My heart starts pounding in the pit of my stomach as my peers and I prepare to go onstage. Despite weeks of rehearsal, some people still believed that the cast could not pull off such a difficult and traditionally cursed play, and yet somehow I was certain that we could (even with that cast of eight to fill a required thirty-one character list). I cannot be sure if it was the fact that we were confident or just having too much fun to care, but this, my first freshman year play at Suffield Academy, was sure to be a hit.
Our first exercise in our warm-up was what my director called "Walking the space." I picked one of my lines, started to repeat it, and got into character as the doctor. "Don't over use your hands, Meg!" "Remember to put emphasis on the second half of that sentence!" and "Although this is Shakespeare you should speak like old-English is your first language." These criticisms, along with many others, were running through my head, but that was nothing compared to what happened next. The "what-if's" slowly began to crawl out of the darkest part of my mind and filled my entire being. The most prominent of those questions obviously concerned me forgetting my lines.
"Stop! Switch characters, go!"
Now as I reset my focus, I become Lennox. I loosen up my posture and walk with more force and purpose the way some men do. Out of my five characters, Lennox required the most of my time in rehearsals; especially when I worked on my monologue that my director informed me, was usually the first section cut in most productions of the play. "What if I rearrange the order of the lines, or break character, or forget those few lines that I always had when the performing arts center was empty?" I realize that I am now standing at the very front of the stage and glance up, for the last time, at the vacant chairs wondering how the room will look with the sold-out audience that was promised.
"Stop! Alright circle up. Now Put-eh-ket-ah, man-in-gannah, and bud-eh-guddah. Go!"
The point of this game was to see how fast you could enunciate these syllables that are believed by the cast to be the earliest words grunted by Neanderthals. Neanderthal: adjective meaning boorish and ill mannered. That was one of my vocabulary words on the quiz the next morning. It was so strange that I began to think about everything at that one moment. I thought about how my volleyball team had won our first game just the day before, about all of my classes and the corresponding homework that needed completing, and even about the laundry that had to be done at home.
Suddenly, my focus is once more re-aligned as I hear the stage manager shout those two words that I had been waiting all winter term to hear: "Five minutes!" The cast whooped and shouted, huddling for a last pep talk offstage. I joined the circle and began to study the painted faces of people that I realized had become my family. The days that I did not leave school until 10:30, the millions of times I said "I can't, I have rehearsal," the script dissections and drills, and the utter exhaustion shared by everybody had created a group of people that were not related, but fused together through a common purpose.
A beautiful, soft hum of people started to fill the building as the curtain closed concealing the magnificent set that was more familiar to me than my own home. I climbed the six steps up to the platform, silently firing off any old line that popped into my head. I watched every position of my feet as I tiptoed down the platform, tried to keep my balance while repairing every last strand of hair that might have been out of place, and attempted to subdue the mass of insects fluttering around within my stomach. Finally I reach the second to last section of the platform and lower myself until I am lying down, arranging and rearranging my limbs specifically to emulate one of my first characters on a real stage: a dead body in William Shakespeare's Macbeth.
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