fearless leader.” We both glanced over at Juliet, who was flirting madly with Jason. The young stage manager looked annoyed and defensive.
“She should know better than to hit on the kid,” Tobin said. “We’ll be dealing with a sexual harassment suit before you know it.”
“Why is he setting up the rehearsal space now?” I asked.
“He said he wanted to. I swear, I’ve never met a more obsessive SM in my life,” Tobin said. “Never quits.”
Jason was handsome in a petulant, underfed way. He had a flop of dark hair that fell romantically over his brow, and he was always flicking it back impatiently. I had vowed a week earlier to tie him down and hack it off with a pair of shop scissors. Tobin had promised to help.
In the theatre, there’s a long-standing tradition that all stage crew people wear black. The idea is that if you wear black, you can’t be easily seen onstage or in the wings as you go about your job. Most of the stage managers I’ve known have a wardrobe almost entirely made up of black stuff. Jason was no exception, but he took it to extremes. Every time I’d seen him, he was wearing the same trademark black leather vest, with multiple pockets for notebook, keys, pens and tiny flashlight, the tools of the trade. He wore black boots, black socks and black T-shirts. It was likely he wore black underwear as well. The vest clanked and jingled when he walked, and I would bet he wore it to bed. The vest was his authority, and without it, he’d be diminished.
He was the kind of stage manager that we used to call a stage-mangler when I was in the touring biz—the officious kind who gave everybody folders at the first rehearsal, with schedules and contact sheets with everybody’s home phone number on them. He would read the company rules aloud and make sure everybody had a copy. He would call Equity coffee breaks in the middle of an important moment in a rehearsal, then get huffy if the actors said they wanted to continue to the end of a scene. He would be a pain—well, he already was. He had already been in my face downstairs in the shop, criticizing my work, which is why, as I said, we weren’t destined for lifelong friendship.
“That’s going to be too heavy for Amber,” he’d said, just as I put the finishing touches on the serpent puppet.
“There’s a waist-belt inside, Jason,” I’d said. “The weight’s carefully balanced.”
“If you have to rebuild it, don’t come crying to me,” he’d replied. His face told me that if the puppet turned out to be too much for the actress to manage, he would be secretly delighted. This power-tripping was not uncommon in young stage managers, but it was obnoxious nonetheless.
“I’d better go over and interrupt,” Tobin said, “before Juliet hauls him into her office for a private audition.”
As Tobin moved away, he squeezed my elbow. “Go downstairs,” he said. “The party’s better in the shop.”
Steamboat Theatre is housed in an old marina on the shores of Sikwan Bay, next to the falls. On the main level are the offices and lobby, the rehearsal space is upstairs in the attic, and downstairs, where the boats used to be, is the shop.
Steamboat doesn’t have a performance space. There’s no point, because Steamboat’s a touring company. Their performance spaces are wherever there’s an audience; school gymnasiums, libraries, community centres, whatever.
The workshop is a wonderful space, but cold. They never got around to boarding up the open water, so the paint-tables and storage racks surround a square pool where several boats would be moored if the place were still a marina. It’s great in the summer, but awful in winter. They have space-heaters, but there’s still frigid water in the middle of the room, no matter what you do.
In the spring, when the smelt are running, you can dip a net into the pool, scoop up a bunch of flashing silver fish and fry them up right there on the workshop hotplate. In the summer, you can stop what you’re doing, strip off and have a swim. In the winter, your fingers freeze. The only good thing about the workshop in winter is that the cold temperatures make the contact cement dry really, really fast. I had been working in the shop since early April, and in Kuskawa, you never discount the possibility of snow until mid-June. It was May 7, and there was still a little snow on the ground, in the shady places.
It was jeezly cold down there that May evening. You could see your breath. A bunch of people were standing in a circle at the bottom of the stairs, and they all glanced up furtively when I opened the shop door. That could only mean one thing. Something of an illegal nature was being passed around. Goody.
Closest to the stairs was Meredith Forbes, the Belleville-based actress hired to play the Mother and the Cat characters. She had toured The Glass Flute before, twice—a Steamboat Theatre veteran. She was a moody-looking woman in her late twenties with dark smudges under her eyes. She wore crimson lipstick and was aggressively muscular and fit. She probably jogged every morning. On tour, she’d inevitably be the first person up in the mornings, the one to hog the motel-room shower. Rooming with her would be awful. She probably went to bed at nine. She wore a cat-costume which I had seen hanging in the wardrobe room, and she didn’t look very pleased about it. It was too small for her, and made her look like a lion that has eaten too much zebra.
Next to Meredith was Bradley Hoskins, the Toronto actor playing the Woodsman and the Dragon, an older man whose presence in the cast was unusual. Touring kids’ theatre is normally considered “paying one’s dues,” something every young actor has to do. It’s not a job that’s readily accepted by the more mature members of the theatre community. Maybe Hoskins really needed the money. I’d heard he was recently divorced and had a kid. I didn’t know for sure, but the tour would probably be a stretch for him. The job isn’t just about acting. It’s about loading and unloading sets and costumes and performing a show twice a day with a half-hour lunch break. It’s about sharing a room with several other actors and sitting in a cramped van on the road when you’re not performing. It’s not easy, and Bradley was kind of pudgy.
I didn’t envy Jason. It would be his job to drive the van and keep the peace. The cast, it seemed to me, was a bit oddly-matched.
Ruth Glass was down there, too. Ruth is the lead singer for Shepherd’s Pie, a folk band that’s pretty hot right now. Her partner, Rose, was in Seattle with her dying brother, so the band decided to take a six-month break. Ruth, never one to sit around, took on the Steamboat gig to keep her mind off Rose’s absence. She was officially the music director, and we were all pretty excited about it. Her job would be to work with the actors on the musical numbers in the show and to record the show tapes. She’d probably end up doing a lot of voice coaching as well, seeing as Amber Thackeray likely couldn’t project her way out of a wet paper bag.
When I joined the circle, Bradley was just sparking up a joint. I immediately imagined Detective Constable Mark Becker coming down the stairs and arresting all of us. I tensed up. Meredith pointedly didn’t partake, which made me wonder why she was down there. Maybe she was afraid she’d miss something, or perhaps she was secretly in league with Becker. When Meredith passed the doob to me (at least she wasn’t afraid to touch the stuff), I took the sweet smoke into my lungs, held on and wiped Becker from my thoughts. Take that, Officer. We started talking about the play.
“It’s not a bad script,” Bradley said, “but I’m not looking forward to sweating through two shows a day wearing those hoods. How are we going to breathe?”
“Through your mouth, as usual,” Meredith said. “You’ll get used to it. And you’ll sweat off a couple of pounds per show, guaranteed.”
“What do you mean by that?” Bradley said, bristling.
“I
