Drama, Drama

Poems on the stage

Photo by Eduardo Pastor on Unsplash

When I was thirteen my mom took me to a junior-college production of Twelfth Night, and that’s when I started to love live theater, including Shakespeare. It’s stayed with me; I love stories on stage, and stories about the stage. Poems, too.

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Bad Rehearsal

Back, says the director, your shadow
is falling on the hero's profile.
The butler retires upstage left,
to poison sherry at the sideboard.

Less business, the director shouts,
don't tiptoe over the dialogue.
Tea and amnesia biscuits, miss? says the butler
with a bow to the ingenue, who chokes.

Enough, screams the director, you walk-on
catastrophe, I'll have you written out.
That's easy, says the butler, draws
a pistol from his waistcoat, and shoots

a hole through the director's script.

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-tio Boys

They meet by chance at a tavern in Eastcheap
after a matinee and evening at the Globe.
Each has seen his best friend killed, again.
Neither is pleased to see the other.

The hell are you here for, Horatio growls, you're dead.
So are you, Mercutio snarls, or said you wanted to be.
I stayed because he told me to, Horatio snaps.
Not all of us get a fight scene in Act Three.

I died defending his name, Mercutio cries.
Bollocks, snorts Horatio, you were spoiling for a fight
before he ever came on stage, you died the way
you lived, you self-enchanted hot-wit.

Talking to me, Mercutio jeers, or your sweet prince?
Died the way he lived indeed, goggling captive
at melancholy in a mirror, royal wits a fever
of Will-I, Won't-I. How many soliloquies, dear God!

A prince at least, Horatio fires back, and not some party boy
invisible outside Verona, leaping harebrained in and out
of love, of ballrooms, gardens, duels, marriage-bed,
a family, a life - but who, when he stood still?

Who knows, at that age? sighs Mercutio, drinking deep.
Ten years more - five! - we would have seen him clear.
And mine, Horatio mutters, like to have proved
most royal, had he lived. Well. Damn.

I made him laugh, Mercutio says. I gave him wit -
as medicine, as a window, as a sword.
I stood by him, Horatio says, saw what he saw,
told him - and in that rotten court! - never a lie.

And did we make a difference?  -To the play maybe,
Mercutio answers, gloomy. Not the ending.
The play, Horatio shouts, the play's the thing!
Mercutio rolls his eyes. Shut up, you're drunk.

I'm right, though. Screw the ending.  -On his feet,
unsteady, Horatio pounds the table. The line, the scene,
the act, the who-you-are-ness, that's the thing,
the play's the thing. The ending's just ... an end.

A sword's end, maybe, scoffs Mercutio, and sways
himself upright. You're drunk, and so am I.
They play again tomorrow?  -So they do, Horatio says,
and scrubs a trembling hand across his forehead. So we do.

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I wrote Bad Rehearsal in my late twenties, and it’s inspired less by a play than by my favorite mystery novels from the Queens of Crime who wrote in the 1920s and -30s: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. All of them were comfortable writing about butlers in their natural habitats, and Marsh in particular was also fond of setting a “cozy” crime in a theatre company, using actors’ outsize personalities and the tensions of rehearsal and performance as elements in the story. I was reaching for some of the tension these writers created in their novels, and for some of their wit … and, by the way, what else was I doing? What was the butler doing in this poem, ever-present in his neat dark suit, meant to be helpful but always in the way, possibly comic and certainly maddening and potentially lethal? What is he about?

-tio Boys is a new poem, and it may be, as they say, a little “niche.” Is it “niche” to love Shakespeare’s plays, in the 21st century? Is it “niche” to spend more time thinking about some of their supporting characters than about the leads? Is it “niche” to believe, for example, that the most interesting thing about Romeo is that Mercutio wants him for a friend? Now we’re getting down to it: the root inspiration for this poem is my long-time fangirling over Mercutio. In a play where the title characters could be any two teenagers whose parents can’t stand each other, Mercutio is mercurial and fantastical and smartass and belligerent and absolutely unlike anyone else in Verona. In some ways he has more in common with Hamlet than he does with Romeo … but a prince in Hamlet’s situation needs a more plain-spoken and reliable confidante. And there’s Horatio at his side, nothing flashy or mercurial about him — an ungrateful part, as actors say — but loyal to the bone. I started thinking about the way these two supporting characters mirrored each other, and what tragic stories their loyalties enmeshed them in, and the value of loyalty and love even in the midst of failure and tragedy, and … anyway, I ended up writing this poem. Which may be a little “niche.” Or not. You tell me.