Seventeen

“My aim is true,” Alison Ashe whispered to herself as the lights came up in the historic Leeds Theatre on opening night. It was a little mantra she liked to say to herself when she wanted to summon the strength to push through. The lyric came from an Elvis Costello song. A beautiful and sad and strange song, and notably, the song she was named after. It helped, as did the secret earbuds and mood playlists, the five tenets of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the secret code names, talking like old British dudes, and of course, plenty of opportunities to engage in hand-to-hand combat with other nerds on campus. Chaturanga had served Alison well this year. It had provided her with a beautiful distraction from an intense and formative period of her life. It was a creative outlet: one that really gelled with her personality– not an easy thing to find. And, perhaps most importantly, it was a vehicle for the development of a lifelong friendship with Paige Hall. Except, she wasn’t sure about that last part right now, and waiting to find out was torture.

Luckily for Alison, she had zero time in the last three weeks to do anything but cram for a leading role in the most acclaimed play of all time. She’d been Ophelia’s understudy all along, she could have learned some of the lines. Instead, she had been running secret operations, planning galas, and throwing bloody shoes at vicious sporks. Actually, some of that was a relief. Alison liked it when her troubles were her own fault. She didn’t have to wonder who to blame or practice sticky hypothetical conversations at two AM. So, with the privilege to self-deprecate in hand, Aly was in the driver’s seat to figure out how to get a whole Ophelia into her brain in 1.5 fortnights. As she wasn’t exactly sure how to pull this off, she was delighted that she didn’t have time to think about it. Peters arranged extensions for her classwork, she was called to extra rehearsals, she still had all of her design responsibilities, and if there was a free moment, she used it to furiously memorize her lines. Right now, with the most important thing on the line– keeping her friendship with Paige– she embraced the chaos, took comfort in it. Even so, a little Elvis couldn’t hurt.

Paige was either being distant and weird or she was giving Alison the space she needed to prepare for her role in record time. Either way, they didn’t interact much at rehearsals or backstage. Passing ships in the night and whatnot. It was fine. Paige had a lot to work on as well with her role. Horatio was nothing to sneeze at. There also wasn’t a lot of on-stage overlap between the two characters, so when one of them was backstage, the other was on. Alison shrugged it off. Something she learned from the game and her switch to BFA Tech and the absolutely insane year she’d just endured was that nothing usually means nothing. Which is to say, if someone doesn’t text you, they’re not intentionally trying to make you spiral. They literally didn’t do anything. Gotta let it go.

In that spirit, Alison did herself a huge favor on the night before opening. Inspired by the silent disco she had surprisingly really enjoyed in the city, she decided to commandeer Leeds that evening for a solo dance party. As the final dress rehearsal ticked to an end, Alison stowed away in the lighting grid, crouched in a little basket with her script. Rehearsal was rather beautiful from all the way up there in her little crow’s nest. She might have even been distracted by everything going on if not for the fact that she was deeply engaged in cramming as many lines into her head as would fit.

When the lights went out and the doors clanked shut, the theatre was all hers. She climbed down into the booth and powered up the lights and sound, connecting her phone to the main system via Bluetooth. She cued the lighting board over to Act IV, Scene V. Though this was technically her death sequence, Alison wasn’t being dramatic. She just liked the cool blue wash of lights in that particular cue. She hiked down to the stage as she thumbed her music app over to favorites and selected a playlist entitled “I’M NOT BEING DRAMATIC, YOU ARE.” She smiled deeply from her azure spotlight as the first notes of Sovereign Light Café by Keane rang triumphantly across the music hall. The juicy power-pop ballad was a wall of sound, exploding with chunky synthesizers, booming kick drums and bass that she could feel in her chest, and a silvery hue of emotional resonance laced with a glaze of sweet nostalgia. Keane was the only band Alison knew that could make her laugh and cry and dance at the same time, and she was due for all three.

I’m going back to a time when we owned this town
Down Powder Mill Lane, in the battlegrounds
We were friends and lovers and clueless clowns
I didn’t know I was finding out how I’d be torn from you
When we talked about things we were gonna do
We were wide eyed dreamers and wiser too

We’d go down to the rides on East Parade
By the lights of the Palace Arcade
Watch night coming down on the Sovereign Light Café

Alison spent the next hour doing silly fake ballet twirls, vaulting across the stage, and shadow boxing. As she danced and played to the music, she recited some of her most challenging monologues. While this exercise was mostly just for fun, there was method in the madness, too. The songs, the lights, the silly dance moves, all made imprints in Alison’s memory, helping her lock in those lines one last time. Her ears ringing and her heart pounding, she slept hard and dreamed weird. When she awoke at 11:28 the next morning, she knew her lines. Great, now all she had to do was– everything else, with no room for error. “When I grow up,” Alison told herself on the way to the dining hall, “I’m gonna do something with room for error.”

From the wings, she watched as Bernardo successfully tackled the first line of the show: “Who’s there?” He nailed it. 10/10. Sold. That was a guard who definitely heard a noise. Alison paused her inner-snark-monologue and took a breath. The show had definitely started. No turning back now. As that reality sunk in, she double-checked that her headphones were tucked into her dress and that her university pin was visible. Even in period costumes and a full house at Leeds, Alison wanted to honor the rules of the game. In this moment, in the safety of the shadow of the heavy, black curtains, she started to take in the beauty of the production that she and her compatriots had poured their hearts into. The production design was gorgeous. The sets and costumes had been truncated to limited palettes. The only colors on stage were crimson, cerulean, onyx black, and gold. This gave the show a distinctive punch to it. The style was period-perfect Renaissance except for that detail. But it made all the difference. The skewing of the visible spectrum added an air of working with limited tools. It was Punk Renaissance, and she loved it.

As Casey started to get his sea legs, Alison noticed something else that she hadn’t expected. He was getting laughs. At first, she figured it was just her reactions that the audience was responding to. After all, it was an acceptably impossible task to hear a boy from an Ivy League sailing team tell her to “Get thee to a nunnery” and not break the fourth wall with a stink face. That laugh might have been hers, but he was swinging above his weight on scenes that Aly wasn’t even in. And they were eating it up. Funny Hamlet. That was her idea. How was it sneaking into this production? Peters! That son of a cummerbund read my paper and decided to make Hamlet funny! Now, that was an honor. Peters knew what he was doing. Alison also knew Peters wasn’t the type to borrow an idea without giving credit, so he must have wanted to keep it a surprise. Dang, that felt good. Hiding little surprises in your art for your favorite people to find. Alison didn’t know exactly what she wanted out of adult life, but she was sure that that was going to be a part of it.

She watched in awe and gratitude as Hamlet laid into King Claudius about the whereabouts of Polonius, whom he had recently murdered.

“Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes but to one table. That’s the end.” Casey was a decent actor, but Alison knew that he’d only put mustard on a line like that if someone told him to. And the crowd ate it right up. She was so excited about being in Hamlet: The Comedy that she almost missed her next cue. It was IV-V, where Ophelia goes crazy and drowns herself in the river. Well, if the audience wanted funny, she could make that funny. Gotta give the people what they want.

In all the whirlwind of the last few weeks, Alison had yet to have an opportunity to simply take the show in. She’d take it now, from the wings. A moment she very much deserved, as she was a designer for this production. The front cover of the Playbill would say “Fight Director: Alison Ashe.” And that meant– that meant. Oh, crud. That meant that mom was in the audience. That’s okay. If it goes terribly wrong, she and mom would have something to laugh about later. Lord knows they had spent many hours laughing together about things that went sideways in plays.

Truth be told, Alison wouldn’t remember much about her performance that evening. Even in a big role, what she was really focused on was the fights. As Hamlet squared off against Laertes, Alison ran the steps quietly to herself from the wings. She had been a choreographer and a coach and, surprisingly, a mentor who had helped a trust fund brat to tread a little more lightly. She was proud of Casey Harrington as he kept his speed in check, even on opening night. His knaps looked good, his combinations looked strong. She even reeled at a haymaker she’d seen a thousand times before. Even knowing that it was fake, it looked like it packed a wallop. Wow. That meant she’d done a good job. What was this feeling? Pride? Nice.

There was another reason that Alison wouldn’t really remember the quality of her Ophelia on opening night, and that’s because in Act V, Scene I, something went wrong.

It all started out fine. Hamlet did his little piece with the gravedigger. Ophelia’s coffin was placed center-right. Ophelia was already dead, so Alison didn’t have any hard work left to do. Her only remaining responsibility was to let the pall bearers carry her to her coffin and lower her in. She laid limp as the four boys carried her on stage, her only struggle at this point was refraining from making a joke about all the attention. Her eyes were closed when Laertes opened the coffin, so her only indication that something was amiss was the collective gasp from the audience. The coffin, it turned out, wasn’t empty.

“What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow conjures the wand’ring stars and makes them stand, like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane.”

But it wasn’t Hamlet. It was Reed Baker, rising from Ophelia’s coffin, dressed as Hamlet’s father’s ghost.