolly.
“The snake motif,” said Willard. “Give me some of that and there can be less hiss in Lear’s voice.
Of course, I don’t want you to show a snake. The too obvious doesn’t work. I want a snake there that people can’t see but that they can feel without quite noting why they feel. I want them to know a snake is there without really knowing it is there, so that it will chill them to the bone, as Lear’s speech should. So when we do it over, Meg, give us a snake that is not a snake.”
“And how do I do that, Jonas?” said Cathcart, making free with his first name. She knew her worth and how essential she was.
He said, “I don’t know. If I did I’d be a backgrounder instead of a lousy director. I only know what I want. You‘ve got to supply it. You’ve got to supply sinuosity, the impression of scales. Until we get to one point. Notice when Lear says, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ That is power. The whole speech leads up to that and it is one of the most famous quotes in Shakespeare.