In One Person

lumberman’s success as an onstage cross-dresser.)
    “Most boys haven’t the vaguest idea how to be a woman—it’s a mortal distraction from the play,” Richard said.
    “Ah,” Grandpa Harry said. “Then how will you manage it?”
    “I’m thinking of asking the younger faculty wives to audition for roles,” Richard Abbott replied, “and the older faculty daughters, maybe.”
    “Ah,” Grandpa Harry said again. “There might be
townspeople
who are also qualified,” my grandfather suggested; he’d always wanted to play Regan or Goneril, “Lear’s loathsome daughters,” as Grandpa alliteratively spoke of them. (Not to mention how he longed to play Lady Macbeth!)
    “I’m considering open auditions,” Richard Abbott said. “But I hope the older women won’t be intimidating to the boys at an all-boys’ school.”
    “Ah, well—there’s always that,” Grandpa Harry said with a knowing smile. As an older woman, he’d been
intimidating
countless times; Harry Marshall had merely to look at his wife and elder daughter to know how female intimidation worked. But, at thirteen, I was unaware of my grandfather’s jockeying for more women’s roles; the conversation between Grandpa Harry and the new leading man seemed entirely friendly and natural to me.
    What I noticed on that fall Friday night—casting calls were always on Friday nights—was how the dynamic between our theater’s dictatorial director and our variously talented (and untalented) would-be cast was changed by Richard Abbott’s knowledge of the theater, as much as by Richard’s gifts as an actor. The stern director of the First Sister Players had never been challenged as a
dramaturge
before; our little theater’s director, who said he had no interest in “merely acting,” was no amateur in the area of dramaturgy, and he was a self-appointed expert on Ibsen, whom he worshipped to excess.
    Our heretofore-unchallenged director, Nils Borkman—the aforementioned Norwegian who was also Grandpa Harry’s business partner and, as such, a forester and logger
and
dramaturge—was the very picture of Scandinavian depression and melancholic forebodings. Logging was Nils Borkman’s business—or, at least, his day job—but dramaturgy was his passion.
    It further contributed to the Norwegian’s ever-blackening pessimism that the unsophisticated theatergoers in First Sister, Vermont, were unschooled in serious drama. A steady diet of Agatha Christie was expected (even nauseatingly welcome) in our culturally deprived town. Nils Borkman visibly suffered through the ceaseless adaptations of lowbrow potboilers like
Murder at the Vicarage
, a Miss Marple mystery; my superior-sounding aunt Muriel had many times played Miss Marple, but the denizens of First Sister preferred Grandpa Harry in that shrewd (but oh-so-feminine) role. Harry seemed more believable at divining other people’s secrets—not to mention, at Miss Marple’s age, more feminine.
    At one rehearsal, Harry had whimsically said—as Miss Marple herself might have—“My word, but who would
want
Colonel Protheroe dead?”
    To which my mom, ever the prompter, had remarked, “Daddy, that line isn’t even in the script.”
    “I know, Mary—I was just foolin’ around,” Grandpa said.
    My mother, Mary Marshall—Mary
Dean
(for those unlucky fourteen years before she married Richard Abbott)—always called my grandpa
Daddy
. Harry was unfailingly addressed as
Father
by my lofty-sounding aunt Muriel, in the same black-tie-dinner tone of voice that Nana Victoria unstintingly hailed her husband as
Harold
—never
Harry
.
    Nils Borkman directed Agatha Christie’s “crowd-pleasers,” as he mockingly referred to them, as if he were doomed to be watching
Death on the Nile
or
Peril at End House
on the night of his death—as if his indelible memory of
Ten Little Indians
might be the one he would take to his grave.
    Agatha Christie was Borkman’s curse, which the Norwegian bore less than stoically—he
hated
her, and he complained about her bitterly—but because he filled the house with Agatha Christie, and similarly shallow entertainments of the time, the morbid Norwegian was permitted to direct “something serious” as the fall play every year.
    “Something serious to coincide with that time of year when the
leafs
are dying,” Borkman said—the
leafs
word indicating that his command of English was usually clear but imperfect. (That was Nils in a nutshell—usually clear but