"S. P. Somtow - Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile.." - читать интересную книгу автора (Somtow S. P)

ABSENT THEE
FROM FELICITY
AWHILE…
by Somtow Sucharitkul




Here’s a variation on a theme that a few courageous writers
have tackled before—with a certain dread and a shock of
horror. Live life over again? Yes, and then again, no. But
this story manages to turn a new direction. The right to
achieve adulthood in a cosmic community must be learned.
 1

You remember silence, don’t you?
There were many silences once: silence for a great speech,
silence before an outburst of thunderous applause, silence after
laughter. Silence is gone forever, now. When you listen to the
places where the silence used to be, you hear the soft insidious
buzzing, like a swarm of distant flies, that proclaims the end of
man’s solitude…
For me, it happened like this: It was opening night, and
Hamlet was just dying, and I was watching from the wings, being
already dead, of course, as Guildenstern. I wanted to stay for
curtain call anyway, even though I knew the audience wouldn’t
notice. It hadn’t been too long since my first job, and I was new in
New York. But here everything revolved around Sir Francis
FitzHenry, brought over from England at ridiculous expense with
his new title clinging to him like wrapping paper.
Everything else was as low-budget as possible, including me.
They did a stark, empty staging, ostensibly as a sop to modernism,
but really because the backers were penniless after paying
FitzHenry’s advance, and so Sir Francis was laid out on a barren
proscenium with nothing but an old leather armchair for Claudius’s
throne and a garish green spot on him. Not that there was any of
that Joseph Papp-type avant-garde rubbish. Everything was
straight. Me, I didn’t know what people saw in Sir Francis
FitzHenry till I saw him live—I’d only seen him in that ridiculous
Fellini remake of Ben Hur—but he was dynamite, just the right
thing for the old Jewish ladies.
There he was, then, making his final scene so heartrending I
could have drowned in an ocean of molasses; arranging himself
into elaborate poses that could have been plucked from the
Acropolis; and uttering each iambic pentameter as though he were
the New York Philharmonic and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir all
rolled into one. And they were lapping it up, what with the swing
away from the really modern interpretations. He was a triumph of
the old school, there on that stage turning the other actors into
ornamental papier-mache all around him.