Playing Juliet Read online

  We left the stage quietly. Everyone looked as miserable as I felt.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I pray you mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favouredly.

  Shakespeare’s As You Like It

  I glanced around casually to make sure no one else was in the lobby before I walked over to the photograph hanging on the back wall. I looked one more time, then touched the last word of the first line on the brass plaque.

  “Tonight,” I whispered.

  Even on opening night, even with a play with a really large cast, you can usually find somewhere to be alone. I went into the prop room, sat down on a papier-mâché copy of a Roman column, and thought of Juliet—as the gentle, obedient daughter, as the flirt, as madly and dangerously in love.

  And as a dumb thirteen-year-old. As quick to run off in the night to solve a problem as . . . as me. Zandy had been right: Juliet acted like we do. She was as reluctant to ask her parents for help as I was. As likely to change from happiness to despair as I was. Shakespeare had written the most wonderful character and I was going to play her. I was half excited and half scared silly.

  “Beth Sondquist,” I said to myself. “You are almost thirteen years old, and this is your thirteenth play . . .”

  Whoa! Not the best line of thought. At least “13 Superstitions Every Theater Kid Should Know” doesn’t say anything about the number thirteen being unlucky.

  Time to get to the dressing room.

  Whenever there’s a sword fight in a play, the actors rehearse it before every single performance. All the girls in the cast were crowded into our dressing room, listening to the clash of the swords, waiting for our call, and talking about the audience. Pam Thompson, who was playing one of the ladies in the banquet scene, always found a way to peek out at the audience, even though Mrs. Mac told us never to do it. Pam said she saw Mrs. Fredericks sitting next to a man who had a mop of dark curly hair. Someone on the other side of the room said she thought Carol Cummings Oldham, who had played Juliet in the first production, was coming to this show.

  I was leaning against the makeup table. Occasionally I saw someone glance over at me with a worried expression and look away quickly. It didn’t matter. I was concentrating on playing Juliet.

  My first scene was very short. It went without a hitch. But the first kiss came during the banquet scene.

  When Zed leaned over and kissed me, I gave a little giggle. A deliberate, bubbly little giggle, totally in character for a young girl getting her first kiss at a party. Everyone onstage tensed when they heard it, but they relaxed when I kissed Romeo back. I was Juliet, in a hopeless freefall into love at first sight.

  The audience was with us, laughing, gasping, and groaning at all the right moments. Their reaction fed our performance.

  When I said Juliet’s most famous line, “Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo,” I managed to get enough complaint into the question and in the next lines, so that when I reached, “Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” a small sound of “oh” came from the audience. I think it was the first time some people understood the meaning of her words.

  When Romeo and I were arguing over whether it was really morning and he had to leave me, our voices were so soft and sweet, no one could doubt we were truly in love.

  Sometimes, very rarely, everything in a production works. This was one of those times.

  Of course there were little glitches. Once or twice, I forgot a bit of blocking or a line came a little late, but my fellow actors covered for me, and if anyone in the audience noticed, they must have forgiven it instantly. Every time I caught sight of Austin in the wings, he was nodding his approval.

  The audience became unusually quiet while I was pleading with my parents not to make me marry Paris. My father, and then my mother, refused to hear me tell them I was already married to Romeo. Finally, I uttered that line of complete desolation that ended the first half of the play:

  If all else fail, myself have power to die.

  When we heard the waves of applause as the curtain went down for intermission, we knew we had a hit.

  People were giving me the thumbs-up sign when I walked into the dressing room, and Pam rushed over to give me a hug.

  “Great job,” she said, flinging her arms around me.

  I felt a splash of liquid land on my arm and heard someone gasp. Pam stepped back, looking in horror from my dress to the open can of grape soda she held in her hand. I glanced down to see purple stains growing down the front and side of my beautiful white brocade costume.

  Pam insisted on going with me to the costume shop.

  “It was all my fault,” Pam said to Mrs. Lester. “I’d smuggled in food for intermission because it’s our last opening night.”

  “We have rules against eating in the theater for a reason,” said Mrs. Lester. She glanced up at the monitor. “Everyone must be worried sick. Go tell them Beth will be ready in time. And get that food out of the dressing room before there are any more accidents!”

  Mrs. Lester hurried over to a wheeled rack in the middle of the room crammed with costumes in flimsy plastic bags. “Thank goodness the Cinderella! costumes just came back from the cleaners,” she said as she shuffled through the hangers.

  For a moment, I didn’t understand why she was searching for my Cat costume. Then I gave a small gasp as I saw her pull out what she’d been looking for.

  “We know the gown you wore as the Duchess fits well and the light blue will work for Act Two almost as well as the white.”

  The blue gown. The unlucky one. The one that jinxed my performance.

  This time I had to get out of wearing it.

  “But what about the pearls that kept falling off?”

  “I took them off as soon as you brought it to me,” Mrs. Lester said, holding up the blue dress and peering at it through the tinted plastic. “There’s still a jeweled band at the top of the bodice, but that was sewn on separately from the pearls.”

  I knew she didn’t believe that blue dresses were unlucky, but she wouldn’t be happy about changing the color of a costume in the middle of a play. The lighting had been set up for white.

  “Maybe there’s another white gown in the rack room. Wouldn’t that be better?”

  Mrs. Lester hesitated, then looked up at the monitor again and shook her head. “Intermission’s almost over. There isn’t time to try on anything else. Better get into this one now.”

  I had no choice.

  I slipped into the costume and glanced down at the decoration, a jeweled band with a flower in its center. I didn’t remember it from the last time I wore that dress, but since I’d only worn it once, I hadn’t had time to take in much of anything.

  I gave the band a tug, just to make sure it wasn’t the least bit loose. Then I pulled on the big yellow jewel in the middle for good measure.

  I suppose the flower is meant to be a daisy, I thought idly. And then I remembered where I’d seen it before.

  “Mrs. Lester,” I said very quietly. “Please look at this.”

  She stood up and looked at the jewels closely.

  “That’s no costume jewelry,” she said, in as quiet a voice as I had used.

  Then she laughed and took my hands and squeezed them, grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat. I grinned back at her, even though I doubted finding the bracelet would make a difference.

  Mrs. Lester switched her attention to the large stitches holding the bracelet on the dress. “I’ll bet the person who sewed that on was no more than nine or ten years old,” she said.

  “Then I think I know how it got on there,” I said slowly. “I put the dress on your repair pile when Mrs. Fredericks was touring the shop. Molly was mending things for you. If Mrs. Fredericks’s bracelet fell off her wrist and landed in the mending pile, Molly could have picked it up and sewn it on my costume.”

  “Molly! I’ve noticed already that she’s got a wonderful sense of design.” Mrs. Lester was still grinning.

  I tucked my chin
down on my collar bone to get a better look. “To think it’s been in the theater all along.”

  Mrs. Lester shook her head. “It wasn’t in the theater at all.”

  I looked at her, confused. “Where was it?”

  “After you left, I put that dress in with the dry cleaning and took it all to my car as I went home. Today’s the first day it’s been back in the shop.”

  She picked up a pair of scissors from the cutting table, weighed them in her hand, and put them back down. “I can’t risk taking the bracelet off now. You’ve got to be onstage in a perfect costume in two minutes. And the bracelet’s as safe there as anywhere else. Go to Mrs. Mac’s office immediately after curtain call and she’ll clip it off and give it to Mrs. Fredericks.”

  The diamonds glittered in the light every time I made the smallest move. They were real all right. I had to say something.

  “Mrs. Lester, can’t you cut it off? Please? It’s supposed to be bad luck to wear real jewels onstage.”

  She looked at me and sighed. “There just isn’t time. And you think wearing blue onstage is bad luck, too.”

  I nodded. “The last time I wore this dress everything went wrong. Tonight’s performance is so important . . .” I didn’t have to finish the sentence. We both knew what was at stake.

  Suddenly Mrs. Lester grinned at me. “I know something I can do to fix it,” she said. “I asked some of my friends if they had ever heard blue was unlucky. Between us, we probably have over three hundred years’ experience as costumers . . .”

  I looked at her expectantly, but she shook her head. “None of them had ever heard anything like that. So I Googled it and I found something on two different websites. They both said that the bad luck will be erased if you wear silver on the blue costume.”

  She reached over for her pin cushion and took off a string of safety pins. “I can pin these around the bottom of your hem. They’ll look like a silver decoration on the gown. What do you think?”

  “Won’t they show?”

  She unclipped the first pin. “Only the people in the first row or two of the audience would be able to see what they were. And if they noticed, they’d just think something went wrong with the hem and I had to pin it up.”

  I looked at the silver string in her hand. I wanted to have that lucky little row of pins flashing onstage so badly. But this was also Mrs. Lester’s opening night, her last one at the theater.

  “That’s not fair to you,” I said. “It would look like you did sloppy work, and you worked so hard on this show.”

  “I don’t mind. Not if it will help you feel more confident onstage.” She jiggled the pins in her hand, waiting.

  I wavered. It would be so easy to get that little bit of extra luck. And surely I could use some help. I had to go back and show the audience a young girl so in love that she makes desperate, stupid choices and manage to convince them that was how Juliet would act. And then I realized I had all the help I needed. I had Shakespeare’s words.

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Lester,” I said. “I don’t need the pins. I’m playing Juliet.”

  “Break a leg,” she whispered as she pointed to the monitor. It was time for me to get back to the stage.

  I spent a few minutes alone in the wings. Slowly I cleared my mind of grape soda and diamond bracelets and those words Mrs. Fredericks had spoken. It was time to concentrate on Juliet. When I went onstage, all I was thinking about was Romeo.

  Our sad story continued until our parents found us dead in each other’s arms. When the curtain came down on our death scene, the audience sat in silence for the longest moment in my life.

  Was it that bad? I thought as I scrambled to my feet and hurried offstage for the curtain call.

  Then a wave of sound hit me.

  Zed and I took our bows last. As we walked out to the front of the stage, holding hands, a stronger wave of sound surged from the audience and I realized everyone was getting to their feet.

  “Standing ovation,” whispered Zed.

  I looked out over the footlights and saw a woman wiping her eyes. But she was standing and clapping and smiling at the same time.

  The whole cast was bowing for the third time when there was a disturbance in the fourth row. Mrs. Fredericks was leaving, pushing her way past everyone else. Someone with dark curly hair, who looked a lot like the picture of Quinn Whittaker in the newspaper, followed closely behind her.

  That was the moment when I knew we’d lost the theater forever. Mrs. Fredericks had found another theater company to give it to, and she didn’t even have the courtesy to stay till the end of our curtain calls.

  I looked away and saw both Austin and Scott giving me a thumbs-up from the wings. The rest of the backstage crew had joined in the applause. I smiled quickly at them and then back out at the audience as Zed and I stepped to the front and bowed again. Mrs. Fredericks might take our theater away, but no one could take away what we had just accomplished.

  When I looked up, the man with the dark curly hair had turned up the aisle to the lobby, but Mrs. Fredericks had turned in the other direction.

  She was climbing the stairs to the stage. She stepped onto it, walked to the exact center, and stood in front of Zed and me.

  The audience started to mutter. Hardly anyone knew who she was and no one knew what she was doing, but she held her hand up for silence and got it.

  I’ll give her the bracelet now, I thought. Right here, quick. Maybe it could still change her mind. I reached up to pull it from the dress, but Mrs. Fredericks was already talking.

  “As some of you know,” she said, “I own this theater. And I plan to turn it into a memorial in honor of my late husband.”

  A couple of people in the audience started to boo softly, but she held up her hand once more and they stopped. I was picking desperately at the threads that held the bracelet until Mrs. Fredericks went on.

  “He loved theater—challenging, memorable plays with great acting—and I can think of no better way to honor his memory than to have his name live on in a theater with an acting company that produced that level of work.” Her voice broke when she was talking about honoring his name, just like it had when she told me the daisy bracelet was the last present he had given her.

  She took a deep breath. “I finally found that company. Tonight.”

  The audience was so silent, it seemed like everyone in it was holding their breath. I know all the members of the cast were.

  “I plan to give this theater to the city of Oakfield if the city will meet two conditions.”

  There were a couple of tentative claps but she held her hand up again and continued to speak. “The first condition is that it be renamed the Edward J. Fredericks Memorial Theater. The second is that it remains a children’s theater and continues to train the next generation of outstanding actors.”

  Everyone—the audience, the cast, the crew—burst into applause. Mrs. Fredericks got her own standing ovation. Zandy, who had heard everything from the lighting booth, shone the spotlight on her.

  The spot caught the diamonds on my dress as well. I looked down at the flashes of white and yellow and smiled. I’d just been given a brilliant present. Mrs. Fredericks was going to get one, too.

  EPILOGUE

  It is an epilogue or discourse, to make plain

  Some obscure precedence that hath tofore been sain.

  I will example it

  Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost

  At the end of some plays, there’s an epilogue. An actor just faces the audience and tells them what happened after the last scene. I guess that’s the best way to tell you what happened after Mrs. Fredericks gave us the theater for good.

  She cried and laughed and cried again when I showed her the bracelet. She’s planning on flying in from New York to see every play in the first season of the Edward J. Fredericks Memorial Children’s Theater.

  Now that the theater is a memorial to her husband, she’s become our biggest supporter. She can’t do enough for
us. She’s helped out in the costume shop and started a college scholarship for a theater kid who wants to study drama. She even offered to make tapes of herself speaking so I can work on my New York accent.

  Zandy’s dad will be flying in, too, as soon as she gets cast in her next play. They talk about it every time he calls, which is a lot more often than he used to.

  Romeo and Juliet got a front page write-up in the Oakfield paper. Beside the article, there was a picture of the reporter who wrote it, the curly-haired guy who sat next to Mrs. Fredericks on opening night. He said some very nice things about my acting and my mom pasted the article in a scrapbook she bought just for my reviews.

  Guess who played Juliet for the rest of the run?

  Emily Chang.

  I watched the last performance of Romeo and Juliet from the audience. Emily’s a better actress than I am. She’s been acting almost four years longer. But I’m still working, still studying, still getting better.

  Look for me.

  I’ll be playing Juliet again.

  Someday.

  THE SHAKESPEARIAN QUOTES

  All of the quotes in this book are from William Shakespeare, who is considered one of the greatest writers who ever lived. He was born in England in 1564, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and died in 1616, during the reign of King James I. He was a playwright and a poet and, like Beth, an actor. His writing was very popular and many of his plays, in which he also acted, were produced at the royal palaces.

  Almost all the lines that Beth quotes are spoken by Juliet in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. Here are Juliet’s lines, the act, and the scene in which they appear in the play, and the page number where you will find them in this book.

  JULIET

  O, shut the door! and when thou hast done so,

  Come weep with me; past hope, past cure, past help!

  Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, scene 1.