“Thank God, or I’d be out of a job.”
“Bank robber?”
“Ha! I’m an actor.”
“Really?”
She turns to me. “Why? Are you of the tribe?”
“Not really.”
She raises an eyebrow. “‘Not really’? That’s like being ‘a little’ pregnant. You either are or you’re not.”
“How about I was, not seriously, and now I’m not.”
“Oh, did you need to get a ‘real job’?” she asks sympathetically.
“No. I don’t have one of those, either.”
“So you just travel and eat dangerously?”
“More or less.”
“Nice life.”
“More or less.” The car hits a pothole and my stomach seems to smack against the roof and then just as abruptly, plummet back to the floor. “What kind of acting do you do?” I ask when I’ve regained my equilibrium.
“I’m a cofounder and artistic director of a small theater company in New York called Ruckus. We do productions, but also training and teaching programs.”
“That’s not impressive at all.”
“I know, right? I never meant to be quite so ambitious, but when my friends and I moved to New York, we couldn’t get the kind of roles we wanted, so we started our own company. And it’s just kind of grown. We produce our own plays and we teach, and now we’ve started this overseas initiative. That’s why we’re in Mexico. We’re running a workshop on Shakespeare in Mérida in conjunction with Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.”
“You’re teaching Shakespeare in Spanish?”
“Well, I’m not, because I don’t speak a lick of Spanish. I’ll work with the English speakers. David, my fiancé, he speaks Spanish. Though the funny thing is, even when we do the Shakespeare in translation, I somehow know where we are in the plays. Maybe because I know them so well. Or because Shakespeare transcends language.”
I nod. “The first time I did Shakespeare, I did it in French.”
She turns to me. Her eyes are green, bright as autumn apples, and there’s a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “You did Shakespeare then? And in French?”
“Mostly in English, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” She pauses. “That’s pretty good for a not-serious actor.”
“I never said I was any good.”
She laughs. “Oh, I can tell you were good.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I have a Spidey-sense for these things.” She pulls out a package of gum, takes a stick, and offers me a piece. It tastes like talcum powder and coconuts and makes my still-churning stomach rebel a little bit more. I spit it out.
“Vile, right? Yet strangely addictive.” She pops a second piece. “So how in the world did a Dutchman wind up doing Shakespeare in French?”
“I was traveling. I was broke. I was in Lyon. I met this Shakespeare troupe called Guerrilla Will. They mostly performed in English but the director is a little . . . eccentric and she thought the way to one-up the other street performers was to do Shakespeare in the native language. She’d cobbled together a cast of French speakers to do Much Ado About Nothing in France, in French. But the guy who’d been playing Claudio ran off to be with some Norwegian guy he’d met; everyone was already doubling up parts so they just needed someone who could get by in French. And I could.”
“You’d never done Shakespeare before?”