Free The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin Page A

shambles, at least in the memory; so, for that matter, are the last days; but, luckily for the theater, one’s memory of intolerable nervous strain ends almost as soon as the strain does. I watched Kazan, who presumably knew what he was going to do with this improbable and disparate collection of actors. I certainly could tell nothing from the actors. They slouched or lurched or strode about, holding on to their books as though they were infants and looking as though they wondered what the hell they were doing here in this tiny, drafty theater, of all places. I was much too terrified of them all, of the mystic forces almost visibly clashing above their poor, doomed heads, todo more than mutter the briefest of “good morning”s and “good night”s—which, in those first days, was probably just as well. I was especially afraid of Gerry because, to tell the truth, I was afraid
for
her. I simply could not imagine her as the aging, desperately predatory, and somehow majestic ex–movie queen that Tennessee Williams had created. And he had written it, as always, somewhat larger and more livid than life. How was this open-faced, quiet midwestern-type girl going to make herself believe in this creation? Or make
us
believe it? My sense of doom was strengthened when I overheard someone whisper one day, “She’s much too young for the part.” I thought so, too—and insufficiently elegant.
    As we all now know, I could not possibly have been more wrong. But now I find it nearly impossible to re-create my view of the steps which led to this transformation. The most crucial steps, of course, did not take place in my view at all, and I suppose that all I really saw were the results of a process which had begun long before rehearsals started. She must have had a very definite sense of the part and how to play it, for, as I now reconstruct those first days, she seemed watchfully and patiently waiting to put her conception to the test.
    But her preternatural coolness, in this forest of knitted brows, left me stupefied then. It was almost as though, with her wedding day upon her and the bridegroom drawing nearer by the second, she yet lingered, in some hideously compromising position, with another boy. “Oh,” she said to me one afternoon, “so-and-so is such a
worry
bird.” So-and-so had vanished, as did nearly all the actors when they were not needed, gloomily, to study his part.
Her
book was closed, in her lap. “Perhaps I
ought
to study,” she said, with a smile—a smile meant, probably, to wipe the bewildered and reproving look off my face—“but…” and her voice tinkled helplessly into silence. I felt that she had put me down as another worry bird.
    On the other hand, she was watching everything Kazan was doing up there on the stage with the other actors. During the entire blocking-out period, she impressed me tremendously with her speed and concentration, but I got no hint of what she would do with the part; and whereas Kazan gave me increasingly precise notes for the other actors, the clipboard is strikingly sparse when it comes to instructions for Gerry Page. Moreover, most of the notes for Gerry are extremely laconic. For instance, “Tell Gerry she’s inaudible” or “Tell Gerry I can’t see her face.” There is scarcely ever on the clipboard any suggestion of what she should be thinking or feeling on this or that movement, on this or that line; and the reason is that her role was worked out in an extremely direct, knock-down-and-drag-outway, and she never needed to be told anything twice. There was very little left for the clipboard by the time she and Kazan got through hammering away at a scene until it began to take the shape they wanted. Tiny little explosions occurred all along the way, illuminating, at first, not so much what Gerry was doing with the part as the treacherous difficulty of the part itself. It is difficult because this grotesque creature, the Princess, is always standing a little outside