a single lightbulb on a metal stand sheds enough glow for you to make out the ropes and pipes hanging overhead, the canvas flats meant to be someone’s front porch, a one-sided automobile. Props from the night’s performance lie in a chalked grid on a table in the wings. On a lectern in the corner, the stage manager has left her prompt book open, each page annotated like a medical chart. Out in front in the dark are rows of empty red seats and the curving white edges of two balconies, and on the ceiling, peering down, a pair of plaster angels who’ve been holding their comic and tragic masks, respectively, for more than a century. Here too you sense you’re not alone.
Somewhere in the curlicues of the proscenium is the smudge of a bullet fired by Buffalo Bill. He’s standing beside you now, dressed in leather chaps and a fringed coat, smelling of prairie. Over there is Ethel Barrymore, running lines, and George M. Cohan, warbling a patriot song, cane in hand, feet thrumming, and here’s Bert Williams in blackface, cradling a tuba. Behind you Thaddeus Stevens slams his fist down on the podium and cries, “Abolition! Yes: abolish everything on the face of the earth but this Union; free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every rebel mansion.” Soldiers are upstairs drilling, and President James Buchanan is sitting downstage, lost in thought, and the voices of the slain and their survivors mingle in the high reaches of this space, beyond the pin rail, and suddenly you catch a whiff of scent as Sarah Bernhardt makes her way through the house, skirts sighing, on her way to the dressing room. She refuses to come in by the backstage door, unseen.
Hold still for a moment and feel the stream of time, feel your place in it. Outdoors the city is quiet. The market is locked tight, the nail salon next door is closed, the banks and restaurants empty. Over on Chestnut Street, at the spot where Abraham Lincoln addressed the citizens of this town on his way to his first inaugural, nothing stirs, and it’s equally silent at the site of the old railroad depot where his funeral train edged its way through weeping crowds four years later. The bars have issued their last calls, the mayor is asleep, and only the police station and the hospital where I was born in the middle of the twentieth century bristle with life. Gone are the taverns whose painted signs once lined the sidewalks, the White Swan and Cross Keys and Cat, gone is the brick courthouse in the center of town where Indians exchanged shells for the promise of peace and land. A tree shivers in the night air, a taxi idles.
The pale white exterior of this theater is its own phantom. The marquee is dark; you can barely make out the word “Fulton” or the sculpted figure two stories up to whom it refers, a short man with a lantern jaw and a tumble of thick hair who’s doing his best to look Napoleonic in a cutaway coat and flowing cape, hand on his breast. He stands in a vaulted niche that looks as though it belongs above the entrance to a cathedral, and he gazes out on the streets where he played as a boy, more than once with British prisoners of war in a game he and his friends called Rebels and Tories. Eleven-year-old Robert Fulton, eventual inventor of submarines and steamboats, sketched these scenes, he and the other boys leaping across a rope to pummel the enemy.
I was eleven myself when I first set foot inside the Fulton Theatre in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Johnson was president; the headlines were full of body counts in Southeast Asia. At home, I watched The Monkees every week on TV and listened compulsively to Julie Andrews on my record player. I came to the Fulton for movies and the occasional concert. When a film bored me, I scooched down in one of the theater’s seats and shot my legs up in the air and bicycled. The place was dilapidated, paint peeling and carpets worn. There was talk of tearing it down to build a parking garage. Outside, a neon sign proclaimed, “A Landmark in Motion Picture Making!”
Inside, the spectral faces of Alan Bates and Julie Christie glimmered on the screen. As I watched their love blossom and then burn, I slipped from my own skin into theirs, glad to exchange the tedium of my junior high existence for their pain. I was just waking to the world. The cone of light trembling in the ether above me contained every future I might possibly want: the Austrian hills, a Dorset field, the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Ascot. If I could only reach up and nab a speck of it.
The room was dark, the furnishings shabby, the stage (for I knew there was one behind Bathsheba and Gabriel) a gray, impenetrable cave I longed to investigate. Soon afterward, watching my first plays on that stage, I was struck by how distant things became when they were real. Absent the giant screen we were genuinely little, I saw, but that was OK, because we belonged to a larger and quite beautiful cosmos. Moons flew in unannounced from the flies, summers burst into kaleidoscopic falls. You could see dust mites dancing in the tall black air and the shadows of strangers in the wings; clearly we were surrounded by all kinds of things visible and invisible.
By the time I turned thirteen I’d resolved to make a life for myself in the theater. I took acting lessons and memorized monologues about young women striving to understand themselves (Joan of Arc, Emily Webb). At a moment when I despaired of ever having a boyfriend for more than three consecutive days, I donned a crinoline to play Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a two-person show about love. One day I auditioned for a musical at the Fulton. I must have been sixteen. I wore a pink corduroy Betsey Johnson pantsuit I’d sewn expressly for the occasion. Shortly after I began to sing I realized that I was also, at the same time, standing to my own left and back a little ways, watching myself sing. It’s the only out-of-body experience I’ve ever had. I remember nothing else about the event, except that I didn’t get the part.
Two years after that audition I went back to the Fulton to work as an apprentice in a summer equity company at $15 a week. We opened four shows in a month and ran them in rep for another month. I sang in the chorus of an Amish musical, ran lights for The Crucible, scrounged props for Tobacco Road, and spent weeks building eighteenth-century hoopskirts and vests for a revival of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, a comedy about pure-hearted Americans and foppish Brits. Tyler’s play made its debut in 1787—nearly fifty years after real-life colonists put mortar to stone to build what would eventually become the foundations of the Fulton Theatre, and more than twenty years after a group of Indians died inside the confines of those stone walls.
I spent whole days and nights threading plastic stays into muslin corsets and jamming yards of taffeta into bodices no bigger than my neck. Ronni, the costume designer, smoked long, filter-tipped cigarettes and used a ripper to stir powdered cream into the tall cups of coffee she sipped all day long. Several months pregnant, she’d come down from New York for the summer to run the shop with her sister Joanie and a woman named Poof, who cut patterns. We all had what we called theater-gray complexions.
The costume shop stood down the street from the Fulton, in an old warehouse with the words “Mack, the Coffee Man” painted in black letters on its side wall. A pair of picture windows opened at street level onto our chaotic interior, and I often wondered what passersby thought went on inside. We were in a slightly seedy part of town. A private bar stood halfway between the costume shop and the theater, and at night you could see glimmers of fluorescent light behind the bar’s shuttered windows. To this day, when I hear the word “speakeasy” I think of that building. One morning a few years after our summer rep season, a costume designer spotted a shoe sticking out of the garbage skip next to the Mack building and tried to grab it for her shop but found it was attached to a foot. A homeless man had climbed into the dumpster the night before and died.
Things like this might explain why my mother once told me there were two careers she preferred I not pursue: funeral direction and the theater.
Theater was all I wanted to do, even if it meant subsisting on coffee and Tab from the neighborhood diner for days on end in order to get the show up on time, a feat we barely achieved with The Contrast. By 7:30 P.M. on opening night, I was still trying to finish a waistcoat for an actor who was due to go onstage at approximately 8:15. The coat was a deep blue ribbed silk, verging on plum, with huge cuffs and fluttering tails, and the actor was Michael Lewis, the misanthropic son of Sinclair. All summer long, Lewis fils had sat in his tiny dressing room sulking when he wasn’t smoking Tiparillos and complaining about something—the building, the
