Bright Shards of Someplace Else

Improvisation

86 Improvisation The play was a success, and all the actors crowded into the green room, gasping and talking loudly, still projecting as if on stage, their individual voices flung over each other like grappling hooks thrown to opposite ledges. The success was made all the sweeter by all the ways it was nearly not. Rosie, the lead, is grinning and crying with relief and exultation, and a long eyeliner drip changes course as she throws her head back to laugh: “The knocking was supposed to happen after Gracie tells me about what happened with the baby. But I start hearing this knocking before she even gets a line out! So get this,” Rosie raises her voice—she is taking too long and losing listeners. “I start stomping on the floor! To cover up the sound of the knocks! And I explain it by saying I’m trying to confuse the termites. And Gracie says. . .” The rest is lost as all attention moves to John, who is red-faced and sweating, squatting and gesturing at an invisible object that he marks out with two forefingers in the air. “I was supposed to pick up a vase on the sideboard and explain how fragile it is . . . You know, like a damn metaphor.” He looks over his shoulder to be sure everyone is listening. “Well, I get going on my spiel and walk over to the sideboard and . . . no vase! No nothing! So I’m stuck explaining how fragile the damn sideboard is! And let me tell you, that thing doesn’t look too fragile.” He throws his hand at the mimed sideboard with a kind of playful faux-despair. Two actors argue loudly enough to turn heads. In their scene, a wall of the set came down and they had to jump aside. Glen had Improvisation 87 continued with his lines as if nothing had happened. The other, Hal, had exclaimed about the “shoddy-ass slum-lord run pit,” that is, he responded by responding in character. Glen has a glass of wine in his hands and shakes it to make a point. “Responding to the falling of the set at all takes the audience out of the moment. It acknowledges the artifice!” Hal is bent over the party tray, and sweat shakes off his mustache at every word. “Looks worse to ignore it.” They continue to argue as everyone leaves the green room and walks the light-slicked streets to the after party, where there are more flushed faces and rousing stories of all the ways the play was saved, the mishaps taken in nonplussed stride, the wrong lighting cues, the lost props, the badly timed entries, the stage-frightened, the missed lines and too-soon departs . A thin young man, Jack, with a congratulatory rose snapped off in his buttonhole, laughs and tells his stories, listens to the others, and leaves finally for home with the sense of loss that always follows even a good show. “But I must insist, Cecil . . .” As he walks he begins reciting lines from the play, of which he had precious few as the nephew of the patriarch who was written in late only to move the plot along; most of his lines were in the order of “But the Duke was just here!” or “I thought I saw the Mistress in the garden that very night!” and “This was left on the davenport!” He repeats all seven of them over and over, like a miser wrist-deep in a pile of coins, pulling up to hear them drop. The street is mostly dark, and the streetlights go out one by one; in fact they go out as he approaches. He keeps on. There is a place he often goes for drinks, but when he gets there it is no longer a decadesold neighborhood bar but an ice-cream parlor. He shrugs and gets a late-night cone. He walks and walks too far; the night wind whips the stem of his rose back and forth so fast it becomes a blurred arc, like a hummingbird treading air. He is lost. He looks around and sees his neighborhood rising above in the background as if it’s a city in the sky resting on the rooftops of the neighborhood he’s in. He can just see the molding around the top window of his apartment, the highest Improvisation 88 frond of his...