Typecasting (4 page)

Jerry Turner steepled his fingers as he thought. As befit someone who ran things, he didn't shoot from the lip. “It bothers me, too,” he said at last. “But when I invite someone to come here and work with our people, I'm reluctant to second-guess him. Otherwise, it turns into my play, not his—and next year I'll have trouble finding anyone who wants to work with me.”

“I understand that,” Bill said. “But when somebody plainly hasn't got a clue—”

“Can you give me an example of what you mean?” Turner interrupted. “No offense, but I do want to make sure you're not just a parent bitching about the part his kid got.”

Bill
was
a parent bitching about the part his kid got, but he hoped he wasn't just that kind of parent. “I sure can,” he said. “Last night, he told me he was glad Nicole was in the troupe because she could play Caliban without any makeup.”

Turner's mouth puckered as if he'd bitten into an unripe persimmon. “Oh, dear,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” Bill nodded. “If that's not clueless, I don't know what is. He looks at a sasquatch, and all he sees is a funny-looking critter. He doesn't see an actor. He doesn't see how there can be an actor under the fuzz, if you know what I mean.”

“That kind of thing won't make the reviewers happy. Not in Jefferson. Not in Ashland,” Turner said fretfully. Bill smiled, but only inside, where it didn't show. He'd hit the producing director where he lived. Turner went on, “The festival grows out of what the state is. If we're about anything, we're about giving people chances because of what they can do, not because of what they look like.”

“Feels the same way to me.” Bill had come to see Jerry Turner with a carrot as well as a stick. He said, “The Ashland Shakespeare Festival's brought Jefferson credit for a long time. Even before the war, the state WPA Guide talks about it.”

“Yes, I know—and it calls Angus Bowmer Angus Bowman,” Turner said with a grin. “He used to laugh about it and say, ‘Fame is getting your name spelled wrong in the history books.'”

“I like that,” Bill said. “So anyway, I was thinking maybe it's time to change the name of what goes on here from the Ashland Shakespeare Festival to the Jefferson Shakespeare Festival, and to put in a little state money to help things grow and move along.”

“No strings attached?” Turner asked.

“How do you mean?”

“A couple of years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts offered us a $50,000 grant, but we had to sign a pledge that we wouldn't do anything obscene. We said thanks but no thanks.”

“Jerry, I don't give a damn what you do with the money, as long as you don't frighten the horses,” Bill said.

The producing director didn't ask how much money the governor was talking about. That was good. It showed a certain amount of trust. And Bill knew too well that some primitives in the Legislature threw nickels around as if they were manhole covers. But he was pretty sure he could get this through. Hardly anyone in Jefferson wasn't proud of the Ashland Shakespeare Festival.

What Turner did say was, “Well, I'll talk with Reggie about reconsidering.
He
may frighten the horses when I do, but I'll make it work.”

“Thanks. Thanks very much.” Something else occurred to Bill: “I hope you can get the programs fixed in time for opening night.”

“We won't print new ones. That would cost way too much,” Turner replied. “We'll do inserts instead. But they'll look good, promise. We got ourselves a Wang word processor last year. It's crazy—It's a computer that sets type. I don't know what we'd do without it.”

“I've seen 'em. State government's starting to use 'em, too,” Bill said. “They're amazing, all right. Who knows what they'll come up with next?”

“Yeah.” Jerry Turner nodded. “Who knows?”

*   *   *

The usher smiled up and up at Bill and Louise. One of the nice things about handing out programs before a play was the interesting people you met. “Hello, Governor. Hello, Mrs. Williamson,” he said. “The sasquatches' box is on your left, down at the front. I hope you enjoy the show.”

“I'm sure we will,” Louise said, beating her husband to the punch.

Bill opened his program and looked through it as he and Louise walked to their seats. Sure enough, the insert did look good. It was on the same coated stock as the rest of the booklet, and the typeface matched, too. They could do wild things these days, all right.

He took a step down to the sasquatches' box. The floor there was lower than in in the rest of the Angus Bowmer Theatre, so big people could get down close without blocking the view of the little folks behind them. Another couple was already in the box. Bill didn't know them, but they looked familiar. A moment later, he realized why. They were the college kids who'd walked by when he and Louise were waiting for Nicole outside Gepetto's.

They realized who he was at about the same time. Both of them bobbed their heads at him—the guy wasn't wearing his JSA cap now. He said, “That's your daughter in the show, right?”

“Yup.” Bill beamed.

“How cool is that?” the girl said.

“Do you know Nicole?” Bill asked. Sure enough, they did. He'd figured they would. Sasquatches stuck out from the crowd of little people. The two couples chatted till the house lights dimmed.

The Tempest
's opening scene, out on the ocean, was all
Sturm und Drang
—literally. Kettledrums supplied the thunder, as they would have in Shakespeare's day. Lasers blazing through dry-ice smoke did duty for stormclouds and lightning. Reggie Pesky knew more staging tricks than were dreamt of in the Bard's philosophy. As their ship foundered, the men in it took to the boats.

Act One, Scene Two was set in front of Prospero's cell on the island where the main action took place. Bill tensed when the young little man playing Prospero—decked out in a gray wig and a pretty good fake gray beard—and his own daughter as Miranda entered. A couple of murmurs rose from the audience, but no angry shouts and (he thanked heaven) no laughter. Much of the crowd would be from Jefferson, used to sasquatches and used to suspending disbelief for them if a performance rated it. The out-of-staters seemed willing to roll with things for a while, anyhow.

“‘If by your art, my dearest father, you have/ Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.…'” Nicole went on with Miranda's first speech. She had the words down, and the feelings behind them. Her voice was deeper than a little woman's, but she didn't sound like a little man, either. She sounded like—herself.

That scene filled the rest of the first act. Ariel's tight-fitting costume was covered with thin diffraction-grating disks that gave off rainbows whenever the girl playing the spirit moved. Caliban looked more like a lumpy alien from the
Star Wars
cantina than a sasquatch. Bill hadn't pictured the semihuman that way, but the makeup didn't set his teeth on edge.

Bill's other anxious moment came in the last act, when Miranda exclaimed, “‘Oh, wonder!/ How many goodly creatures are there here!/ How beauteous mankind is! Oh, brave new world,/ That has such people in 't!'”

By then, though, Nicole had done well enough so the audience took her for granted in the role. More than that, she couldn't hope. Well, she could hope—it didn't hurt. Whether she hoped or not, though, Bill didn't expect the Royal Shakespeare Company to call any time soon. Good as she was, Nicole wasn't
that
good. Stratford-on-Avon wasn't Jefferson, either.

He blistered his palms when the cast came out to take their bows. His daughter got as big a hand as he thought she deserved. He felt about to burst with pride.

In spite of the Equal Accommodations Act, when Bill went backstage he had to walk carefully to keep from bumping his head on the ceiling. Nicole's dressing room barely held three sasquatches. “I did it!” she kept saying. “Oh, my God! I really did it!”

“You sure did,” Bill said. “You were great, too.” That might have stretched things a bit, but people who told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to their nearest and dearest soon found themselves not so near and not so dear.

After a bit, Louise tugged at his arm. “We shouldn't hang around,” she said. “We can talk more later. She still has stuff to do.”

“I suppose so,” Bill answered grumpily, knowing she was right. When he opened the dressing-room door to go out, he almost ran into—ran over—Reggie Pesky coming in.

“Hello, Governor,” the director said with a sour smile. “I was hoping you'd come back. I have a couple of things I want to tell you.”

“Go ahead. I'm listening,” Bill said.

“The first one is, that worked better than I thought it would. Your daughter did a nice job, and the audience bought it.”

“Okay, that's one. What's the other?”

“Fuck you. Just … fuck you.”

Bill could have driven him into the ground like a nail. People would have talked if he did, though. “Don't worry about it, man,” he said after a beat. “I love you, too.”

*   *   *

“Are you ready, Governor?” his publicist asked. A blonde with a nice shape, Barbara Rasmussen was almost too decorative for the work she did.

Bill took his place behind the massive gubernatorial desk. Once Bigfoot Lewis', it had sat in storage for years and years, till in their wisdom the people of Jefferson chose another sasquatch to lead them. He made sure the bill on the desk was the one he was supposed to be signing. He also made sure the pen he'd sign it with wrote.

The bill was the right one. The pen did have the right stuff. The governor nodded. “We're good to go. You can let 'em in.”

Barbara opened the door to the governor's study. Reporters and still photographers came in. TV cameramen took their places at cameras already set up and waiting for them. Barbara turned a rheostat. The lights above the desk got brighter—and hotter. Bill started to sweat.

“Governor Williamson will make a brief statement,” Barbara said, telling the press corps what they already knew. “Then he'll sign the bill, and then he'll take a few questions.”

As soon as the red lights under the camera lenses went on, Bill smiled at them and said, “hello folks. We all know the Ashland Shakespeare Festival has helped put Jefferson on the map since the Depression was at its worst. I'm proud that our state has America's first Elizabethan theatre. And, under the new producing director, Jerry Turner, the festival has grown in size and scope. It draws coverage from around the world, and it draws lots of visitors to Jefferson.

“Because of all that, the Legislature and I have agreed it's high time our state recognizes how important the festival is. The bill I'm going to sign today changes its name from the Ashland Shakespeare Festival to the
Jefferson
Shakespeare Festival. And, to show we're putting our money where our mouth is, the bill authorizes an annual state grant of $75,000 to the festival to support it and help it expand even more.”

He'd wanted to give the festival $150,000 a year. He'd expected the tightwads in the Capitol to haggle him down to a flat hundred grand. They proved even tighter than he'd figured on, though. One of the things politics was was the art of taking what you could get. Otherwise, you ended up with nothing.

Bill ceremoniously picked up the pen and signed three copies of the bill as the TV cameras followed his every move and the still photographers flashed and clicked away. Then he waved to the reporters, inviting the questions Barbara had promised.

“What kind of strings go with the money?” asked the man from the
Port Orford Post
.

“Well, Pete, the usual financial kind, to make sure the people in Ashland only spend the grant on things that have to do with the festival. Jerry Turner won't head for the closest Bentley dealership with the check.” Bill got a few chuckles. He went on, “Of course, if I thought he'd do anything like that I wouldn't have proposed the bill in the first place. And there are no artistic strings attached.”

“None?” Pete said.

“None,” Bill echoed. “This is Jefferson. This isn't a place where we give with one hand and take away with the other. This isn't a place where we tell people how to do things. This is a place where we let them do things. If you don't like what they do, you don't have to go. We got to be a state by doing our own things here. We've been doing it ever since, long before the hippies latch on to the phrase.”

“Did your daughter being in a Shakespeare play have anything to do with this grant?” the reporter from the
Ashland Daily Tidings
asked.

“Maybe a little something, Annie.” Not usually someone given to understatements, Bill paused a moment to admire that one. Then he continued, “She certainly helped put Ashland on my radar, and the festival deserves all the help we can give it.”

“Her casting changed at the last minute,” Annie said. “Did
that
have anything to do with what you just signed?”

Bill shrugged his wide, wide shoulders. “I have no artistic control over the festival. I don't want any, either. I'd just foul it up. I will say I'm a proud papa like any other proud papa.”

If any or any other people wanted to push it, they could raise a stink. Reggie Pesky would likely be glad to lend a helping hand. But no one seemed eager. It was a feel-good bill. It was a feel-good story. Why mess with it?

A few more harmless questions followed. Then the reporters and photographers hurried out of the study to get their stories and pictures in. Bill leaned back in his swivel chair. It creaked.

“That went fine,” Barbara remarked.

“Yeah, I think so, too,” Bill said. “And all's well that ends well.” He winked.