Shakespeare's Valentine Pt. 01

1.

"Uh oh."

I'd said it under my breath, and there was the usual chatter of people introducing themselves and getting seated around the table, so I don't think anybody heard it. And it was an equivocal "uh oh." There were certainly potential upsides to the circumstances which prompted the "uh oh," but there was also an element of risk. I'd have to monitor the situation, control my responses; I'd have to be goddamn careful.

2.

The previous summer had been my first with the Oak Ridge Shakespeare Company: Casca in Julius Caesar, and a bunch of small stuff in As You Like It. I'd never seen anything at Oak Ridge before--I'd been cast off a video audition--and the work had been the sort of thing you might expect from a SPT (Small Professional Theater) contract summer festival a couple hours drive from an isolated midwestern city. There was some brilliant acting; some less brilliant acting. The director of Caesar had some interesting ideas about the play which the budget finally wouldn't let her realize. As for the director of the As You, I'd written him off as a waste of food after less than a week. But he was lucky in his leads, and the production succeeded, in spite of the ubiquitous green tights and the bleating sheep soundscape.

I thought I'd done a good job with what I'd been given. Casca was a treat, and once we were up, and the un-director had returned to 1926 Northamptonshire, or wherever he dug up his production concept, As You Like It was a kick to run. Lots of backstage downtime, but Shakespeare didn't know how to write a bad part, so when you're on--even in the little stuff--you're golden.

All of which is to say that, barring more lucrative work, I'd certainly come knocking when the festival auditioned for whatever they decided to do next summer. I certainly did not expect a call a couple of months after we closed inviting me back to play Macbeth for a month in their first ever stab (pun intended) at a winter season, which they were calling "Shakespearean Valentines."

3

All well and good, but Macbeth? For Valentine's day? Not--I don't know--Romeo and Juliet? No, Macbeth, with the witches, the severed heads, the murdered kings--okay, there are murdered kings in a bunch of the plays--but also murdered children, apparitions, the list goes on. I suppose the Macbeths are a "loving" couple under the meaning of the act; they certainly know how to throw a rockin' regicide, but still! We were in rep with Much Ado, which struck me as far more appropriate. But, hey, I wasn't complaining. I was playing Macbeth! And Cherri Morganthal was playing Lady Macbeth!

Uh oh.

4.

Cherri was an Oak Ridge semi-regular. She'd "taken this last summer off;" code for they'd gone with a younger Rosalind and an older Calphurnia, and they didn't have a contract for her. And some of the cattier veterans hinted, none too subtly, that they might not have given her a contract if they'd had one. Word was Cherri was crazy.

Which was really no surprise. I was 45, an age at which men can look forward to some of the best roles in the canon: Macbeth, Iago (if you cut the line about him being 28), Brutus, Prospero, Lear, Falstaff, not to mention the occasional 40+ Hamlet or Petruchio or Benedick, and that's just in Shakespeare. Women past 40? Cleopatra, if you're very lucky, Lady M, Gertrude in Hamlet, and then it's onto the Nurse in R&J and Mistress Quickly. For most of the women who do the bulk of their work in non-musical American theater, youth is relevance, and relevance is employment. It's brutally unfair, and it's changing very slowly, but still... I'd met Cherri exactly once, at the outdoor opening night party for Caesar. She'd come with the costume designer, because his husband still disliked crowds. That was where she'd told me about taking the summer off, and that she felt that she could still give the world a definitive (her word) Juliet, in a big enough theater.

Cherri was my age, plus or minus, and as far as I was concerned, she was a knockout. She was tall and willowy with pale skin, thick brown hair, and curves which I found...provocative. Her eyes were large and green with long, dark lashes and heavy lids. Her nose was probably not original, but the work had been good. Privately, I suspected it was her mouth which had kept her from playing Juliet, even when she was the right age. It looked small, mostly because her lips were so full. And it gave her a look of...sophistication, and experience, particularly sexual experience. The combination was powerful stuff. She'd make an amazing Lady Capulet, wearing Tybalt out three times a week in the solarium while her old man is out on the tiles, but even twenty years ago, it would have taken an...imaginative director to cast her as Juliet.

And this was my Lady Macbeth, my "dearest partner in greatness," the woman who would spend the first act of the play using everything at her disposal--mind, heart, and body--to persuade me to commit murder. Well, nobody could say the next several weeks weren't going to be interesting.

5.

I had two potential reasons to tread carefully with Cherri, and neither of them was because she had a reputation for crazy. Crazy I could handle, if crazy she actually was. Crazy could mean she was a perfectionist. Fine. So was I. It could mean she was an attention seeker; that she took up too much time in rehearsals. I'd heard that Gil Marchese, our director, ran a pretty tight ship. Good. Rehearsal time management was his problem. Or it might just have been one of those snarky things that younger, less experienced actors say about more established performers, particularly female performers, because their process doesn't conform to one drama school dictum or another.

No. The first reason I needed to watch myself around Cherri was that I was crazy; crazy in lust with her. Some combination of her looks, the sound of her voice, the way she carried herself, the way she had of touching people, even casual acquaintances, and insinuating herself just past the borders of personal space, so that your senses could respond to the rustle of her dress or the scent of her perfume just made me want to jump out of my skin. And this was on maybe two hours' acquaintance. I'd seriously considered making a move on her at that opening night party all those months ago, but I'd held off. Beyond a little backstage gossip, I didn't know a thing about the woman. Maybe she was married, or in a relationship. Maybe I wasn't her type. Or maybe she just wanted to have a few drinks and congratulate some old friends, and didn't need some hormonally addled teenager in a middle-aged man's body sniffing around her all night long.

But now, we were going to be working together, rehearsing sexually charged scenes as husband and wife. Right. All the more reason not to think with the little head. Be professional. Be respectful. Be an ally. Pick up your cues, don't drop your line endings, return energy for energy, and when it comes up, ask before you touch. You need a little relief at the end of the day? That's why the festival gave you a one bedroom apartment, and why God gave you your right hand.

Wow, I had to get a hold of myself! I'd crushed on my fellow performers before this; maybe not as hard, but still... And occasionally something nice had come of it. After the job was over. Well, there was that one time...no! Stop it! Jesus, this woman had me talking to myself like I was some golden retriever puppy who'd just peed on the rug! I took a deep breath. I wasn't a puppy, or a child, or even a teenager. I could do this. Then I thought about the other reason for my initial "uh oh."

6.

After meeting Cherri at that party, I'd mentioned her to a director friend of mine, Diana Calder, who promptly blew a gasket. After I'd removed Diana's fist from the wall of my apartment, she'd told me the following story. It seems that, a year or so before I took the job at Oak Ridge, Diana had been directing a production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses at a mid-sized theater in Atlanta. Cherri had auditioned for the lead--Merteuil: Glenn Close in the movie--but had been offered a smaller role and the opportunity to take over Merteuil for the final week of the run, when Melissa, the actress cast in the role, had a prior commitment.

It had been a troubled production from the start. The artistic director of the theater, male and married, had disagreed with Diana's ideas about the play, and had questioned her competence in front of the cast. Also, not long after rehearsals began, rumors began to circulate about an affair between the AD and Cherri. And many considered those rumors confirmed when, two weeks before opening, both Diana and Melissa were fired, and Cherri wound up playing Merteuil.

So from Diana, I had heard not only that Cherri was crazy, but that she was...and this is a word you do not want associated with your name in the relatively small world of American regional theater...difficult. And "difficult" was far from the only thing Diana had called her. Now to be fair, given what I knew about Diana, and what I had heard and seen then, and since, of Cherri, the two women were never destined to be soulmates. And at the time plenty of people made a lot of assumptions based on the behavior of an artistic director who was later fired for sexually harassing an underaged actress. Still, whatever the truth of the incident, and whether or not she deserved it, Cherri had, in certain circles at least, acquired a reputation for being selfish, sexually manipulative and devious.

So...pretty good casting for Lady Macbeth.

7.

The truth is that I wasn't worried about Cherri disrupting the Macbeth process in the way that she supposedly had Liaisons. She was playing Lady M, the female lead, so even if she had "maneuvered" to get herself a bigger part in Atlanta, there was no point in doing the same thing here. Unless she wanted to play Macbeth, and I figured we'd cross that bridge when, and if, we came to it. And while our director, Gil, was also married, his husband was our lighting designer, Magnus. So an affair with Cherri seemed unlikely on a couple of levels. Finally, pretty much everything I'd heard against Cherri boiled down to rumor and innuendo. Thinking about it, I started to feel bad for the woman. I didn't know how far the Liaisons story had spread, but I decided I wasn't spreading it any further; a decision which included a healthy dose of self interest. After all, this was my shot. I was playing the man himself, and I wanted the production to be good, which meant I wanted the rehearsal room to be happy, which meant I was not going to prejudge, snark about, or undermine my costar!

And I wasn't going to make a pass at her either!

Yeah. Maybe I should've gotten that last bit tattooed on my forehead.

8.

First rehearsal: a table read. I saw some old friends, Jem Hauptmann, (Duncan and the Porter,) had been Cassius in the Summer Caesar. Jem was 6' 3" tall, and 160 lbs soaking wet. You couldn't see the guy if he turned sideways. And there was Kal Masters, Antony in that same Caesar, and Charles the wrestler in As You. Kal was a gym rat: 6' 5" and 245 lbs of solid muscle. And the man was gorgeous. He was also Macduff, which meant he and I would be dueling to the death with broadswords. Fortunately he was supposed to win, because nobody would believe it the other way around. Sam Cabrerra, the Banquo, who I didn't know, was another mountainous guy. Okay. I was starting to see where Gil was going.

How do you cast Macbeth? Well, sometimes he's the biggest, buff-est badass in the room, because the first thing we hear about him, he's carving his way through a Norwegian army to the Scottish rebel chief, at which point, according to a wounded soldier who saw the whole thing, Macbeth "unseam'd him from the nave to the chops and fixed his head upon our battlements." But sometimes, he's a smaller guy, more of a street fighter, the kind of guy who kicks you in the balls, then cuts your throat when you bend over. The kind of guy, in short (pun once again intended) who might not be so confident of his position in the Scottish succession, and who might have considered murdering his buddy, King Duncan, even before the witches bring up the possibility.

Now I'm not a tiny guy. I'm 5' 10", in decent shape; nothing like Kal, of course. I've got broad shoulders, and some definition in my arms and legs. But next to the cast Gil had put together...fer chrissake, the kid playing Angus had to be 6' 6"! Where'd they go for these guys, Rent-a-Giant? Next to them, I was going to look...like a pitbull surrounded by mastiffs, which could work. And of course these guys all seemed to have full heads of long hair, not that I could see for sure, given my comparatively dwarfish stature. But I was seeing a lot of "Braveheart" dos, with the full beards and the shaggy mustaches. I'd started balding in my 20's, and for most of my career I'd kept my head shaved and my face bare. If Gil wanted his Macbeth to contrast with this army of tree people, he had his wish in me. And I was fine with it. In fact, I was over the moon. I was the guy! I had the big beautiful speeches. I had the last bow. And I had (almost) all the scenes with Cherri.

She'd given me a big hug when we'd met in front of the table which held the designers' models.

"My Thane! Oh, I'm so excited! I thought you were just a marvelous Casca! And the Martext!" (One of my small roles in As You Like It.) "I just love that Touchstone-Audrey scene!"--Martext comes in at the end of it--"You know the last time we did it, I was Audrey, and that vicious bitch of a costume designer--I'm kidding of course; Simone is just so talented!--anyway, she had me laced so tight into this corset that all anybody could see were my tits!"

Hoo boy.

9.

The read was pretty great, actually. Turns out Gil's team of ex-NBA prospects knew their Shakespeare. And for all of her introductory...theatrics, Cherri was sublime. We sat next to each other, and fell into rhythm so quickly and completely that we might actually have been this glamorous married power couple sparking and scheming and seducing and slaughtering our way to the crown. She'd already found so many colors: giddiness as she read my letter reporting the witches prophecy, fear and anticipation as she conjured the spirits to fill her "from the crown to the toe top full of dire'st cruelty," panic as she realized that I had excluded her from my plans for further bloodshed, despair in her madness as she obsessively washed imaginary blood from her hands, and desire! She'd woven the whole thing together with this thread of desire: desire for power, desire for connection, physical desire...

I like to think I gave as good as I got. We grinned at each other at the end of the read. The technique was there, the fun was there, and the chemistry was there. Now we had a play to rehearse, and a story to tell. She gave me another hug at the end of rehearsal; told me she had "just hundreds of little things" she had to do that evening, but maybe we could get a bite to eat after rehearsal tomorrow, and talk through our characters' arcs, their relationship...

I said that I'd look forward to it. And I would. Whatever else Cherri was, she was talented, which is sexy all by itself. I also had a sense, or maybe just a hope, that as we worked together, she might ease up on the grande dame act a little bit.

10.

First day of staging. We were down a witch--conflict approved before rehearsals began--and Gil had decided to spend the day on the Macbeth/Lady Macbeth scenes. A little introductory housekeeping: her name was Cherri, pronounced like the fruit; my resume said David Brenner, but most people called me Dai; Gil had apparently been named for a baseball player on the Yankees. He hated baseball. Everybody good? Okay, on to Macbeth.

Lady M's first appearance is in the fifth scene of the play. She's reading a letter from her husband, who tells her of the witches' prediction that he will become King of Scotland. Setting the letter aside, she then considers her husband in a soliloquy. He's ambitious, but he may not be ruthless enough to kill for his ambition. Well, she'll fix that. As her speech builds to a climax of passionate resolve, Macbeth enters.

Cherri turned as I approached, opened her arms and ran to me on her line: "Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor! Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!" She then wound her arms around my neck as her speech continued, and on the last word, turned her face up to mine with shining eyes and parted lips. I did what any husband returning to his beautiful wife after months away in the wars would do: I pulled her close and kissed her, hard.

"Hold it." Gil stopped us. "Cherri, is the kiss alright with you?"

She looked at him like he had three heads. "Gil, darling, I was practically begging for it. Was my intention not clear?"

"No, no. Clear as a bell. But we don't have an intimacy coordinator, so I thought I'd better ask."

Cherri looked from Gil to me: "In that case, darling, you should probably ask Dai first. In my experience, men are far less comfortable with intimacy than women." We had relaxed a little but her arms were still around my neck. Now she caught my eye, and gave me just the slightest wink. Gil didn't notice. I had to fight not to laugh.

"Dai, is the kiss alright with you?"

"Yeah, it's...um, lovely, but can I ask something?"

"Sure."

I turned to my Lady. "Cherri, look, the way I'm imagining it, we've been apart for months, and I think that the only reason I'm not just picking you up and carrying you to our bedchamber is because I need to tell you that the King is stopping by for dinner. I loved what you did on the cross into me. Would you mind if I maybe put my hands in your hair and kind of lose myself in the kiss for a beat or two before, you know, remembering that I have something to tell you?"

"Of course, my Thane! I completely agree with you about the time apart and the...what? The mutual need? And I'm fine with hands in my hair, but we should probably also run that by...Gil, darling, what's the name of that lovely woman who's doing the wigs?"

Gil: "Trish."

"We should run it by Trish. But if the hair doesn't work, you're welcome to touch my face. Or I could hold yours..."

Gil, to our stage manager: "Victor, make a note to check with hair about whether hands in the hair can work."

Victor: "Roger that."

Gil took a deep breath. "Okay, let's run it again from Macbeth's entrance."

11.

Cherri asked to begin at the top of her speech, so I watched as she summoned the fell spirits who would give her the strength necessary to carry out a regicide. She cooed to them like lovers, begging them to enter into her, and it was clear from the slight parting of her legs and rocking of her hips how and where she expected to receive them. Then she invited them to "Come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall..." caressing herself through the t-shirt she was wearing, so that, when her hands fell away, I could see the slight rise of the fabric over her nipples. I felt the beginnings of an erection, and had to adjust myself quickly so as not to miss my cue.

As before, she ran into my arms on her greeting, and turned her face up for the kiss. I decided to vary things just a little, and spoke before kissing her, completing her line of verse with my first three words:

"My dearest love!"

Into those words I poured all the hunger she'd aroused in me as I watched her rehearse the speech. Should Macbeth enter a little early and...observe her conjuration? A question for later. I saw her eyes widen in response to the lust in my voice, and then I was kissing her. Stage kisses, even passionate ones, are most often closed mouthed: intimate choreography; passion indicated rather than passion felt. Not this time! Cherri opened her mouth, and I could feel the tip of her tongue brush at my lips and teeth until my mouth opened too. Then she raised one long slender leg and wrapped it around me. Immediately my hands went to her ass, and I lifted her until I felt both her legs gripping me around my waist. My cock had never been this hard. I felt her arms around my neck, but...shit! I had another line to say! I pulled my face away. Still holding her aloft by her backside I rasped: