The Scottish Play

We've been together for several months now, performing a trio of Shakespeare plays in rotating repertory at venues all over the Midwest. One night we're at a senior center in Indianapolis performing The Tempest for white-haired ladies in wheelchairs who titter at the appearance of Caliban, played by a muscular young actor who insisted on doing the part shirtless, and the next we're at a community college in Peoria doing Love's Labour's Lost for a bunch of college kids who've come only because they've been promised extra credit. The students slouch in their seats, barely paying attention, until the dynamic Princess of France arrives to stir things up. It's fun to see that change come over them.

Every audience presents its own challenge, but we always have a blast trying to breathe life into plays that have been around for 400 years and that too many people encounter only in dusty books and required courses in high school. One way we do that is by keeping the houselights up and engaging directly with the audience, no matter how uncomfortable it might make them. Sometimes that's just a matter of addressing an aside to the bald guy in the third row, making him squirm a little, but when we do The Tempest, Ariel flits and dances through the crowd, peeking into women's purses or under their chairs, much to everyone's amusement. It always gets a big laugh. When you come to one of our performances, you've got to pay attention or you'll end up being part of the action.

It's been a long tour, but it's coming to an end now. Some of us have signed on for another season, with three new plays to learn, but others will move on to different gigs elsewhere, and still others have decided that the itinerant actor's life is not for them.

Despite occasional tensions, we've grown really close, as you might expect for 12 actors who spend all day every day with each other. We're a team, pulling together for a common purpose. One downside to that is there's never an opportunity to be alone, except in the bathroom, and even then there's a chance someone will walk in on you while you're doing your business. That much togetherness can wear on you, as it has on us.

For one thing, the nonprofit theater that hired us doesn't have a lot of money, so we have to share motel rooms on the road. Most of us are young, not too far removed from college, and don't mind having roommates. Officially, because we're eight men and four women, we're assigned same-sex roommates, and the numbers work out. But there are always complications. There's a married couple in our troupe this year, so naturally they get to room together, which leaves us with odd numbers for the other pairings. Most of the guys wouldn't object to sharing with the women, but management is reluctant to force anyone to do it. Currently, there is no problem because the bodybuilder who plays Caliban has hooked up with our ingenue, the very pretty and amazingly talented woman who plays Miranda in The Tempest. Their scenes together in that show are incredibly moving if you know that they're sleeping together in real life. And during the pre-show music we perform, they have a beautiful duet of "Falling Slowly" that never fails to make the audience quiet down and listen. Some of the other relationships—including between a couple of the guys in the troupe—have been shorter lived and rather volatile. As we said: complications.

We've been doing these plays now for many months, and we could probably perform them in our sleep. Our director warns us about this because it can, understandably, lead to some pretty dead performances. She tries to keep us on our toes, though. Once, during a performance of LLL, in the middle of the crucial scene where the Princess of France is [End...