“Everything you’ve ever slammed shut gets reopened here,” he said. “If none of you had auditioned and been accepted you would all have become cemented, cast in plaster and molded for the rest of your adult life. That’s what’s happening to everybody else, out there. In here you never congeal. You never set or crust over. Every possibility is kept open—it must be kept open. You learn to hold all these possibilities in your fist and never let any of them go.”
There was a silence. The golden boy smoothed the knees of his corduroy pants and said, as if he had just thought of it, “Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is always clever enough to enslave you.”
October
Stanley was disappointed with his life so far. Here, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, he stood in the rich dusty quiet of the shuttered foyer in a paralysis of bitterness and dissatisfaction. He was thinking about everything he was not.
Stanley had expected to be savage and dissenting and righteous as a teenager—he had yearned for it, even—and grew more and more dissatisfied as his high-school years passed politely by. He had expected to drink whisky from a paper-bagged bottle by the river, and slip his cold hands up a girl’s skirt in the patch of scrub beyond the tennis courts, and take shots at passing cars with a potato-gun from a neighbor’s garage roof. He had expected to drink himself blind and vandalize the bus shelters in the suburbs, to drive without a license, to retreat from his family, to turn sour, and to frighten his mother, maybe, by refusing to eat or leave his room. This was his entitlement, his rightful lot, and instead he had spent his high-school years playing gentlemanly sport and watching family television, admiring from a distance the boys brave enough to fight each other, and longing for every girl he passed to lift her head and look him in the eye.
Stanley heard the voice of the Institute tutors in his mind. “The real thrill of the stage,” they said, “is the thrill of knowing that at any moment something might go wrong. At any moment something on the stage might break or fall over; someone might miss their cue, someone might botch the lighting, someone might forget their accent or their lines. You are never fearful watching a film, because what you are watching is always complete, always the same and always perfect; but you are often fearful watching a play, in case something goes foul and you must then suffer the private embarrassment of watching the actors flounder and repair themselves. But at the same time, in the silky dark of the auditorium, you ache for something to go wrong. You desire it utterly. You feel tender toward any actor whose hat falls off, whose button breaks. You gasp and applaud when an actor trips and rights himself. And if you see a mistake that others in the audience miss, then you feel a special privilege, as if you are glimpsing a seam of a secret undergarment, something infinitely private, like a scarlet bite-mark on the inside of a woman’s thigh.”
Stanley stood in the foyer of the Institute and looked about him. Here was another possible life that was in his power to claim, another life he wanted, just as he had wanted, as a shy and useless teenager, to be unfeeling and disrespectful and casual and vile. Now, as then, he felt the weight of a terrible inertia pin him to the foyer floor. He suffered all over again the disappointing and quotable truth that the world would not come to him, or wait for him, or even pause: if he waited, this life would simply pass him by. Stanley thought about this and felt deflated and terribly short-changed.
In his sixth-form school production he had been cast as Horatio, a part which pleased him—Horatio was a memorable name, at least, the only one he had heard of before he encountered the play. Everyone remembered Horatio. It was a name that stuck. Horatio it was who endured, critical and strident in the cultural memory, as the less resonant, less pronounceable characters peeled off and dropped away. Stanley’s part was pared almost to nothing by the sharp-nosed drama teacher who said, “People don’t want to sit here for three and a half hours,” and in rehearsals remarked, “You are a bit of a Horatio, aren’t you, Stanley? You’re a Horatio through and through.” Stanley nodded and smiled and mouthed “Thank you” and felt a private happy-thrill, and didn’t truly apprehend her meaning until several months later when he realized that the comment had been less than kind. Even on stage as he trotted about in Hamlet’s brooding shadow, flaring his doublet and flexing his hose, he had not really understood that his part existed merely to throw other, more interesting characters into greater profundity and sharper relief. His mother called him “Wonderful,” and in the exhilarated lineup of the curtain call he had been close as he could be to the center: by Hamlet’s side, holding Hamlet’s sweaty hand.
At the end of seventh form Stanley had seen the ragged call for auditions stapled to the pin-board in Careers Advice and simply fished for a pen and written his name. He supposed that he had wanted to be an actor since he was a child. Acting was part of a child’s primary lexicon of adult jobs: teacher, doctor, actor, lawyer, fireman, vet. Choosing to become an actor did not require originality or forethought. It was not like choosing to be a jockey, or a greengrocer, or an events manager for a local trust, where part of the choosing meant seeking and creating the choice; it did not depend on opportunity or introspection. Choosing to become an actor was simply a matter of reaching for one of these discrete and packaged categories with both hands. Stanley did not think about this as he wrote his name. The auditions sheet was watermarked and heavy, and the emblem of the Institute was stamped in bronze.
Later, wishing to amplify the memory of this unremarkable decision, he imagined that it was this moment, when he lifted his pen up to the paper and pressed hard to unstick the ink in the roller-ball tip so that for an instant his fingertips were white and bloodless and hard—this moment, he imagined, was the moment when he seized an opportunity to transform from a Horatio into something utterly new.
October
“Welcome to the first stage of the audition process,” said the Head of Acting, and he briefly smiled. “We believe here that an untrained actor is a liar merely.” He was standing behind the desk with all his fingertips splayed upon the green leather. “As you are now,” he said, “you are all liars, not calm persuasive liars but anxious blushing liars full of doubt. Some of you will not gain entrance to this Institute, and you will remain liars forever.”
There was scattered laughter, mostly uncomprehending and from the ones who would not gain entrance. The Head of Acting smiled again, the smile passing over his face like a shadow.
Stanley was sitting stiffly at the back. He knew some of the boys from high school, but sat apart from them just in case they betrayed or encouraged some aspect of him that he wished to leave behind. The room was tense with hope and wanting.
“So,” the Head of Acting said. “What happens at this Institute? How do we carve up the strange convulsive epileptic rhythm of the days? What violence is inflicted here, and what can you do to minimize the damage?”
He let the question settle like dust.
“This weekend is a virtual simulation of the kind of learning environment that students at the Institute encounter daily,” he said. “Today we are holding classes in improvisation, mime, song, movement and theater history, and tomorrow you will extensively workshop and rehearse a text in collaboration with a small group of others. You are all expected to participate fully in these lessons and to try your hardest to demonstrate to us the level of commitment you are prepared to offer us should you be invited to study here.
“We will be watching you over the course of the weekend, patroling the edges of the rooms and taking notes. If you are successful after this first audition weekend, we will invite you back for an interview and a more formal audition. Does anyone have any questions about how the weekend will be run?”
They all had paper numbers pinned to their chests like marathon runners. Number 45 raised his hand.
“Why don’t you just hold ordinary auditions like the other acting schools?” he said. “Like where you prepare two monologues, one modern and one classical.”
“
Because we do not want to attract that kind of student,” said the Head of Acting, “the kind of student who is good at self-advertisement, who will choose two contrasting monologues that perfectly demonstrate the range of their skill and the depth of their cunning. We do not care about the difference between modern and classical. We do not want students who color-code their notes and start their essays weeks in advance.”
Number 45 blushed, feeling that he had been implicated as a student who color-coded his notes and started his essays weeks in advance. The other hopefuls looked at him with pity and privately resolved to keep their distance.
“Acting is a profession which requires a kind of wholeness,” the Head of Acting said. “My advice to you today is this: your ideas about talent count for nothing here. The moment when we decide to move you to the Yes list—the moment when we decide you deserve a place at this Institute—might not be a moment when you are actually acting. It might be a moment when you’re supporting someone else. It might be when you yourself are watching. It might be when you’re preparing yourself for an exercise. It might be when you’re standing by yourself with your hands in your pockets and looking at the floor.”
The strategists among them were nodding gravely, already planning to let themselves appear to be caught unawares as frequently as possible. They made a mental note to remember to stand for a moment with their hands in their pockets, looking at the floor.
Stanley looked around at his rivals, all of them eager and fervent like candidates for martyrdom, the Head of Acting looming above them, swollen with the wonderful honor of choosing the first to die.
“Let me hand over to the Head of Improvisation,” the Head of Acting said. “Good luck.”
October
The longest corridor at the Institute bordered the gymnasium for its entire length. The corridor was glassed on one side with long curtained windows and recessed doors, and on the other side the wall was uninterrupted save for the heavy double doors into the gymnasium that swung out halfway down. On this long wall were fixed a number of costumes preserved and flattened against the high brick, their empty arms spread wide, like ghosts pinned by a sudden and petrifying shaft of light.
Stanley paused to look. He supposed that the costumes had been retained to mark notable performances, and he moved forward to read the first brass plaque mounted underneath a pair of limp tartan trousers and a jaunty ruffled shirt. It bore neither the title of the play nor the name of the actor, but merely the name of the character and a date, engraved as if on the side of a tomb. Belville. 1957. The plaques continued neatly down the wall. Stanley walked along the corridor as one paying respects to the dead, looking up at the stiff splayed arms and limp trouser-legs and tattered lace, the older costumes ragged and flecked with mold. Vindici, Ferdinand, Mrs. Alving, The Court Envoy. He paused at a heavy royal costume, brocaded in silver and satin lined. One of the splayed kingly sleeves had fallen away from the wall and hung limply by his side, so the effigy seemed to be pointing toward the foyer, the fabric of the fallen arm dragging his shoulder painfully down. The War Minister. Hal. The solemn procession of costumes down the wall was like an eerie trickle of spirits from a leak in the bounds of the underworld. He shivered. Perdita. Volpone. The Toad.
November
“They’ll do terrible things to you there,” Stanley’s father said. “You’ll get in touch with your emotions and your inner eye and worse. I won’t recognize you this time next year. You’ll just be this big pink ball of feeling.”
“Look at all the famous people who’ve come through,” said Stanley, taking the brochure off his father and pointing to the list inside the back cover, where all the television and film stars were asterisked in red. The pages of the brochure were already soft from being turned and turned.
“I look forward to seeing you on daytime television,” said Stanley’s father. “That’s my son, I’ll say out loud, to nobody. There on screen with the airbrushing and the toupee. That’s my son.”
“Did you see the photos of the grounds?” Stanley said, flipping back through the brochure until he found them. “It’s in the old museum building. It’s all stone and mosaic floors and stuff, and big high windows.”
“I see that.”
“Three hundred people audition.”
“That’s great, Stanley.”
“And only twenty get in.”
“That’s great.”
“I know it’s just a beginning,” Stanley said.
A waiter arrived and Stanley’s father ordered wine. Stanley leaned back and looked around. The restaurant was starched and shadowy, full of murmuring and quiet laughter and cologne. The ceiling was strung with little red lanterns glinting back and forth above them.
The waiter bowed and moved off. Stanley’s father shook out his cuffs and smiled his therapy smile. He pushed the glossy brochure back across the tablecloth.
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “It’s going to be great. But you know, we’re working for opposing teams now.”
“What do you mean?” Stanley said.
“Theater is all about the unknown, right? Theater has its roots in magic and ritual and sacrifice, and magic and ritual and sacrifice depend on some element of mystery. Psychology is all about getting rid of mystery, turning superstitions and fears into things that we can understand.” He winked and speared an olive with a toothpick. “We’re practically at war.”
Stanley felt stumped, as he often did when his father said something clever. Each year after this meal was over Stanley lay in bed and thought for hours about what he could have said back that would have been cleverer. He chased the oily bubbles of vinegar around his dish with his finger.
“Do you disagree?” his father asked, looking at him sharply as he chewed.
“Sort of,” Stanley said. “I guess I thought… I guess for me acting seems like a way of finding out about a person, or getting into a person. I mean, you have to understand sadness to be able to act it. I don’t know. That seems kind of similar to what you do.”
“Ah-ha!” said Stanley’s father with the unpleasant greedy quickness of someone who likes to triumph in an argument. “So do you think actors know more about ordinary people than ordinary people know about themselves?”
“No,” Stanley said, “but I’m not sure that psychologists know more about ordinary people than they know about themselves either.”
His father burst out laughing and slapped the table.
“Aren’t you supposed to be giving me life advice and passing on a torch or something?” Stanley asked, to change the subject.
“Shit,” said his father. “I would have come prepared. How about you just tell me all the new cuss words, and we can swap dirty jokes. I’ve never been to drama school. Don’t ask me about my feelings.”
“I don’t know any new cuss words,” said Stanley. “I think all the old ones are still current.”
There was a small pause.
“I’ve got a joke for you,” said Stanley’s father. “How do you give a priest a vasectomy?”
“I don’t know,” said Stanley.
“Kick the choirboy in the back of the head.”
Stanley laughed and felt disgusted that his own father was more outrageous than he was. He started flicking through the brochure again just in case he’d missed something.
The wine arrived. Stanley’s father made a great performance of tasting it, rolling it around in the bottom of his glass and inspecting the label on the bottle. “That’s fine,” he said to the waiter at last, nodding briefly at their glasses, and then switching his smile back to Stanley. “So, you want some life advice,” he said.
“Not really,” said Stanley. “I just thought you were going to do the big ‘now you’re all grown up’ thing.”
“You want psychobabble?”
“No.”
“Kid, you got good blood and a fine pair of shoes.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Did I tell you about my client who set hersel
f on fire?”
“I heard you telling Roger.”
“Life advice,” said Stanley’s father, holding up his glass for a toast. “Right. I’ve got something good and nasty. Stanley, to mark your rite of passage I am going to tell you a secret.”
They touched glasses and sipped.
“Okay,” said Stanley reluctantly.
His father stroked his lapel with his fingertips, his glass poised and careless in his other hand. He looked rich and camp and deadly. “I am going to tell you how to make a million dollars,” he said.
Stanley had the hot frustrated feeling again, but all he said was Okay. He even smiled.
His father said, “Okay. I want you to think of your time at high school. Five years, right? During those five years, same as during anyone’s five years at any high school, there was one kid in your year who died. Yes?”
“I guess so.”
“Maybe he drove too fast, drank too much, played with guns, whatever—there is always one kid who dies. Did you know, Stanley,” he said, “that you can take out life insurance on a person without them knowing?”
Stanley just looked at him.
“And the premiums on school kids,” his father continued, “are really, really low. Provided they don’t have any reasons to think these kids are going to die. You can take out a million-dollar life insurance policy on a kid for something like two hundred a year.”
“Dad,” said Stanley disbelievingly.
“All you’d need to do is pick it. All you’d need to do is to get in there and do some research and get some information that would give you the edge.”
“Dad,” Stanley said again.
His father put his hands up like an innocent man, and laughed.
“Hey, I’m giving you gold here,” he said. “Think of your kid. The one who died at your school. Could you have picked it beforehand? If you could have predicted it, then you could have got in there and made something good of it. Here’s your life advice, Stanley: that is how people get rich. That’s the only secret. They see things are going to happen before they happen, and they pounce.”