Date: 17 April, 2006
From: the_german_terminator@gmail.com.de
To: aconroy@TSA.ca, ladym@yahoo.ca 
Subject: Geoffrey Tennant, not in Boston


Fog lifted long enough to let in storm clouds. Flew in a circle, then a wiggle, and am now in Buffalo.

Rented a car. Hans will drive. He’s always wanted to see Canada.

G

TSA MEMO


from
Maria MacDoyle


for Information to
Darren Nichols
Ranita Singh
Imogen Pope


to
Jayson Kanu--properties


date: 17 April, 2006


subject
Severed Heads


The stand for 13 heads on poles for the Cade rebellion needs to be more firmly braced. The heads will remain on stage for the duration from that point, D/S centre, so the poles will have to be long enough so that the heads don’t block too much of the action.


Maria

As the door hisses shut, Tiffany jumps up and hangs the CLOSED sign in the window. Across the road, the Bata Shoe Museum goes dark except for a light in the gift shop casting shadows of regency pumps onto the sidewalk. Beyond the museum, Robarts Library looms, its tower and upper floors making a giant Canada goose stuffed with words.


“So, the bus is late–of course–” Geoffrey says, opening his palm to the sky where the evil gods are no doubt looking down and smirking. He offers them a thin smile before going on. “There’s no way we can make it to the theatre in time for the first act–assuming that Darren kept the act breaks and didn’t decide to turn the whole thing into a torturous four-and-a-half-hour marathon. There’s not a cab to be had.” Geoffrey stands up in the narrow shop and mimes signalling cab after cab, and watching them swerve around him and his cast. He flips the bird at the imagined tail-lights and lifts his collar. “April, and it’s frigging snowing,” he says, wrapping his arms around himself against the cold. “But Hans is on a mission. He’s got a feverish glow about him, not unlike yours, Mary, when you look into this box, this infernal box. And after twenty fruitless minutes, he lets out the most terrifying battle cry, like something you’d expect Beowulf to howl right before wrenching Grendel’s arm out of its socket, and he heaves me up and throws me over his shoulder and steps into the middle of the road and–I don’t know–uses me and my cast to threaten oncoming traffic. Tiny packets of peanuts and pretzels are scattering on the asphalt and, upside down, under Hans’s tree-trunk arm, I see headlights, growing bigger, bigger.” Geoffrey flings his arms across his face, his eyes screwed shut, fists clenched against his imminent death. And then, slowly he opens one eye, lowers his arms finally and shrugs, his hands slapping against his thighs. “Well, there’s more than one way to hail a cab.”


Someone rattles the door. Tiffany bellows, “WE’RE CLOSED!” and points to the sign.


Geoffrey waits for her to settle in again.


“So we don’t make the first act, and I miss Kate’s Joan of Arc, which is a shame, because I hear she was brilliant, if a little green about the gills, you know, with the morning sickness and all of that, which didn’t help her later on with what went down, poor kid.


“We get there just at the beginning of the Cade rebellion. Brilliant moment in the play, so–” Geoffrey makes that grasping gesture in the air again. “–brutal and stripped bare, down to the bones of power–so I get it, I do, what Darren was trying to do with the nakedness, and frankly, although I hate to admit it, the decision to leave the heads on their pikes in the foreground for the remaining action is inspired.” He aims a finger at Mary and then at Tiffany. “But make no mistake, the man is an evil sprite sent from a spiteful god to plague me until the day I die, which I will do no doubt sweating and raving about Old Nick capering at my bedside. That’ll be him.”


Then he opens his arms again, and the aisle between the stools and the pastry case widens, becomes the Théatre Sainte-Catherine, becomes the medieval slums of London, becomes the battlefield where Queen Margaret, her tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide, humiliates the once-proud Duke of York by crowning him with paper on a molehill. “And you know the fact that she was standing there half-naked in a tee-shirt with ‘MAGGIE’ scrawled on it only made Ellen angrier, and you could see it–you could see it–the way she harnessed it all, all that frustration and exasperation, and pulled it inside–” He mimes this, as though he’s dragging the coils of a serpent into his own body. “–and squeezed it into Margaret’s hatred for York, her ambition, her petty refusal to let him die with any dignity. From the back of the theatre, where I’m wedged in between a man with a mohawk half a story tall and Hans’ rapt mountain of quivering attention, and my pinned ankle is screaming like valkyrie, I could feel it.” He thumps his chest with the side of a loose fist, his gaze on the stage, the spot-lit space, where through the grisly angles of the poles and their severed heads, Ellen mocks and rages and undoes him wholly. “God, I love that woman.” He drops his hands and the theatre disappears for a moment as he smiles. “It was brilliant. Of course, it couldn’t last, could it.”






TSA SHOW REPORT

THE PLANTAGENETS
PRESS NIGHT 18 April, 2006

HOUSE: FULL

CAST: ALL SHOW–Ms Fanshaw five minutes late
DIRECTOR: IN ATTENDANCE

STAGE MANAGER: Maria MacDoyle

TECH:

X23 late cue at sc. 12
04 bulb went mid sc. 23 fixed at interval
banner flew crooked at sc. 30


PROP:

At sc. 38 Mr. Breedlove slipped on the meat pile, knocking the rack of severed heads off of the stage and into the stalls.

Show was called due to riot

RUNNING TIME: 2hrs 12min--incomplete



“You know, Henry Breedlove is an ass, but you can’t fault him on the grounds of professionalism when he’s on stage. His York was as bombastic and cunning and naïve and cruel and haughty and proud as I’d hoped–even standing there in his tee-shirt he had command of that space, a perfect wall of battered stone for Margaret to rail against.” Geoffrey turns to Tiffany, who nods her understanding as he explains. “The molehill scene is tricky, because you need to walk a careful line between feeling sorry for York and feeling like he’s getting what’s come to him. He’s gored the nation, turned its teeth on its own guts. But his humiliation is painful to watch; Margaret smears his face with a napkin stained with his son’s blood and crowns him with paper, and he breaks.” Geoffrey’s hands curl inward toward his chest as he bows under the weight of York’s pain. “He breaks.” Then he straightens and his face takes on an odd in-between expression, like he’s not sure whether to laugh or to cry. “All the way to the ground. Which in this case was made of meat.”


Stepping out into the aisle again, he pinwheels his arms, leaning first left, then right, then forward and back. “The meat–I don’t know, some kind of gesture to the mangled body politic, I guess–is slippery, and as Margaret reaches out to smear his face with Rutland’s blood Henry’s feet go out from under him –” Geoffrey’s foot–no longer in its imaginary cast–swings out in a wild kick that makes Tiffany lean back on her stool. “–but Henry doesn’t go down, oh no, he doesn’t fall on his ass; he tries to recover, and he almost makes it, almost, until, just when we think he’s going to pull it together, his heel comes down on a particularly vile sliver of offal and he goes over backward, down-stage-centre, arms flailing, right into the rack holding the severed heads.”


Mary notices that Geoffrey has drawn a little bit of a crowd on the other side of the glass who can’t possibly hear his words but seem entranced by the mime. Tiffany’s mouth is hanging open, horrified.


“And it’s magical, in its way, with its own peculiar balletic inevitability, each pike with its attendant head, tipping, tipping, one after the other as though timed to a waltz.” His hands go out as if to catch them. “One after the other, in all their dripping, putrescent glory, right into the laps of the first-row patrons. One of them, of course, is the Minister of Culture, who is in my humble theatre instead of at New Burbage because she’s trying to impress her sixteen-year-old niece. Well, down comes the head, its radishy eyes googling and its slack mouth gaping and whatever it was that Jayson used to make them more squishy leaking all over her Vera Wang pantsuit, and as she picks it up with a shriek, the skin breaks and the head–” His hands fling out and up. “–explodes like a pinata at Tarantino’s birthday party. And it’s just too much for her, and as she’s shrieking and the people next to her are shrieking, she draws in a breath and projectile yaks three feet across the aisle onto Henry, who’s on his hands and knees, tangled in the pikes. At that point, poor Kate, who that sadist Darren has doubled as one of the Queen’s henchmen, and who has been standing green with morning sickness practically knee-deep in rotting meat for ten minutes, loses it too, getting Henry as he scuttling away from the Minister. And that was it.” Geoffrey’s sweeping arms indicate the mass exodus. “It’s like the worst chain-reaction you can imagine. A chaos of panic and vomit, and in the middle of it, Ellen standing like a pillar of fire glaring into the wings. I’m trying to get down the aisle, but I’ve got this ridiculous cast on and the traffic is going the other way, and I’m about to get trampled to death–and, you know, I’ve imagined going a lot of ways, but this was not one of them–when this massive arm circles my waist and lifts me out of the crowd and before I know it I’m being carried from the place by a German juggernaut who’s bellowing something unintelligible and terrifying and scattering patrons like matchsticks, and two minutes later we’re out in the street and there’s Darren in his toga and his leather pants, standing on the sidewalk with his hand over his gaping mouth like he’s watching a unicorn split open and barf out a basilisk.


“Then the police came.” Gingerly, like he’s protecting his injured foot, Geoffrey lowers himself down onto a stool. “So, Hans sets me down on the curb, next to the Minister’s niece who is writhing around incoherent with hilarity, and then he turns around and BAM!” Geoffrey slams his fist into his palm. “He knocks. Darren. Cold.” His grin is wistful with remembered joy. “And that’s how they met.”

Geoffrey tugs at his ear and folds his arms again. “I hear their techno-industrial Oklahoma! de Sade is killing in Berlin.”

Peeling her hands from over her mouth, Tiffany says, a little breathlessly, “So, your show was a bomb?”

“NO! No! That’s just it.” Geoffrey leaps up and shakes his fists at The Box. “It was a hit. A smash, raving hit! Tickets were scalping for two hundred bucks a pop. Packed houses the entire run. People wanted their money back if nobody vomited.” He clutches at his hair and paces in a circle, winding up at the pastry case where he puts his head down in his arms on the glass and stares in at the petrified bran muffins. “It was like Titus Andronicus in ’55, with ambulances standing by and runners in the house to drag the faintees out of the stalls.” His long, slow string of curses is muffled by the arms of his sweater, but the refrain of “Darren fucking Nichols,” is plain enough. Finally, he turns around and leans back on the case with his ankles crossed and his hands in his pockets. “We took it on tour–with significant revisions. All the way to London and back.”

Mary’s voicemail, 14 November, 2011