Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
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sounds like a wasting disease, or perhaps a creature whose extinction is guaranteed—I’d judged the district elementary school spelling bee, served as toastmaster for the dedication of the refurbishment of the public library, and arbitrated countless conflicts between bosses and their secretaries via our department’s Grammar Hotline. I promoted and produced language for a living, I went by “Doctor” more or less honestly, and, to put it bluntly, I came cheap. If not especially momentous, I was still, clearly, the man of the moment. Hence, I heeded the call of history.
Predictably, most of the problems I encountered came down to issues of authority. Not mine—as I said, I carried sufficient mystery and uncontestable, if elusive, esteem to compel the attention of the players. (I also made a point of wearing a sport coat and tie when I visited, emblems I reserve for the world beyond campus when I need to summon prestige. Similarly, a retired colonel will don his dress blues for a funeral or a judge will allude to his title to secure a table at a crowded restaurant.) No, it was the kids’ believability that needed bolstering. In order to impersonate eminent historical figures with any effectiveness at all, they had to transform themselves more fully than any Stanislavsky-bred actor ever did when dissolving into his role. Basically, they all had to deal with being twelve-to-fourteen years old. The judges would excuse the artifice of our having to expedite each life we displayed, cramming its span into a ten-minute thesis. They would overlook the cardboard scenery moms had helped their kids cut from boxes cadged from the grocery store. Their willing suspension of disbelief could withstand the occasional chirp of a wristwatch in the audience as General Lee conceded at Appomattox Courthouse or excuse the ring of a cell phone outside the cell of soliloquizing Sir Thomas More, whose very walls swayed with the air conditioning. But something had to be done to distract from the fact that these junior high kids, for all their honorable effort and commitment to something other than video games and gateway drugs, were still, undeniably, junior high kids.
Acting is deception, granted, and like all adolescents, those in my charge had undoubtedly had plenty of practice. But acting upped the ante considerably, and considerably beyond their scope. It was one thing to lie convincingly about having brushed one’s teeth, done one’s homework, or pocketed the dollar that disappeared from the dresser. It was quite another to do so as Caesar. Yeats’s claim to the contrary, the ceremony of innocence was not so easily drowned. I might temporarily subdue their teen-aged squirms and instruct their pulses to slow down, but the truth was that by junior high, our actors hadn’t lived long enough to credibly inhabit their own adult futures, much less anyone else’s adult past. They were as yet too unassembled themselves to dissemble successfully—not according to the script, anyway, and not on cue.
Costumes and make-up could disguise their true stature only so far. Actually, the combination of vague, hasty tailoring and clumsy, almost clownish application of cosmetics had the opposite effect, emphasizing the masquerade they were intended to conceal. Anything we used to accessorize the lie—borrowed briefcases and purses, babushkas and watch fobs, stopgap armor and sartorial ruses as given celebrities required—actually made it harder for the kids to be convincing, not to mention maintain their balance. Our few props—assorted sextants and scepters, plastic swords and quills—merely exposed how small our operating budget was. The students swam in their pseudo-period clothing, struggling as much with the merchandise as with the lines they had to deliver. (Just try finding military gear, waistcoats, and tunics in the Children’s Department of any store in the mall.) So our would-be Booker T. Washington had to contend not only with racial stereotyping but also with the oversized suit that kept threatening to subdue him before he completed his speech. Our Abe Lincoln’s estimable head kept sliding up his famous stovepipe as if he were a chimney sweep, and the embattled president had to free himself at least once during each rehearsal in order to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. In the midst of deliberations about his death, a toga scissored and sewn from a bed sheet caused our Socrates to revert to a boy who needed to be cajoled back to sleep. “You have to amplify,” I implored them, referring to more than the projection of their voices to the back wall of the theater. But they could manage only so much dimension. The History Day theme for that year, “Triumph and Tragedy,” connoted pinnacles and depths; my junior high players could neither aspire nor plummet very far and still keep their ill-fitting costumes intact.
As for the make-up, the kids depended on rickety miracles of deception, variously comprised of shoe polish, Scotch tape, spirit gum, Vaseline, and lipstick applied like plumber’s caulk. It was as if they were engaged in a kind of goofy kabuki. With washable thin-line markers they slashed wrinkles on their foreheads like staves that could be read from the mezzanine; with talcum they excessively pomaded their hair as if elderly characters rose like phoenixes from the ashes of autos-da-fe held eras ago. Smudged with charcoal and rouge, Molly Pitcher’s and Kit Carson’s respective skins, meant to look weathered, looked necrotic instead. Cotton ball beards did not create sages but ramshackle Santas or, rather, based on the size of the players, Santa’s scrabbling elves. The kids wore wigs that shifted on their heads like ice floes. They pancaked on the powder, making their faces seem to slop like boiled chickens loose on their bones. They sported breasts and bellies made of wadded toweling, which would slide off kilter and turn the kids into botched outcomes of plastic surgery, Cubist nightmares.
The conclusion of all of this counterfeiting was to render the pantheon of human history, from Garibaldi to Indira Gandhi, from Galileo to Thomas Edison, from Leonardo da Vinci to John Dillinger . . . well, cute. Watching from the vantage of authentic adulthood, I feared that parents, teachers, and judges might be charmed by the sputtering history staged for their benefit, but they’d never be edified, implicated, or truly moved.
Nonetheless, I did what I could to counteract the actors’ unerasable nature. I helped to edit some of the scripts, removing telltale anachronistic diction from their dialogues. “It’s unlikely that Anne Boleyn would have uttered the phrase ‘Yeah, right!’ under any circumstances,” I argued. “And I’d bet anything that General Patton never referred to his junior officers as ‘you guys.’” I also rooted out instances of unnatural exposition. History would have to survive the absence of such admittedly functional but wholly incredible lines as “Well, there’s never a dull moment when you’re Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. It’s almost 1803 already, and I still haven’t purchased the Louisiana Territory!”
Mostly, though, I urged the actors to manifest the physical differences their adopted selves required. Eleanor Roosevelt doesn’t throw herself into her seat the way a child does, I said; rather, she reaches for it gingerly, befitting a woman of consequence, pomp, and excess poundage. Then, when she rises, she doesn’t launch herself out of the chair like one of the White House pups but works her way up in stages, pressing up with both hands. The pre-teens in particular were used to rocking back and forth as they spoke as if needing the bathroom. My would-be soldiers, scientists, and labor leaders were sprawlers who swung their bodies about as recklessly as they used slang. I tried to explain that older workers are not called “working stiffs” for nothing. I reminded them of the arthritis and equity that increase over time and encouraged them to show both in their carriage. Thus I grounded Lindbergh and Earhart. I bent springy senior statesmen into ampersands. I laid gravity upon Joplin Junior High School’s brace of notables and bade them stay.
In short, I tried to teach the kids to cultivate a semblance of the heft of decades in only a month. (The alternative, I told them, was to whittle history down and compete solely as distinguished children: say, a bunch of boy King Tuts and a squad of Shirley Temples.) Hamlet took pains to tutor the players he commissioned in plausibility, admonishing them not to bellow, strut, or saw the air in such ways as to strain patience and crack the mirror he’d have them hold up to Nature. But at least the prince was dealing with grown men, and professionals at that. My troupe’s problem was not tempering their passions but mimicking passions they’d never had.
Unfortunately, even when I convinced them that they must not only speak the speech but act their assumed ages as well, the result was pretty comical. Grown-up moods take years to cook into the countenance. For example, kids get sad, certainly, but their sadnesses are comparatively shallow; richer recriminations and profounder sorrows take time to bed down in the core of the people we become—a great deal more time than we could devote to the process. Asked to do languor, our Queen Elizabeth I merely