Berkshire Bright Focus...

. . .On Theatre, Music, Visual Arts and more!

Home

What's Hot!

season shots

Contact Us

SMALL IRONIES: Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Epilogue

Three Continents

From the ship at sea 1

From the ship at sea 2

From the ship at sea 3

From the ship at sea, 4

From the ship at sea, 5

From the ship at sea , 6

From Rio!!

The Trip Home

NEW SHORT STORIES

Nothing There For You

Nothing There For You, 2

Nothing There For You, 3

Nothing There For You, 4

Chase of The Thrill, 1

Chase of the Thrill, 2

Chase of the Thrill, 3

Chase of The Thrill, 4

Of Course, part1

Of Course, part 2

Of Course, part 3

Of Course, concluded

In Memory: Of My Cruise 1

In Memory: Of My Cruise 2

In Memory: Of My Cruise 3

In Memory: Of My Cruise 4

Las Vegas, 1

Las Vegas, 2

Las Vegas, 3

Las Vegas, 4

Las Vegas, concluded

Mad Moment #1

Mad Moment #2

Mad Moment #3

Mad Moment #4

Margaret Never Knows, 1

Margaret Never Knows, 2

Margaret Never Knows, 3

Margaret Never Knows, 4

Margaret Never Knows, 5

Remote, part 1

Remote, part 2

Remote, part 3

Remote, concluded

POETRY

April's Fools

Easter Sunday

...simple answers

And when they come at me

Fogged In

BROADWAY/NYC THEATRE

Love, Linda

Curtains

Barrington Stage Company

The Fantasticks

A Streetcar Named Desire

Sleuth

Underneath the Lintel

Carousel

Freud's Last Session

This Wonderful Life

To Kill a Mockingbird

See Rock City. . .

Private Lives

The Violet Hour

Mysteries of Harris Burdi

...Spelling Bee

I Am My Own Wife

Trumbo

Berkshire Opera

Le Nozze di Figaro

La Boheme

Berkshire Theatre Fest.

Red Remembers

Sick

Ghosts

Prisoner of 2nd Avenue

Candide

The Einstein Project

Broadway by the Year

Faith Healer

A Christmas Carol

Eleanor: Her Secret Journ

Noel Coward in Two Keys

Waiting for Godot

A Man For All Seasons

The Book Club Play

Pageant Play

Candida

The Caretaker

BTF Archive

Chester Theatre Company

Tilted House

The Dishwashers

Almost, Maine

Blackbird

Copake Theatre Company

Nine Months

I Do! I Do!

Sour Grapes

Talking Heads

Grace & Glorie

Dorset Theatre Festival

Marry Me a Little

The Hollow

Merton of the Movies

St. Nicholas

June Moon

A Year with Frog and Toad

Ghent Playhouse

Complete Wm Shakespeare

Puss in Boots

Belles

Enchanted April

Dancing at Lughnasa

The Boys Next Door

Jack and the Beanstalk

Clue: The Musical

6 Women...

Picnic

Hair Loom!

Over the River, etc.

Literature

B ob Dylan

Christmasville

A Lesser Saint

Upstreet, #1

Mac-Haydn Theatre

Meet Me in St. Lou

Crazy For You

Sweet Charity

Beauty and the Beast

Hello, Dolly!

Joseph. . .Dreamcoat

High Society

The Sound of Music

Phantom

Hairspray

Chorus Line

Music

Journeys by Robert Baksa

Mary Verdi: Precious Love

Mahagonny

NYSTI

And Then There Were None

King Island Christmas

A Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Philadelphia Story

Yours, Anne

Orphan Train

Of Mice and Men

Twelve Angry Jurors

Anastasia

1776

Macbeth

Miracle On 34th Street

Arsenic and Old Lace

American Soup

Ordeal By Innocence

Reunion

Oldcastle Theatre Company

Third

Beauty Queen of Leenane

"Almost, Maine" in VT

One Two Three

The Grass is Greener

Restaurants

Bezalel Gables

Blantyre

Brazillian

Burrito Bound

SPICE!

Shakespeare & Co.

Liaisons Dangereuses

Cindy Bella

Hound of Baskervilles

White People

Dreamer Examines Pillow

Twelfth Night

Golda's Balcony

Pinter's Mirror

The Actors Rehearse...

Shirley Valentine

Romeo and Juliet

Bad Dates

The Canterville Ghost

Goatwoman of Corvis Count

Othello

All's Well That Ends Well

The Ladies Man

Special Attractions

Paris, 1890--Unlaced

BCC's A Christmas Carol

Sister's Christmas Catech

i take your hand in mine

The Pajame Game

Her Name is Vincent

Property Known as Garland

12th Night

I Know I Came...Something

Vritue, Desire, etc.

Forbidden Broadway

Doubt, a Parable

Voices' A Christmas Carol

Dickens A Christmas Carol

Marie Galante

Machinal

Under Milk Wood

The Owl and the Pussycat

Capitol Steps

Late Nite Catechism

Rabbit Hole

Taming of The Shrew

Mystery of Irma Vep

daemons

I Love a Piano

Walking the dog's HAMLET

The News in Revue

Cyrano

The Mikado

Saturday Night Liv

A Chorus Line

The Gospel of John

BCC - Christmas Carol

Morgan O-Yuki

Rent

Theater Barn

Moonlight and Magnolias

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Romance, Romance

Zanna Don't!

Veronica's Room

Leading Ladies

Murder at Howard Johnson

Visiting Mr. Green

Grease

Forever Plaid

The Musical of Musicals

The Mousetrap

Same Time, Next Year

How the Other Half Loves

Visual Arts

Weston Playhouse

A Raisin in the Sun

Rent - Weston

25th Spelling Bee

Fully Committed

Les Miserables

No Child. . .

The Light in the Piazza

Williamstown Theatre Fest

Quartermaine's Terms

Caroline in Jersey

The Torch-Bearers

What is..Cause of Thunder

True West

Knickerbocker

Children

David Storey's "Home"

A Flea in Her Ear

Three Sisters

Broke-Ology

She Loves Me

The Atheist

Beyond Therapy

Chapter Thirty-Two

From Theater Language; A Dictionary of Terms in English

of the Drama and Stage from Medieval to Modern Times

by Walter Parker Bowman and Robert Hamilton Ball:

Scène à faire: A French expression used in English for

an obligatory scene. Usually italicized.


     I knew, of course, that he would come. He had to be there, had to see me once more, talk to me if I would permit it. He had no choice in this matter. I had left him none. The life he knew and would attempt to continue to know was the life I had brought him into as my aide. He loved it all, much more than he had ever said, but still I knew what was real. I knew that Max enjoyed the company of great, and even near-great, artists and that was the world in which I lived and worked. So dumping him on the ship, allowing him to live on his own for a week and telling him in a letter that we were done, all of that was for the desired effect. He would have to come and see me.

     I know I sound manipulative. In truth, I am. I simply cannot be plainer that that on this subject. Max thought he knew me but in reality he only knew a part of me, a third of me perhaps, but surely not me in my entirety. No one knew all that made up the soul of Paul Donner.

     So I wasn’t surprised when the stage door man brought back the slip of paper with Max’s name written on it. I looked at it for a moment while the man watched me, waiting for an answer of some sort. I milked the moment for all it was worth, staring at the name on the paper. Then I very deliberately crumpled the paper up and tossed it over my shoulder into some sort of oblivion somewhere in the dressing room, somewhere the woman would find it when she cleaned this room up, readying it for another artist to temporarily occupy.

     "You don’t want to see ‘em?" came the Cockney question from the mouth of the man.

     "No," I said. "I’ll see him. Give me five minutes, then send him up." I gave the man a smile but he scowled back at me. "Please," I amended my statement. He broke into a broad grin, showing one broken tooth and one capped in gold. He nodded twice at me and backed out of my dressing room door, closing it firmly but silently as he did so. "I’ll definitely see him," I muttered to myself. "Oh, yes."

     I spent the intervening minutes combing my hair, daubing my forehead with cologne and generally making myself irresistible. I was ready for him when he knocked on the door. I was good and ready, rehearsed and prepared and ready to work the lad over until the apology I’d get would come from the depths of the heart, not merely from the formulations of the mind.

     He knocked.

     I didn’t respond.

     He knocked a second time and without waiting for my call, he opened the door and came in. That, I will confess, took me by surprise. Even if it shouldn’t have, it did.

     "Well. Max," I said. He stood in the doorway without saying a word. He was looking at me, waiting for me to make a first move, but I could find no reason to be the first one to weaken here. I was the victim, after all, the victim of a distinct form of betrayal, after all.

     "You looked good out there, Paul," he said. "You sounded good too."

     "A compliment," I said.

     "Well, yes. You sang beautifully and you looked wonderful. I thought you needed to hear that." He was good at this," I thought to myself, "so good."

     My heart was leaping around in my chest. I could feel it dancing a gavotte or some such movement. It wasn’t directly responsible for, or responding to, Max’s words. They had been hard enough to pick up and write, eventually, pausing for a moment or two at the last movement. That has been my specialty for years, but I was wrong - there was no doubt about t.

     "Well, I have no doubt you have similar engagements elsewhere, Maxie," I said to him. He blanched, then recovered and was about to say something when I intervened once again with a new thought.

     "If you don’t, dear boy, I can recommend a few of the needier artists currently in London. Surely you will find someone among them who cares, or who desperately needs to play the show to its concluding measures."

     "That’s cruel, Paul," Max said to me in return. "I knew you could be hard, but I never imagined such cruelty coming from you."

     "You don’t know what human cruelty is, Max. You’ve never had to live within its borders."

     "And you have, I suppose?"

     "Max, you think you know me. What you know, dear boy, is a fraction of my life, a mere fraction, perhaps two tenths, perhaps less."

     "I think I’d surprise you, now."

     "Do you?"

     "I do."

     "Come here, Max. Sit down while I work on this face again," I said. I was only forestalling the inevitable and I knew it.

     When he was seated and less intense I spoke to him again.

     "Will you please tell me what you want, Max. You know I consider us to be at an end."

     "I don’t Paul." He smiled and I could feel that smile with the back of my neck as I watched it emerge in my dressing table mirror. "We’re both here, Paul, and we’re both helpless in this situation."

     "Oh, you think so, Max. Well, let me tell you something you should have known from the beginning of our relationship....."

     "There’s that stupid word," he shouted. "Why does everyone use that word when it means so very little. I meet you, we shake hands and smile, we part. That is now, now has become, a relationship. It’s crap, Paul. We had a whole lot more than just that."

     "Max, if you insist on glamorizing our situation with imagery you had better do a good job of it."

     "Oh, please, Paul. Pay attention, please. I want to talk about where we are and where we’re going."

     "All right, Max. Where are we? Where are we going?" I smiled at him as I turned to look at him again. "Be precise, now."

     And he proceeded to tell me his concept of our arrangement. I listened to all of the sordid details and the more humane ones as well. I paid close attention to every word of this scene, so obviously rehearsed by Max before he arrived. He told me everything except the two most important facts and I wasn’t ready to ask him to go over those points. He never mentioned love in our equation and he never included sex either. Please note: I consider them very different things. I never confuse the two.

     By the time our talk concluded Max had brought me to confess that I wanted him on the next three legs of my tour in Britain and on the Continent. I had seven concerts and a dozen or so radio appearances scheduled and I did need him to do the dirty jobs that were just beneath the level at which an artist would be comfortable operating. Max would join me in a week in Glasgow for a recital and we would move on together from there going to Manchester, Liverpool, Brussels, Paris, Lyon, Zurich, Venice, Lake Como, Stuttgart, Berlin, Copenhagen and finally Warsaw. As he programmed the schedule in his head I was already preparing to desert him in Poland, to leave him there among the hateful crew who never forgave anyone for the holocaust, but blamed it on the Jews, the Austrians, the Bavarians and the American blacks who came there at the end of the war. Yes, I thought, leaving Max stranded in Warsaw was revenge enough for his desertion of me on the ship for that man.

     There was a moment in our conversation that made this plan seem all the more plausible and reasonable. He had apologized five or six times for what he insisted was only a misunderstanding. I had accepted his apologies but, at that point, made no concessions. That was when he brought up Drew, his new ‘friend.’

     "He has been kind to me Paul. I feel I must not just walk away from him. I have to do this right, Paul."

     "And that is...?"

     "I have to tell him about our conversation - oh, he knew I was coming here."

     "He tried to dissuade you, no doubt."

     "He did, but I persisted and finally he understood what I had to do."

     "And you’ll tell him it’s all over."

     "I’ll tell him what’s real. I think that’s more reasonable."

     "And what is real, Max"

     "That I am going to be with you now. That we’ve talked and all is understood."

     "I see."

     "It’s not enough for you, is it Paul?"

     "No." I paused a moment, then laughed - oh, so sincerely. "It could never be quite enough, Max. You know how I am."

     "Then what would you want?"

     "Max, I would want you to stay where you are, right there and never to speak to or see, him again. That’s what I would want."

     "You’d want me to be to him what you were to me on the ship."

     "Yes. Exactly."

     "I’m not you, Paul. I can’t do that."

     "Then go to him and not to me."

     "Paul, I’m trying to correct mistakes here. Yours as well as my own."

     "So, you think I’ve been behaving improperly."

     "Yes, I do."

     "How sweet of you, boy."

     "I think I’m being the mature adult, Paul, and you’re the little spoiled boy in this. You’re the one who acted badly without even hurling an accusation at me."

     "Hurling an accusation. What would that have brought? More lies? Most likely, I say."

     "I can’t do this, Paul," he said, standing up and moving away from me.

     "Oh, sit down, Max. You wanted to talk all this out and that’s what we’re doing. You’re having your way with me."

     "I’m not."

     "You are, but let’s not press the point if it makes you so uncomfortable."

     "Thank you."

     "Welcome."

     What followed was the calming, and the petting, and the pandering, and the lies and the quibbles, and, well, you know how these chats go, I’m sure. I agreed to this and that and he agreed to the other thing and when he left to return to this Drew it was with the understanding that he would end whatever was between them and come back to me and we would tour Europe together.

     But I had my ace tucked up my sleeve. I’d leave him in Warsaw and that would, after all this time, actually be that. Having my cake and eating it too. There’s a small irony in all that decision-making. A very small irony indeed. An obligatory scene between us had played out according the pattern normally pursued. But there was one little element that only I knew about.

     Smiling, at my age, reverses the wrinkles and allows me to present a much more youthful portrait of myself to an adoring public. With Max on his way back to me I could face those lovely fans and dazzle them with my eternal youth.

#####

 


Web Hosting powered by Network Solutions®