so much as mentioned his dad, so we’d all learned not to say a word, but we knew who he was. It was right there in his playbill bio: “Mr. Lewis is the son of the late Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis and the journalist and commentator Dorothy Thompson.” Just what those parents had done to make Michael the ogre he was, we couldn’t imagine. He was in his early forties, tall and stooped, with a long, curving nose that made me think of Captain Hook. He kept mostly to himself. Everyone knew he drank; in rehearsals you could sometimes detect the hazy aftermath of a round with the bottle.
That he was somehow wounded may have occasionally crossed my eighteen-year-old mind, but not that night as I stitched buttons into place and rushed over to the ironing board. Lewis, I knew, had been grumbling all day about our incompetence. He didn’t want to go onstage in a blouse, he wanted the waistcoat, and what in God’s name had we been doing all summer for it to come to this. I remember my frenzy, the uncomfortably pregnant Ronni urging me on, Joanie cheering as I pumped the last shot of steam into the coat and bounded out the door. The two sisters physically pushed me off on a hundred-yard sprint from our shop to the theater, shouting go, go, go. I tore down the street, past the speakeasy and the bums, the silver diner glistening in the dusk, onto the sidewalk and through the back door of the Fulton into the greenroom where Lewis was pacing. The red of his fury bled through his makeup. I threw the coat over his shoulders, yanked his arms through the sleeves, adjusted the front while he fiddled with the lace jabot at his neck, and then he was gone, upstairs and onstage, not a second to spare. I could hear applause through the ceiling, the creaking of the old floorboards as the son of the author of Main Street and Babbitt made his entrance that evening in one of the first American plays ever produced.
Within a year Michael Lewis was dead. Forty-four years old, he left a daughter and two sons, a wife and an ex-wife. The obituaries didn’t give the cause of death, but we could all guess, right or wrong, and anyway it didn’t seem right that someone so mean could survive for long. By then my own life had spun off in untoward directions. I’d quit the Christian theater group I’d joined in high school and taken up with a married set designer who seduced me in my college theater. I thought it a fitting location, given my passions. I look back now and see that I craved drama so desperately I didn’t mind wrecking lives in order to get it.
When I go back to the Fulton today, among the ghosts I find is the specter of my adolescent self. She and Michael Lewis have more in common than I would have imagined back then. Having now outstripped him in years, I recognize some of the devil that gnawed at him: the compromises of middle age, the burdens of family, the urge to secure your place in a country that disappoints as often as it inspires. Sinclair Lewis called America “the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.” Perhaps Michael Lewis shared that view. Perhaps as he stormed onto the Fulton stage in his silk waistcoat that long-ago August night he was invoking his father’s spirit.
We called our season the American Heritage Festival; exactly what that meant I couldn’t have said. It made me squirm whenever I heard John Proctor defend his integrity that summer. Week after week I sat offstage listening to him, my fingers on the light board, waiting for the cue to illuminate his desperate face. “My name!” he’d cry. “My name!” I pushed the levers up. What had provoked the madness of Salem, I wondered, never mind the madness that prompted Arthur Miller to write those lines? One night toward the end of our season, Richard Nixon resigned. The audience that evening was small, and I hurried home after the show to catch the real theater on my parents’ TV. The Vietnam War was raging; that year in college I’d read Arthur Kopit’s Indians and for the first time been urged to consider the connections between what we were doing in Asia and what we’d done on our own frontier.
I was too fixed on the future to realize a portion of that frontier lay under my feet every time I walked onto the Fulton stage. Scrambling up onto the pin rail to hang lights, I was a sailor charting the swells of my own possibility. Occasionally I went downstairs into the storage tunnel below the auditorium to retrieve a lamp or gel. Inside the subterranean gloom I could see the log piers the first Fulton architect had installed to help hold up the place. They’d since been reinforced with concrete, but beyond them lay soft earth you could touch. I had no idea how long that soil had been there, probably centuries. Further off in the dark were the limestone walls that ran like a maze through the underbelly of the opera house. They were the old jail walls, I knew, and without them the theater would collapse. But I seldom thought more about their presence, about the American saga they’d helped beget. I hadn’t yet learned the pull of the backward gaze.
The notion of the theater as a memory machine dates back at least to the sixteenth century, when an Italian scholar named Giulio Camillo suggested using components of a stage and auditorium as mnemonic prompts. The metaphorical implications of his choice have beguiled theater people ever since. “We all know these buildings are haunted,” a director friend said to me when I told him about my obsession with the Fulton. Camillo was after personal as well as collective memory, and for me, of course, the Fulton holds both. The lamps I hauled up from the basement and helped string over the Salem courtroom where John Proctor repeatedly went on trial in the summer of 1974 belong to more than one narrative.
I’ve been told that cells from Julius Caesar still circulate in the world, that with each breath I draw I’m inhaling molecules from ancient Rome. If I keep going back to the Fulton, it’s to suck in the past, of which my own is just a fraction. A child sees little but herself until one day she wakes and discovers she occupies a sliver of chronology in a ticking universe. I’d spent most of my life dreaming of what was to come, but that summer I shifted my gaze by a degree, and I’ve been turning counterclockwise ever since. I see now that we belong equally to the dead and the living, that if you put your hand out and touch the cold stone walls of history you can feel the thrum of your predecessors, those dim beings who’ve faded into the earth. I know now that if you race down a street at dusk, carrying a silk waistcoat in your arms, you just might make it in time for their story to begin.
MR. YECKER OPENS A THEATER: 1866
Six months had passed since the end of the War between the States, and Lancaster was thriving. The funerals of boys too young to die had stopped; the papers no longer published accounts of battles so ghastly they defied belief. Instead of troops, trains carried ordinary men and women back and forth to places like Philadelphia and Baltimore. Ships on the Susquehanna heaved under the weight of new merchandise: plows and threshing machines, carriages, firearms, wagons, umbrellas, cigars, hats, distilled liquors. Soon the cotton mills would be back in business and gaslights would flicker in every home in the city. Soon work would begin on a granite monument in the center of town to commemorate those who had given their lives in the terrible fight to preserve the Union. Already those brave men had begun to lapse into memory, their vibrant selves reduced to quicksilver images inside little cases their mothers and widows kept on the parlor table or carried in their pockets.
The circus came to town, and families went in throngs to see the clowns and acrobats. From time to time someone lit a gas valve under a giant balloon and rose from downtown into the blue sky over south-central Pennsylvania, while hundreds below watched in wonder. People craved amusement. They wanted to laugh at minstrel shows and see cowboys shoot Indians and hear famous actors declaim Shakespeare.
Blasius Yecker thought it might be a good time to open a theater. A small man with a round face and dark hair who spoke English with a German accent, he said little publicly about why he wanted to go into show business. He was in his early thirties. He’d come to America from Europe at thirteen, leaving his widowed mother and traveling by diligence to Paris from his Alsatian birthplace, then by train to Le Havre, then by boat across the Atlantic in the dead of winter to New York and finally to Lancaster, where he’d worked first as a farmer and miller, then apprenticed as a saddler and opened a harness shop. Now he wanted
