My 8th grade English teacher holds out a pair of wooden swords. They have black handles and grey painted blades the approximate thickness of three paperback copies of The Red Badge of Courage stuck together. Laertes reaches out an eager hand. My English teacher flinches back.
“I…think maybe you should practice without the swords.”
Laertes and I make fleeting eye contact.
“Without the swords?” I speak softly, wonderingly.
“How do we do that?” asks Laertes. “It’s a sword fight. We…we fight with the swords.”
“You will break them.” My English teacher is actually Swedish. Her accent adds a measure of exotic authority. I imagine they do not barter in the Scandinavian lands, but rather let their mountain trolls settle their disputes. Arguments are obsolete. “These are the only ones we have.”
Laertes and I glance down. There must be a solution here. “We’ll be…careful?” I suggest. I do not feel confident that this is a sufficient enticement.
“We promise not to break them,” says Laertes solemnly.
“Use rulers,” says the English teacher, her head nodding in punctuation. I take this to be a mark of finality imported from her homeland. It is very effective. “Practice in the library.”
We gather our rulers and make for the door. Laertes takes one last furtive glance at the swords as they are bundled together and stuffed into a drawer. “Soon enough,” I tell him. “Soon enough.”
*~*
All architecture is a product of circumstance. When demand for good quality caves began to exceed availability early man was forced to construct crude shelters in the hopes of escaping the elements and reducing the strain of near-constant wholly mammoth attacks. Then as now, how those shelters were constructed was informed largely by the materials at hand (wood, brick, clay, gingerbread) and the needs of the builder (conservation of floor space, conservation of heat, acquisition of delicious German children). Slanted roofs were designed to sluice off excess snowfall. Pike-filled moats were constructed to impede invading Huns. There was a purpose to the design.
From this we can deduce that at some point in time someone had a good reason for building a stage into the corner of Mrs. Wilson’s 8th grade homeroom, but by the time I was 13 years old that someone was very exceptionally dead and I was left to act Shakespeare as a consequence.
Truth be told, I wasn’t nearly as worried as everyone else in my class. I was essentially a seasoned actor by that point, paying my dues as various shepherds, teapots and shrubs. My first big break was the role of Winnie-the-Pooh, a beloved national treasure. I chose to play Pooh Bear as an earnest recovering honey addict, struggling to make sense of a world filled with temptation and darkness. The show was well received, though the play’s harrowing climax (in which Pooh, engorged and delusional, attempts repeatedly, feverishly to escape through Rabbit’s narrow front door, his honey-ridden frame tragically swollen, coming too late to an understanding of the literal and metaphorical barrier his addiction has become) was met mostly with laughter rather than the cathartic mass outbreak of wailing I had anticipated. But I was six then. Some things I didn’t yet understand.
I also played Joseph one year in a nativity scene. To the uninitiated that may have appeared to be no more than dressing up in a flannel bathrobe, wrapping a dish towel over my head and standing silently for an hour. I like to believe that I elevated the role, however, incorporating subtle positioning of my head, eyes, mouth and shoulders to indicate the doubt, awe and joy that Joseph must have felt, as well as his widely reported fear of donkeys.
~*~
My classroom has been tasked with bringing the classic romantic comedy Hamlet to life. I earned the title role on the strength of my excellent memorization and brooding skills. I also look fantastic in a cape. A reporter from the local paper is writing a piece about the play because in certain smaller American towns 8th grade renditions of the works of Shakespeare constitute news.
“My name is Hamlet. I’m the Prince of Denmark. My father is dead but he won’t leave me alone. I have a girlfriend, which is cool. I killed her father, though. Which is less cool. And my relationship with my mother is pretty inappropriate. Oh yeah, I think my uncle killed my father, which I’m not very happy about. I don’t know. Other than that it’s alright. You know what I mean?”
The reporter smiles. “You don’t have to answer in character.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I respond. “I only speak Danish.”
The reporter sets his notebook aside. “Which one’s Ophelia?”
During rehearsals our English teacher bellows the same four instructions: “Slower!” “Louder!” “The audience is out here!” “What are you doing with your hands?”
Rosencrantz drops his hands behind his back. “West side?”
“Wu Tang,” whispers Guildenstern.
*
I offer to help Polonius paint the backdrop. “Where are all the windmills?” I ask.
“You’re thinking of Holland,” says Polonius, adding depth to a rolling green hill.
“I’m the Prince of Denmark,” I reply icily. “I had them installed last year.”
Polonius considers his green tipped brush. “….right.”
I jab down at the center of the landscape. “And this is where I’m building the low income housing.”
Eventually the big night arrives. Parents and siblings stack themselves in a sweaty pile in the converted classroom. For the price of a Thursday night they’ll never get back our families will enjoy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Hamlet, one after the other in a punishing cycle of terror-struck mumbling and agitated talk-shouting.
Everything has gone very well and we are approaching the finale of our tragic tale. Having killed his father and driven his sister to suicide, I have somehow made an enemy of Laertes, who challenges me to a fencing match. He will stab me with a poisoned blade and I will do the same to him. It is the climax of the story as well as the climax of our months of effort. More than this however, it is symbolic of WE GET TO FIGHT WITH SWORDS!!
Laertes and I brandish our concrete grey foils with the elegant poise of seasoned experts, cutting the air with exploratory jabs and slashes. We make eye contact and exchange a brief nod. Now begins our carefully choreographed dance.
Laertes lunges forward, his sword sweeping down in a killing stroke. I slip to the side, my blade flashing out to turn his thunderous blow.
CRACK.
My sword shatters on impact. Shards and sawdust fly across the stage and into the audience. Small children shriek. Parents dodge hurtling bits of shrapnel.
Laertes and I stare at each other for ten long heartbeats. We both glance down at the ruined remains of my sword hilt, resting on the edge of the stage. Eventually Laertes leans forward and simply pokes me in to the shoulder with the tip of his still intact blade.
“A hit!” cries Osric.
I have absolutely no idea what to do. A small voice, possibly Swedish, hisses instructions in the back of my mind. Kill Laertes! Kill him! Kill!!!
I have no sword. Instincts take over. I karate kick Laertes. To death.
“I am justly killed with mine own treachery!” declares my foe, recoiling from the force of my Steven Seagal-style straight kick.
The rest is pure massacre. Gertrude dies, Claudius dies, Laertes is dead and so am I. Horatio, apparently unaware that this stage full of corpses is primarily my responsibility, mourns my death:
“Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
End scene. Cue gales of muted but respectful applause. Bow. Bow. Blow kisses to the director. Curtain closes. The cars are already started. Time to go.
^*~*^
Backdrops are rolled up and stored away, piled in damp corners until mold and time render Denmark, Illyria, Scotland and Athens into nothing more than pulp and paint chips. Costumes are folded and boxed, reused and repurposed year after year until their past lives are impossible to retrace. Eventually all we have left are half-remembered memories and photographs – photographs in which we look like startled pirate children in cadaver make-up.
It may have felt like some foreign punishment at the time, an ancient tongue-tying torture in tights, but there’s wisdom there, in timeless works, that we could only appreciate in our later years.
“Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice,” advises Polonius to his soon-departing son. “Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Man. Now I feel bad about killing that guy.
