“Well you know how she is if you put your phone on in the ‘sacred rehearsal room.’ But I heard she’s extra uppity because Geert said ‘Mackers’ in the theater earlier.”
“Mackers?”
“The Scottish Play,” she says. When I fail to understand she mouths Macbeth. “Very bad mojo to say it in a theater.”
>“So, what we got on today?” Max asks in her London cockney. Like me, she’s a mutt; her father is Dutch from Surinam and her mother is from London. The cockney gets stronger when she drinks too much, though when she reads Rosalind, her English goes silky as the British Queen’s.
“They’re going over the fight scene choreography,” I tell her.
“Oh, good. Maybe that ponce will actually get hurt.” She laughs and runs a hand through her spiky hair. “Wanna run lines later? Won’t be much of a chance once we start tech.”
Soon, we move the set out of the theater for the final five days of tech rehearsals and dress rehearsals at the amphitheater in Vondelpark where the show will go up for six weekends. In two Fridays, we’ll have our soft opening, and then Saturday, the hard opening. For the rest of the cast, this is the payoff for all the work. For Max and me, it’s when we cash out, when any semblance of us being in the cast disappears. Linus has told us to make sure we know the entire play, all the blocking, by heart, and we’re to trail Jeroen and Marina through the first tech rehearsal. This is as close to the action as we get. Not once has Linus or Petra given us any direction or asked us to run lines or gone over any aspect of the play. Max and I run lines incessantly, the two of us. I think it’s how we make ourselves feel like we’re actually a part of the production.
“Can we do the Ganymede parts? You know I like those best,” Max says.
“Only because you get to be a boy.”
“Well, natch. I prefer Rosalind when she’s channeling her man. She’s such a simp in the beginning.”
“She’s not a simp. She’s in love.”
“At first sight.” She rolls her eyes. “A simp. She’s ballsier when she’s pretending to have balls.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to be someone else,” I say.
“I should think so. It’s why I became a bleeding actor.” And then she looks at me and snorts with laughter. We may memorize the lines. We may know the blocking. We may show up. But neither one of us is an actor. We are seat warmers.
Max sighs and kicks her feet up onto the chair, daring a wordless reprimand from Petra and a follow-up telling off from Linus, or, as Max calls him, the Flunky.
Up on stage, Jeroen is arguing with the choreographer. “That’s not really working for me. It doesn’t feel authentic,” he says. Max rolls her eyes again but I sit up to listen. This happened about every other day during the blocking, Jeroen not “feeling” the movements and Petra changing them, but Jeroen not feeling the new blocking either, so most of the time, she changed it back. My script is a crosshatch of scribbles and erasures, a road map of Jeroen’s quest for authenticity.
Marina is sitting on the cement pilings on the stage next to Nikki, the actress playing Celia. They both look bored as they watch the fight choreography. For a second Marina catches my eye and we exchange a sympathetic smile.
“I saw that,” Max says.
“Saw what?”
“Marina. She wants you.”
“She doesn’t even know me.”
“That may be the case, but she was giving you f**k-me eyes at the bar last night.”
Every night after rehearsal, most of the cast goes to a bar around the corner. Because we are either provocative or masochistic, Max and I go along with them. Usually we wind up sitting at the long wooden bar on our own or at a table with Vincent. There never seems to be room at the big table for Max and me.
“She was not giving me f**k-me eyes.”
“She was giving one of us f**k-me eyes. I haven’t gotten any Sapphic vibes off her, though you never can tell with Dutch girls.”
I look at Marina. She’s laughing at something Nikki said, as Jeroen and the actor playing Charles the wrestler work some fake punches with the fight choreographer.
“Unless you don’t like girls,” Max continues, “but I’m not getting that vibe off you either.”
“I like girls just fine.”
“Then why do you leave the bar with me every night?”
“Are you not a girl?”