Portia gathered everyone together in front of the stage after we dressed and then physically hauled Peter over by the elbow. She shoved him next to me, completely exasperated.
“Um, okay everyone.” He looked around at all our faces except mine. I hoped I wasn’t as flushed as I felt with him standing so close.
“Hold hands, everybody,” Portia directed from Peter’s other side, grabbing her neighbors’ hands. “We have to form the power circle.”
Everyone thinned out into a big circle and connected up, until Peter and I were the last ones apart. He slipped my hand into his before it became awkward and held it gingerly.
“You’ve all worked so hard,” he began slowly, clearing his throat. “Look at this set,” he said. Everyone turned and admired it.
“It’s on par with anything I’ve seen at the smaller professional theaters in the cities. Great construction, guys. And the costumes. Christy, they’re exactly how I imagined them. Clean lines, timeless. Beautiful job. The lights and sound are all a go, mainly because Portia’s been riding the crew like Peter Jackson. Thanks, Porsche.”
I started. I couldn’t help it, hearing him use my name for Portia like that. It rolled so easily off his tongue as he warmed up to the speech, and I remembered the times I’d rambled on about my best friend to him, all the things he knew about her that he had no right to know. How she craved drama. How she hid shirtless pictures of Ryan Gosling in her nightstand. How she hated that her parents made her speak Hmong during Sunday dinners. How she wanted so badly to fit in and stand out at the same time.
No one else seemed to notice his slip. Everyone laughed and grinned at Portia, who beamed.
Peter continued, using his full-on teacher voice now. “This isn’t a happy play, but it’s an important one. Here we see Shakespeare looking deep into one man’s soul after he murders his king. He’s not an evil man. Evil is simple. It’s a child’s explanation for why people do bad things. The truth is always more complicated and worth pursuing. Shakespeare pursued the truth in this play. Of course, he threw in the witches and the bloodbaths to boost ratings”—everyone laughed except me—“but at its heart, this is a psychological study. Why would a man commit a terrible crime, something he knew was wrong even before he did it?”
My palm started to sweat. Gradually, so slowly that I didn’t even notice it at first, his hold on my hand grew tighter.
“Ambition,” Portia answered.
“The witches told him he’d be king,” added Emily, who played the Second Witch.
“His wife made him do it,” said Adam, who played Macbeth. I stuck out my tongue at him, and he winked back.
“You’re all correct,” Peter answered, “but the underlying theme is desire. What happens to him—what could happen to any of us?—if we pursue our darkest desires? What do we lose of ourselves when we cross that line? What does it cost those around us?”
His fingers squeezed mine.
“Macb—MacBee,” Peter amended, drawing a gleeful smile from Portia, “crossed that line anyway. He took what he wanted, regardless of the consequences, regardless of society’s conventions, of the mental anguish, or even of his own life. That’s what makes this play so timeless. He’s just an ordinary man who understands, I believe, at least in part, what his temptation will cost him, and he succumbs anyway.
“This is what you’ll show our audience this weekend: the consequences of a man’s ugliest and most powerful desires. After all the work everyone has put in, I know you’re going to crush it. You’ll have no mercy on this poor bastard’s soul.”
Everyone broke apart and clapped and cheered. I didn’t move. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there, not looking at Peter, while the rest of the cast and crew yelled. He gave my hand one last lingering squeeze and then walked away. I turned and slipped backstage, waiting numbly for Act 1, scene 5, when I would make my entrance.
Even though it didn’t go perfectly, the dress rehearsal was pretty good. One of the thugs dropped his sword at one point, right when he was supposed to be killing Banquo. Banquo laughed, but then the thug pretended to snap his neck and Banquo obediently fell over dead.
Adam had his lines down and worked up some pretty good emotion during the monologues. Some of the cast hadn’t liked that he looked so babyish, but I did, because it helped me appear like I was manipulating him to commit the murder in the first place. I was almost a foot taller than him in my heels and I really laid on the power in our first scene where we plan the murder. Harsh, high tones. Severe expressions.
My best performance, though, was the sleepwalker scene, my last scene. The crown slipped sideways in my hair and my dress was almost completely red down the front. I looked more like the murder victim than the murderer now, which was the whole point. Our treachery was killing us. I paced upstage in agony, holding my hands in front of me like I couldn’t figure out how they were connected to the rest of my body. I stared blindly into the gymnasium walls and over the space where the heads of the audience would be, where Peter sat by himself in the dark. I didn’t even realize I was crying until the room blurred. I poured my heartache into the scene. In rehearsals I had played this act just as strong as the waking scenes, shouting sleeping instructions to myself to shake off the murder.
“Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale!”
But now my lines hinted at desperation, like I knew I was heading over the abyss into madness and could not understand the fall. My voice trembled, threatened to break.