by Anissa M. Bouziane
I’ve been standing in the wings forever. Other actors are not made to wait as long as me. Other actors have not been asked to bring their scenes back as many times as I have. Lady Macbeth. Why had director Stanleivic asked me to take her on? Why not Ophelia as I had suggested? Ophelia’s madness I understand, Lady Macbeth’s is too fearsome for me to embody, though I would never admit it to Stanleivic.
“Acting Shakespeare is difficult,” he had told me, in a peculiar meeting — after hours, at his home slightly off-campus, while an early New England snow fell upon the surrounding darkness. Standing on the stone porch of his Gothic-style home, I hesitated before ringing the doorbell. Was it normal for the director to invite a prospective acting student to his home? Before I could touch the bell, the heavy wooden door swung open, and Stanleivic’s imposing figure filled the doorway. “Ah, here she is, the star of this season’s Anouilh. Not an easy play, l’Orchestre. You pulled it off well, but you’ll see, Shakespeare — with me — is a whole different kettle of fish.”
Hearing that speech, I should have turned my back on this man whom I barely knew. There were other directors on campus. Why had I let him get away with that comment? This was not my first attempt at Shakespeare. The previous year, to much acclaim, I had played Kate in Taming of the Shrew, but not under his direction. Everyone on campus knew that to be recognized as a true Shakespearean actor, one had to work with Stanleivic. The man apprenticed with Olivier and Gielgud (2), had performed at the Globe and studied at the Moscow Art Theatre. “...a whole different kettle of fish.” To Stanleivic my Kate mattered none. I might as well never have performed Shakespeare, since I had never been directed by the maestro.
Why had I agreed to this meeting? Why go to his house? After dinner? How did I come to believe that it was up to me to convince Stanleivic that he should choose to accept me into his coveted Shakespeare class? Standing in his office above the hallowed stage of the school’s renowned Alumni Hall, I dared to make the request, “Professor Stanleivic, I’d like to join your acting Shakespeare class.” I was unaware of how unconventional such a request was. Others knew that young women actors usually waited for Stanleivic to invite them into his class. The director stood up, extending the full length of his lanky frame, and ran his long graceful fingers through his opulent-white hair before responding, “You defy protocol my dear.” I did not reply. “Tradition has it that actors,” he hesitated for a moment, then added, “such as you. Are asked by me to join my Shakespeare class.”
“I am sorry, director, it’s just that I have a real passion for...”
Stanleivic silenced me with little more than a raised eyebrow. “Now is not the time to convince me.” Moving around his desk, he ran his long fingers along my arm as he guided me towards his office door. “I live right off campus up College Road and to the right — the lone Gothic home. Tonight, after dinner, would be a better time for such a conversation.”
And that is how, with the snow beginning to fall, I found myself stepping through the front door of Stanleivic’s austere home. He lived alone. I knew this, but now, as I stepped into a darkened sitting room lined with books and dominated by a leather chesterfield couch, I chastised myself for not having thought through what it might mean to be alone with Stanleivic in an isolated house off-campus.
How does a nineteen-year-old refuse to acknowledge a look, a hand, an intonation? I am an actor. I know how to burrow deep into the center of my being in search of the truth I chose to inhabit. That night I discovered I could retreat into that center. Hide. Escape. Ignore. Refuse to see a look, a hand, a touch. Or had I? Had I ignored them? What does it mean to ignore? Can we believe that the things we ignore are things that have not happened?
I remember little after sitting in the leather chesterfield couch alongside Stanleivic, who towered over a conversation that was not one. His long legs crossed and uncrossed as his voice boomed over me with assertions that talent was not enough. My next memory is one of me, walking through the silently falling snow, jaw clenched tightly against the certainty that should I loosen my grip, every bone in my body would fall apart. If talent didn’t matter, what did?
“The Queen, my lord, is dead.” (1)
Standing in the wings of the stage in Alumni Hall, my jaw remains clenched. Sixteen times Stanleivic has asked me to rework my Lady Macbeth. And with every one of his explosions of discontent, his: “No, no, no! It is too flat!” or “You just keep bouncing over and over again against the ceiling and go nowhere!” My jaw tightens more. Sixteen times now, Stanleivic has bellowed, “Get off my stage, passion is not enough!”
He is punishing me. What had I done, or not done on that snowy evening?
“You need more than talent to play Shakespeare!”
Now, in the wings, all I have is anger. I give my anger to Lady Macbeth, and I take her anger into me. It once scared me, now it fills me, “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!” (1)
Stanleivic interrupts, “Enough, bring it back next week!”
Disappearing into the wings, I murmur to myself, “What’s done cannot be undone.” (1)
Someone hears me. “Don’t worry, we’ve all been there before,” a female voice whispers. I search the darkness before I find its source: a soft, but angular face belonging to a boyish frame dressed in jeans and an Elizabethan doublet. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” (1) the actor whispers.
I shake my head, “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” (1)
“You met him at his house?”
I nodded, yes.
“You’re not the first.”
I say nothing.
“Don’t let it break you.”
“I fear it has,” I respond, “I don’t know how to do this anymore. He’s right. My Lady Macbeth is flat — I’ve quashed her with my anger.”
“Don’t die with her. Leave her aside,” says the actor. “Bring another role next time.”
“If I could, I would play Macbeth: And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.” (1)
“Do it.”
“He’d never allow it.”
“Allow yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at me,” says the actor. In the penumbra, I gaze more clearly at the individual before me. Blonde hair, cropped short, revealing a long-sleek neck, shoulders made wide by a velvet doublet that concealed a white T-shirt tucked into the slim waist of tattered jeans. “I am who I want to be,” she says. “Today it’s Hamlet, tomorrow Ophelia. What Stanleivic says, what Stanleivic does, there will come a day when we will take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them...” (3)
“And until then?” I ask.
She raises her eyebrow and says, “Just strut and fret...upon the stage (1) girl. Tomorrow, bring him Macbeth, leave the Lady at home.”
(1) Macbeth, by William Shakespeare (2) Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud – renowned Shakespearean actors of the early to mid-twentieth century. (3) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
copyright © 2020 by Anissa M. Bouziane
