The Rehearsal

take you a very long time. Most likely by the time you got the courage to fight back, the scene would be over.”
    Stanley was at a loss for what to say.
    “I know it’s a horrible thing to have to imagine,” the Head of Movement said, “but I’m trying to make a point. I’m just trying to point out that if a person is standing onstage in front of an auditorium full of people then ‘real’ is a useless word. ‘Real’ describes nothing on stage. The stage only cares whether something looks real. If it looks real, then whether it is real or not is immaterial. It doesn’t matter. That’s the heart of it.”
    “That’s not what you told us in Movement class,” Stanley said, with rising anger. “You said what was important was truth and not sincerity. All that stuff you said about mime. I believed all that.”
    The Head of Movement sighed and pressed his fingers to his lips. “No,” he said, and paused for a moment, shaking his head and gathering his thoughts together. He drew a weary breath. “No. We’re talking about two different things now.
    “Stanley,” he said, “think how you would feel if you acted in a play in which your character had to die, and after the performance everybody came up to you and said I really believed you, I really honestly believed that you had died. I saw you dead onstage and I felt myself thinking, Oh my God, he’s actually dead . You would be rapt. It would be the best possible compliment anybody could give you: that your pretence, your big game of let’s-pretend, looked so real that somebody actually thought it was real.”
    “But I’m real,” Stanley said, realizing to his displeasure that he was again on the verge of tears. “My performance might be pretend, but I’m not.”
    “That’s exactly it,” said the Head of Movement swiftly. “If you are a good actor, you will be using your emotions, displaying your laughter, your tears, your sexuality, your insecurities. There’s always this doubleness at play. You and the character you are playing both have to be transparent. You have to look through the one to see the other. That is why being an actor is such a difficult job. It really is you up there.”
    “But there wasn’t any doubleness today,” Stanley cried out. His voice was high and tight and choked. “It was just him. It was his shirt they ruined. It was his breath. It was his hair. They were hurting him .”
    “You’re angry because they betrayed you,” the Head of Movement said simply. “They lured you into feeling something truthful and real, and then they destroyed it in front of you.”
    “They betrayed him !” Stanley shouted.
    The Head of Movement sighed and looked down at his hands.
    “Why is this not a problem for you?” Stanley said after a moment, still breathing quickly. “How can it be okay by you that something like this is able to happen?”
    “I understand your anger,” the Head of Movement said. “Please believe that it wasn’t meant to happen in the way that it happened. In fact I don’t think the boys properly understood what they were doing. The manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty is really a lot more complicated and interesting and life-affirming than its name suggests.” He closed his eyes, recalling a loved passage to his mind, and said, “ ‘I have therefore said “cruelty” as I might have said “life” or “necessity” because I want to indicate that there is nothing congealed about it, that I turn it into a true act, hence living, hence magical.’ ” He opened his eyes and smiled sadly at Stanley. “Artaud,” he said, “in his own words.”
    Stanley sat for a moment, breathing heavily and feeling stalemated. He tried to remember what they had been talking about a few minutes earlier, to renew his argument and try to force the Head of Movement out of this tired apologetic apathy.
    “I like that you had the courage to talk to me,” the Head of Movement said now. “I’ll be speaking to each of those students very seriously so they really understand the emotional impact of what they did.” He blinked at Stanley and waited. The minute hand moved forward with a solemn thock .
    When the Head of Movement was younger he acted for the Free Theater, a mothy ragged band of minstrels and failed gypsies who squatted in derelict houses and camped in parking lots and traveled around the country each year to perform at prisons and rural schools. On the wall above his head were a few snapshots from those