In One Person

black box, we can position the audience where we want them; we can move the seats around. Sometimes, the audience completely encircles the stage or sits facing one another with the stage between them. For
Romeo and Juliet
, I had all the seats form a shallow horseshoe around the stage. With the houselights dimmed, but not dark, I could watch the rehearsals from any seat in the audience and still see well enough to read my notes—or write new notes.
    It was my gay Benvolio who whispered in my ear, while all of us were still waiting for Manfred (my trouble-making Tybalt) to get back to campus from his wrestling match. “Mr. A.—I see him,” my Benvolio whispered. “That guy who’s looking for you—he’s in the audience.” With the houselights dimmed, I could not make out the man’s face; he was sitting in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped seats, about four or five rows back—just out of reach of the spotlights illuminating our stage.
    “Should we call Security, Mr. A.?” Gee asked me.
    “No, no—I’ll just see what he wants,” I told her. “If I appear to be stuck in an unwelcome conversation, just come interrupt us—pretend you have to ask me something about the play. Make up anything that comes to mind,” I said.
    “You want me to come with you?” my bold Nurse, the field-hockey player, asked me.
    “No, no,” I told the fearless girl, who was spoiling for a fight. “Just be sure I know when Manfred gets here.”
    We were at that point in our rehearsals where I like to have the kids run their lines consecutively; I didn’t want to be rehearsing either piecemeal or out of sequence. My ever-ready Tybalt is an inciting presence in act 1, scene 1. (
Enter Tybalt, drawing his sword
, as the stage directions say.) The only rehearsing I wanted to do without Manfred was that small set piece the Chorus says, the prologue to the play.
    “Listen up, Chorus,” I said. “Run through the prologue a couple of times. Take note that the most important line ends not with a comma, but a semicolon; pay attention to that semicolon. ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’; please
pause
after the semicolon.”
    “We’re here, if you need us, Mr. A.,” I heard Gee say—as I went up an aisle to the fourth or fifth row of seats, into the dimly lit audience.
    “Hey,
Teacher
,” I heard the man say, maybe a split second before I could clearly see him. He might as well have said, “Hey,
Nymph
”—that’s how familiar his voice was to me, almost fifty years after I’d last heard it. His handsome face, his wrestler’s build, his slyly confident smile—they were all familiar to me.
    But you’re supposed to be
dead
! I was thinking—the “of natural causes” was the only doubtful part. Yet
this
Kittredge, of course, couldn’t have been
my
Kittredge. This Kittredge was only slightly more than half my age; if he’d been born in the early seventies, when I’d imagined Kittredge’s son had been born, he would have been in his late thirties—thirty-seven or thirty-eight, I would have guessed, upon meeting Kittredge’s only child.
    “It’s truly striking how much you look like your father,” I said to young Kittredge, holding out my hand; he declined to shake it. “Well, of course, I mean if I had seen your father at your age—you look as I
imagine
he must have looked in his late thirties.”
    “My father didn’t look at all like me when he was my age,” the young man said. “He was already in his early thirties when I was born; by the time I was old enough to remember what he looked like, he already looked like a woman. He hadn’t had the surgical reassignment yet, but he was very passable as a woman. I didn’t
have
a father. I had two mothers—one of them was hysterical most of the time, and the other one had a penis. After the surgery, as I understand it, he had some kind of vagina. He died of AIDS—I’m surprised you
haven’t
. I’ve read all your novels,” young Kittredge added, as if everything in my writing had indicated to him that I easily could have died of AIDS—or that I
should
have.
    “I’m sorry,” was all I could say to him; as Gee had said, he was upset. As I could see for myself, he was angry. I tried to make small talk. I asked him what his dad had done for a living, and how Kittredge had met Irmgard, the wife—this angry young man’s mother.
    They’d met skiing—Davos, or maybe Klosters. Kittredge’s wife was Swiss, but she’d had a German