_If_We_Were_Villains_-_M_L_Rio
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For the many weird and wonderful thespians whom I have had
the good fortune to call my friends. (I promise this is not about
you.)
ACT I
PROLOGUE
I sit with my wrists cuffed to the table and I think, But that I am forbid /
To tell the secrets of my prison-house, / I could a tale unfold whose
lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul. The guard stands by the door,
watching me, like he’s waiting for something to happen.
Enter Joseph Colborne. He is a graying man now, almost fifty. It’s a
surprise, every few weeks, to see how much he’s aged—and he’s aged a
little more, every few weeks, for ten years. He sits across from me, folds
his hands, and says, “Oliver.”
“Joe.”
“Heard the parole hearing went your way. Congratulations.”
“I’d thank you if I thought you meant it.”
“You know I don’t think you belong in here.”
“That doesn’t mean you think I’m innocent.”
“No.” He sighs, checks his watch—the same one he’s worn since we
met—as if I’m boring him.
“So why are you here?” I ask. “Same fortnightly reason?”
His eyebrows make a flat black line. “You would say fucking
‘fortnight.’”
“You can take the boy out of the theatre, or something like that.”
He shakes his head, simultaneously amused and annoyed.
“Well?” I say.
“Well what?”
“The gallows does well. But how does it well? It does well to those
that do ill,” I reply, determined to deserve his annoyance. “Why are you
here? You should know by now I’m not going to tell you anything.”
“Actually,” he says, “this time I think I might be able to change your
mind.”
I sit up straighter in my chair. “How?”
“I’m leaving the force. Sold out, took a job in private security. Got
my kids’ education to think about.”
For a moment I simply stare at him. Colborne, I always imagined,
would have to be put down like a savage old dog before he’d leave the
chief’s office.
“How’s that supposed to persuade me?” I ask.
“Anything you say will be strictly off the record.”
“Then why bother?”
He sighs again and all the lines on his face deepen. “Oliver, I don’t
care about doling out punishment, not anymore. Someone served the
time, and we rarely get that much satisfaction in our line of work. But I
don’t want to hang up my hat and waste the next ten years wondering
what really happened ten years ago.”
I say nothing at first. I like the idea but don’t trust it. I glance around
at the grim cinder blocks, the tiny black video cameras that peer down
from every corner, the guard with his jutting underbite. I close my eyes,
inhale deeply, and imagine the freshness of Illinois springtime, what it
will be like to step outside after gasping on stale prison air for a third of
my life.
When I exhale I open my eyes and Colborne is watching me closely.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m getting out of here, one way or the other. I
don’t want to risk coming back. Seems safer to let sleeping dogs lie.”
His fingers drum restlessly on the table. “Tell me something,” he
says. “Do you ever lie in your cell, staring up at the ceiling, wondering
how you wound up in here, and you can’t sleep because you can’t stop
thinking about that day?”
“Every night,” I say, without sarcasm. “But here’s the difference, Joe.
For you it was just one day, then business as usual. For us it was one day,
and every single day that came after.” I lean forward on my elbows, so
my face is only a few inches from his, so he hears every word when I
lower my voice. “It must eat you alive, not knowing. Not knowing who,
not knowing how, not knowing why. But you didn’t know him.”
He wears a strange, queasy expression now, as if I’ve become
unspeakably ugly and awful to look at. “You’ve kept your secrets all this
time,” he says. “It would drive anyone else crazy. Why do it?”
“I wanted to.”
“Do you still?”
My heart feels heavy in my chest. Secrets carry weight, like lead.
I lean back. The guard watches impassively, as if we’re two strangers
talking in another language, our conversation distant and insignificant. I
think of the others. Once upon a time, us. We did wicked things, but they
were necessary, too—or so it seemed. Looking back, years later, I’m not
so sure they were, and now I wonder: Could I explain it all to Colborne,
the little twists and turns and final exodos? I study his blank open face,
the gray eyes winged now by crow’s-feet, but clear and bright as they
have always been.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll tell you a story. But you have to understand a
few things.”
Colborne is motionless. “I’m listening.”
“First, I’ll start talking after I get out of here, not before. Second, this
can’t come back to me or anyone else—no double jeopardy. And last, it’s
not an apology.”
I wait for some response from him, a nod or a word, but he only
blinks at me, silent and stoic as a sphinx.
“Well, Joe?” I say. “Can you live with that?”
He gives me a cold sliver of a smile. “Yes, I think I can.”
SCENE 1
The time: September 1997, my fourth and final year at Dellecher
Classical Conservatory. The place: Broadwater, Illinois, a small town of
almost no consequence. It had been a warm autumn so far.
Enter the players. There were seven of us then, seven bright young
things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther
than the books in front of our faces. We were always surrounded by
books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in
leather and vellum. (I blame this in part for what happened.) The Castle
library was an airy octagonal room, walled with bookshelves, crowded
with sumptuous old furniture, and kept drowsily warm by a monumental
fireplace that burned almost constantly, regardless of the temperature
outside. The clock on the mantel struck twelve, and we stirred, one by
one, like seven statues coming to life.
“’Tis now dead midnight,” Richard said. He sat in the largest
armchair like it was a throne, long legs outstretched, feet propped up on
the grate. Three years of playing kings and conquerors had taught him to
sit that way in every chair, onstage or off-. “And by eight o’clock
tomorrow we must be made immortal.” He closed his book with a snap.
Meredith, curled like a cat on one end of the sofa (while I sprawled
like a dog on the other), toyed with one strand of her long auburn hair as
she asked, “Where are you going?”
Richard: “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed—”
Filippa: “Spare us.”
Richard: “Early morning and all that.”
Alexander: “He says, as if he’s concerned.”
Wren, sitting cross-legged on a cushion by the hearth and oblivious
to the others’ bickering, said, “Have you all picked your pieces? I can’t
decide.”
Me: “What about Isabella? Your Isabella’s excellent.”
Meredith: “Measure’s a comedy, you fool. We’re auditioning for
Caesar.”
“I don’t know why we bother auditioning at all.” Alexander—
slumped over the table, wallowing in the darkness at the back of the
room—reached for the bottle of Scotch at his elbow. He refilled his
glass, took one huge gulp, and grimaced at the rest of us. “I could cast
the whole bastarding thing right now.”
“How?” I asked. “I never know where I’ll end up.”
“That’s because they always cast you last,” Richard said, “as
whatever happens to be left over.”
“Tsk-tsk,” Meredith said. “Are we Richard tonight or are we Dick?”
“Ignore him, Oliver,” James said. He sat by himself in the farthest
corner, loath to look up from his notebook. He had always been the most
serious student in our year, which (probably) explained why he was also
the best actor and (certainly) why no one resented him for it.
“There.” Alexander had unfolded a wad of ten-dollar bills from his
pocket and was counting them out on the table. “That’s fifty dollars.”
“For what?” Meredith said. “You want a lap dance?”
“Why, are you practicing for after graduation?”
“Bite me.”
“Ask nicely.”
“Fifty dollars for what?” I said, keen to interrupt. Meredith and
Alexander had by far the foulest mouths among the seven of us, and took
a perverse kind of pride in out-cussing each other. If we let them, they’d
go at it all night.
Alexander tapped the stack of tens with one long finger. “I bet fifty
dollars I can call the cast list right now and not be wrong.”
Five of us exchanged curious glances; Wren was still frowning into
the fireplace.
“All right, let’s hear it,” Filippa said, with a wan little sigh, as though
her curiosity had gotten the better of her.
Alexander pushed his unruly black curls back from his face and said,
“Well, obviously Richard will be Caesar.”
“Because we all secretly want to kill him?” James asked.
Richard arched one dark eyebrow. “Et tu, Bruté?”
“Sic semper tyrannis,” James said, and drew the tip of his pen across
his throat like a dagger. Thus always to tyrants.
Alexander gestured from one of them to the other. “Exactly,” he said.
“James will be Brutus because he’s always the good guy, and I’ll be
Cassius because I’m always the bad guy. Richard and Wren can’t be
married because that would be gross, so she’ll be Portia, Meredith will
be Calpurnia, and Pip, you’ll end up in drag again.”
Filippa, more difficult to cast than Meredith (the femme fatale) or
Wren (the ingénue), was obliged to cross-dress whenever we ran out of
good female parts—a common occurrence in the Shakespearean theatre.
“Kill me,” she said.
“Wait,” I said, effectively proving Richard’s hypothesis that I was a
permanent leftover in the casting process, “where does that leave me?”
Alexander studied me with narrowed eyes, running his tongue across
his teeth. “Probably as Octavius,” he decided. “They won’t make you
Antony—no offense, but you’re just not conspicuous enough. It’ll be that
insufferable third-year, what’s his name?”
Filippa: “Richard the Second?”
Richard: “Hilarious. No, Colin Hyland.”
“Spectacular.” I looked down at the text of Pericles I was scanning,
for what felt like the hundredth time. Only half as talented as any of the
rest of them, I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in
someone else’s story. Far too many times I had asked myself whether art
was imitating life or if it was the other way around.
Alexander: “Fifty bucks, on that exact casting. Any takers?”
Meredith: “No.”
Alexander: “Why not?”
Filippa: “Because that’s precisely what’ll happen.”
Richard chuckled and climbed out of his chair. “One can only hope.”
He started toward the door and leaned over to pinch James’s cheek on his
way out. “Goodnight, sweet prince—”
James smacked Richard’s hand away with his notebook, then made a
show of disappearing behind it again. Meredith echoed Richard’s laugh
and said, “Thou art as hot a Jack in thy mood as any in Italy!”
“A plague o’ both your houses,” James muttered.
Meredith stretched—with a small, suggestive groan—and pushed
herself off the couch.
“Coming to bed?” Richard asked.
“Yes. Alexander’s made all this work seem rather pointless.” She left
her books scattered on the low table in front of the fire, her empty
wineglass with them, a crescent of lipstick clinging to the rim.
“Goodnight,” she said, to the room at large. “Godspeed.” They
disappeared down the hall together.
I rubbed my eyes, which were beginning to burn from the effort of
reading for hours on end. Wren tossed her book backward over her head,
and I started as it landed beside me on the couch.
Wren: “To hell with it.”
Alexander: “That’s the spirit.”
Wren: “I’ll just do Isabella.”
Filippa: “Just go to bed.”
Wren stood slowly, blinking the vestigial light of the fire out of her
eyes. “I’ll probably lie awake all night reciting lines,” she said.
“Want to come out for a smoke?” Alexander had finished his
whiskey (again) and was rolling a spliff on the table. “Might help you
relax.”
“No, thank you,” she said, drifting out into the hall. “Goodnight.”
“Suit yourself.” Alexander pushed his chair back, spliff poking out of
one corner of his mouth. “Oliver?”
“If I help you smoke that I’ll wake up with no voice tomorrow.”
“Pip?”
She nudged her glasses up into her hair and coughed softly, testing
her throat. “God, you’re a terrible influence,” she said. “Fine.”
He nodded, already halfway out of the room, hands buried deep in
his pockets. I watched them go, a little jealously, then slumped down
against the arm of the couch. I struggled to focus on my text, which was
so aggressively annotated that it was barely legible anymore.
PERICLES: Antioch, farewell! for wisdom sees those men
Blush not in actions blacker than the night
Will ’schew no course to keep them from the light.
One sin, I know, another doth provoke;
Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.
I murmured the last two lines under my breath. I knew them by heart,
had known them for months, but the fear that I would forget a word or
phrase halfway through my audition gnawed at me anyway. I glanced
across the room at James and said, “Do you ever wonder if Shakespeare
knew these speeches half as well as we do?”
He withdrew from whatever verse he was reading, looked up, and
said, “Constantly.”
I cracked a smile, vindicated just enough. “Well, I give up. I’m not
actually getting anything done.”
He checked his watch. “No, I don’t think I am either.”
I heaved myself off the sofa and followed James up the spiral stairs
to the bedroom we shared—which was directly over the library, the
highest of three rooms in a little stone column commonly referred to as
the Tower. It had once been used only as an attic, but the cobwebs and
clutter had been cleared away to make room for more students in the late
seventies. Twenty years later it housed James and me, two beds with blue
Dellecher bedspreads, two monstrous old wardrobes, and a pair of
mismatched bookshelves too ugly for the library.
“Do you think it’ll fall out how Alexander says?” I asked.
James pulled his shirt off, mussing his hair in the process. “If you ask
me, it’s too predictable.”
“When have they ever surprised us?”
“Frederick surprises me all the time,” he said. “But Gwendolyn will
have the final say, she always does.”
“If it were up to her, Richard would play all of the men and half the
women.”
“Which would leave Meredith playing the other half.” He pressed the
heels of his palms against his eyes. “When do you read tomorrow?”
“Right after Richard. Filippa’s after me.”
“And I’m after her. God, I feel bad for her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a wonder she hasn’t dropped out.”
James frowned thoughtfully as he wriggled out of his jeans. “Well,
she’s a bit more resilient than the rest of us. Maybe that’s why
Gwendolyn torments her.”
“Just because she can take it?” I said, discarding my own clothes in a
pile on the floor. “That’s cruel.”
He shrugged. “That’s Gwendolyn.”
“If I had my way, I’d turn it all upside down,” I said. “Make
Alexander Caesar and have Richard play Cassius instead.”
He folded his comforter back and asked, “Am I still Brutus?”
“No.” I tossed a sock at him. “You’re Antony. For once I get to be the
lead.”
“Your time will come to be the tragic hero. Just wait for spring.”
I glanced up from the drawer I was pawing through. “Has Frederick
been telling you secrets again?”
He lay down and folded his hands behind his head. “He may have
mentioned Troilus and Cressida. He has this fantastic idea to do it as a
battle of the sexes. All the Trojans men, all the Greeks women.”
“That’s insane.”
“Why? That play is as much about sex as it is about war,” he said.
“Gwendolyn will want Richard to be Hector, of course, but that makes
you Troilus.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t you be Troilus?”
He shifted, arched his back. “I may have mentioned that I’d like to
have a little more variety on my résumé.”
I stared at him, unsure if I should be insulted.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, a low note of reproach in his
voice. “He agreed we all need to break out of our boxes. I’m tired of
playing fools in love like Troilus, and I’m sure you’re tired of always
playing the sidekick.”
I flopped on my bed on my back. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” For
a moment I let my thoughts wander, and then I breathed out a laugh.
“Something funny?” James asked, as he reached over to turn out the
light.
“You’ll have to be Cressida,” I told him. “You’re the only one of us
pretty enough.”
We lay there laughing in the dark until we dropped off to sleep, and
slept deeply, with no way of knowing that the curtain was about to rise
on a drama of our own invention.
SCENE 2
Dellecher Classical Conservatory occupied twenty or so acres of land on
the eastern edge of Broadwater, and the borders of the two so often
overlapped that it was difficult to tell where campus ended and town
began. The first-years were housed in a cluster of brick buildings in
town, while the second- and third-years were crowded together at the
Hall, and the handful of fourth-years were tucked away in odd isolated
corners of campus or left to fend for themselves. We, the fourth-year
theatre students, lived on the far side of the lake in what was whimsically
called the Castle (not really a castle, but a small stone building that
happened to have one turret, originally the groundskeepers’ quarters).
Dellecher Hall, a sprawling red brick mansion, looked down a steep
hill to the dark flat water of the lake. Dormitories and the ballroom were
on the fourth and fifth floors, classrooms and offices on the second and
third, while the ground floor was divided into refectory, music hall,
library, and conservatory. A chapel jutted off the west end of the
building, and sometime in the 1960s, the Archibald Dellecher Fine Arts
Building (generally referred to as the FAB, for more than one reason)
was erected on the east side of the Hall, a small courtyard and
honeycomb of corbeled walkways wedged between them. The FAB was
home to the Archibald Dellecher Theatre and the rehearsal hall and, ergo,
was where we spent most of our time. At eight in the morning on the first
day of classes, it was exceptionally quiet.
Richard and I walked from the Castle together, though I wasn’t due
to audition for another half hour.
“How do you feel?” he asked, as we climbed the steep hill to the
lawn.
“Nervous, like I always am.” The number of auditions under my belt
didn’t matter; the anxiety never really left me.
“No need to be,” he said. “You’re never as dreadful as you think you
are. Just don’t shift your weight too much. You’re most interesting when
you stand still.”
I frowned at him. “How do you mean?”
“I mean when you forget you’re onstage and forget to be nervous.
You really listen to other actors, really hear the words like it’s the first
time you’ve heard them. It’s wonderful to work with and marvelous to
watch.” He shook his head at the look of consternation on my face. “I
shouldn’t have told you. Don’t get self-conscious.” He clapped one huge
hand on my shoulder, and I was so distracted I pitched forward, my
fingertips brushing the dewy grass. Richard’s booming laugh echoed in
the morning air, and he grabbed my arm to help me find my balance.
“See?” he said. “Keep your feet planted and you’ll be fine.”
“You suck,” I said, but with a grudging smirk. (Richard had that
effect on people.)
As soon as we reached the FAB, he gave me another cheery smack
on the back and disappeared into the rehearsal hall. I paced back and
forth along the crossover, puzzling over what he had said and repeating
Pericles to myself like I was saying a string of Hail Marys.
Our first semester auditions determined which parts we would play in
our fall production. That year, Julius Caesar. Tragedies and histories
were reserved for the fourth-years, while the third-years were relegated
to romance and comedy and all the bit parts were played by the second-
years. First-years were left to work backstage, slog through general
education, and wonder what the hell they’d gotten themselves into. (Each
year, students whose performance was deemed unsatisfactory were cut
from the program—often as many as half. To survive until fourth year
was proof of either talent or dumb luck. In my case, the latter.) Class
photos from the past fifty years hung in two neat rows along the wall in
the crossover. Ours was the last and certainly the sexiest, a publicity
photo from the previous year’s production of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. We looked younger.
It was Frederick’s idea to do Midsummer as a pajama party. James
and I (Lysander and Demetrius, respectively) wore striped boxers and
white undershirts and stood glaring at each other, with Wren (Hermia, in
a short pink nightgown) trapped between us. Filippa stood on my left in
Helena’s longer blue nightdress, clutching the pillow she and Wren had
walloped each other with in Act III. In the middle of the photo,
Alexander and Meredith were wrapped around each other like a pair of
snakes—he a sinister and seductive Oberon in slinky silk bathrobe, she a
voluptuous Titania in revealing black lace. But Richard was the most
arresting, standing among the other rude mechanicals in clownish flannel
pajamas, enormous donkey ears protruding from his thick black hair. His
Nick Bottom was aggressive, unpredictable, and totally deranged. He
terrorized the fairies, tormented the other players, scared the hell out of
the audience, and—as always—stole the show.
The seven of us had survived three yearly “purges” because we were
each somehow indispensable to the playing company. In the course of
four years we were transformed from a rabble of bit players to a small,
meticulously trained dramatic troupe. Some of our theatrical assets were
obvious: Richard was pure power, six foot three and carved from
concrete, with sharp black eyes and a thrilling bass voice that flattened
every other sound in a room. He played warlords and despots and anyone
else the audience needed to be impressed by or afraid of. Meredith was
uniquely designed for seduction, a walking daydream of supple curves
and skin like satin. But there was something merciless about her sex
appeal—you watched her when she moved, whatever else was
happening, and whether you wanted to or not. (She and Richard had been
“together” in every typical sense of the word since the spring semester of
our second year.) Wren—Richard’s cousin, though you never would have
guessed it by looking at them—was the ingénue, the girl next door, a
waifish thing with corn silk hair and round china doll eyes. Alexander
was our resident villain, thin and wiry, with long dark curls and sharp
canine teeth that made him look like a vampire when he smiled.
Filippa and I were more difficult to categorize. She was tall, olive-
skinned, vaguely boyish. There was something cool and chameleonic
about her that made her equally convincing as Horatio or Emilia. I, on
the other hand, was average in every imaginable way: not especially
handsome, not especially talented, not especially good at anything but
just good enough at everything that I could pick up whatever slack the
others left. I was convinced I had survived the third-year purge because
James would have been moody and sullen without me.
Fate had dealt us a good hand in our first year, when he and I found
ourselves squashed together in a tiny room on the top floor of the
dormitories. When I’d first opened our door, he looked up from the bag
he was unpacking, held out his hand, and said, “Here comes Sir Oliver!
You are well met, I hope.” He was the sort of actor everyone fell in love
with as soon as he stepped onstage, and I was no exception. Even in our
early days at Dellecher, I was protective and even possessive of him
when other friends came too close and threatened to usurp my place as
“best”—an event as rare as a meteor shower. Some people saw me as
Gwendolyn always cast me: simply the loyal sidekick. James was so
quintessentially a hero that this didn’t bother me. He was the handsomest
of us (Meredith once compared him to a Disney prince), but more
charming than that was his childlike depth of feeling, onstage and off-.
For three years I enjoyed the overflow of his popularity and admired him
intensely, without jealousy, even though he was Frederick’s obvious
favorite in much the same way that Richard was Gwendolyn’s. Of
course, James did not have Richard’s ego or temper and was liked by
everyone, while Richard was hated and loved with equal ferocity.
It was customary for us to watch whichever audition followed our
own (performing unobserved was compensation for performing first),
and I paced restlessly along the crossover, wishing that James could have
been my audience. Even when he didn’t mean to be, Richard was an
intimidating onlooker. I could hear his voice from the rehearsal hall,
ringing off the walls.
Richard: “Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war:
We charge you, in the name of God, take heed.
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood; whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint,
’Gainst him whose wrongs give edge unto the swords
That make such waste in brief mortality.”