When I was a kid I thought I could call down wind and call down rain. It wasn't hard, living a block from the East River. I often walked that last block home from school with my eyes closed because of all the dirt kicked up by my imagined powers. But I wasn't fond of storms; they made it too hard to breathe.
I went to Australia in its summer, and it's strange to be in a place where it's 80 degrees on a cool day and yet every lamppost is adorned with banners featuring the legacy of Christmas back in Britain. You are surrounded by pictures of fir trees and snowflakes as you walk amongst spiders and palms.
We were working on Macbeth at NIDA, and I was playing the Lady. It meant a lot to me, seeing how I felt like I'd bullshitted my way into the program and whored my way into the country. I didn't know how to act, not really, but I sure as hell was discovering that I could, and maybe getting the Lady was obvious what with that little vicious slide of a smile in my headshot and the way I fall into high status characters full of reflex and fear.
Who knows. Either way. I had a shitload of text to learn in a very short amount of time, and if there's anything I'm crap at as an actor, it's learning text. And so I spent my lonely life in Sydney haunting cafes and muttering to myself about blood and ambition as I sipped lemon sodas and kept one eye out for the story that had brought me to Australia, but that I knew in my heart wasn't actually coming to find me.
My Macbeth was a fellow named Richard. He was a kid, twenty maybe. And while it wasn't something we talked about, lord knows it was something I thought about as we worked together. We were playing the characters young, the Lady particularly, so it wasn't so much an issue of them in my head, as of us. I'm bad enough at human interaction as myself, to add the layer of these lovers was a fucking terror to me.
Because I'd told Richard things, told him about why I had come to the other side of the world and also about why I was scared and lonely and a fool. Richard smiled and teased me and then showed me with great pride the sticks he'd taken from the yard behind his house and whittled down to be Macbeth's blades. From there it was also stories about how you have to tuck your pants into your socks into your boots if you really want to be safe in the bush.
He lived two hours north of the city and commuted in every day, and I get now that maybe he was embarrassed by his story too and that we were siblings in wanting.
We used to practice on our own time up by the library which was closed for the summer. I was in a fury about it, because access to the archives in there would have been worth the price of admission alone. I stared longingly through the glass doors of it between runs, and he took it, like most matters between us, with good humour.
There are few things more shitty in the world of acting that doing a love scene. It doesn't even have to involve nudity or kissing for it to just be awful, invasive and awkward, and I certainly felt like I must have seemed a foul, desperate, idiot of an older woman every time he yanked me close and I had to stare into his eyes and encourage him to my plans, until one day I forgot my lines and so did he and we just stood there gazing desperately at each other until suddenly we both broke into uncontrollable laughter.
"I'm sorry, I was staring into your eyes and completely forgot what I was going to say!"
"Me too!"
It was hilarious. We were acting so perfectly, we forgot what the fuck we were doing, and we just sat on the ground on the red-carpeted landing in front of the closed library and laughed until we felt broken.
After that, I knew the Lady loved Macbeth and did so with an eager pride. After that, I felt better with the world if I could sit close to Richard and feel as if I were a small but hard girl. He kept close, and I was grateful. We had to write diary entries as our characters, and I remember people being shocked at my ability to find her tone and saying they felt shamed in the face of her desire.
Richard and I wrote the story of Macbeth and the Lady's early life together with a woven fury. Shakespeare had given us a point, a fixed truth, and we were happy to extend it with wicked glee infinitely in space in all directions. I came to know that I loved Richard in no way but gratitude, because we were so very, very good.
Being a summer program, we had no support of NIDA's rather astounding costumers and had to style ourselves. Richard proudly showed me a shirt he had bloodied with paint in his back yard for a short film he and his friends had made on the beach at some point in his far too recent childhood, while I took the red gown I'd bought for attending the Opera House and draped the sheer gauzy robe I'd brought for the hostel over it and I was quickly haunted and drowned.
I performed in bare feet and struggled often for my lines. But I knew the Lady and knew cadence and I certainly knew Macbeth, and I plowed through it in all her playful anguish.
When Richard and I had no desire to let them go, I signed us up to perform a scene at the corrobee. The corrobee was held on a small platform stage in the cavernous glass-enclosed lobby of NIDA's new building, while people drank and ate sausages and our crazy movement teacher Wendy "Short Fast Loud" Strehlow tended bar.
"How do you want to do this?" I asked.
"Fuck the platform," he said.
Right. Bare feet on the floor in the middle of goddamn NIDA in the most ridiculously hard to project into space there ever was in front of a couple hundred drunk people who either wanted to be us or wanted us to want to be them. And I was the American girl. The curiosity.
It was grey out. And the sky had been a little bit rumbly all day. I was nervous about it because I had theater or festival or something tickets later that night and didn't feel like getting rained on, but hadn't really thought about it for any other reason.
Until we started the scene with Richard's silly wooden daggers made from sticks taken in his back yard.
Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
They must lie there. Go carry them, and smear
The sleepy grooms with blood.
Crack! Bam! Lightning. Not a flash, but one of those sharp and jagged lines that cut the sky. People gasped. Someone screamed. I, the Lady, was fucking terrified. At the end, Richard winked at me, and after, as Wendy pushed a glass of wine into my shaking hand, people congratulated me on the lightning.
I think of Richard often. I hope he has finally gotten into the full-time program at NIDA, even if I'm a little jealous, even as that's not my path. And I hope he is good and strong and brave. He has lovely eyes, and I want him to be a star.
I was so lonely in Sydney. It was so hard. Except when Richard was teaching me to call down wind and call down rain and never, ever close my eyes. It was bliss in nearly every way.
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