Staging Ground. Leslie Stainton

kittenish yelps. “Standby lights one,” the stage manager whispers into her headset. For an instant everything is suspended—actors, orchestra, audience, the redheaded boy, still as a statue, whose gloved hands grip the rope that controls the curtain that shelters this make-believe world. I watch his face. Very possibly he’s the same age James Webb was when he went to work on the building whose walls gave rise to this theater. The boy listens for his cue. He’s dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans, work boots, the kind of practical attire I imagine Webb wore. This young man too is about to unleash a story. In another moment he’ll swing into action, the Fulton’s red curtain will lift toward the heavens (or more accurately, toward a wood grid reinforced with steel), and Webb’s walls will slip into shadow, or at least it will seem that way for a while.

4

       SACRED SPACE

      I made my stage debut when I was four, as an angel in a Christmas pageant in my grandparents’ church. I wore a white taffeta sheath with a pair of sheer white wings edged in tinsel. My mother fussed with them right up to my entrance, but they flopped anyhow. I had no lines. My parents tell me I clung to the altar rail and bobbed up and down.

      My next role was Mrs. Claus in a second-grade skit, followed by a small singing part in an operetta about flowers. By age eleven I was stagestruck. That year our music teacher informed my sixth-grade class that she and her colleagues were casting a Nativity tableau and needed a Mary who could sit very, very still for long periods of time. We girls shut up for days, but in the end the role went to an eighth-grade brunette who looked the part. I was crushed. Two years later I was cast as Lady Macbeth, a role for which I seemed better suited. “Out, damned spot,” I intoned, thrilled by my profanity. At sixteen I joined an evangelical Christian theater troupe, and we traveled the country giving overwrought performances of A Man Called Peter in sanctuaries and social halls. In one church we used an empty baptism tank as the entrance for a maid.

      I’m not sure what I believed back then. Faith was a way of doing theater, so I accepted Christ and memorized John 3:16. I even handed out tracts in Brooklyn one weekend. At a revival meeting I watched a pair of missionaries set a matchbook on fire and hold it under the fingers of someone they hoped to convert. “This is what hell feels like,” they murmured. “Do you want to burn?” I was bewildered by their histrionics, so different from the tame Episcopal rites I’d grown up with.

      I joined a Christian choir and learned dozens of gospel tunes (“Love is surrender / Love is surrender to His will!”). One night we gave a concert at the Fulton Opera House (as it was then known), my first appearance on that stage. We wore floor-length skirts of fuchsia and royal blue with big sashes and bright blouses. I stood off to one corner and swayed, much as I’d done when I was four. Henry Harrison, a singer from Harlem known as “Amen Henry,” stole the show with his rendition of “Amazing Grace.” There were drums and a synthesizer, swirling light effects, and a crowd of mostly family members who clapped in time to the music. Offstage we talked, as we almost always did in those days, about sex. The choir director’s wife confessed that she and her husband had done it at least five times on their wedding night—she’d been too sore to remember. My friend Margaret and I swore to each other that we would not die virgins, even if we were diagnosed with a terminal disease the next day.

      When I turned seventeen, my Christian theater troupe produced The Diary of Anne Frank, and I played Anne. We opened it in my high school auditorium, took it briefly on the road, and then rented the Fulton for a week and ran it there with my name on the marquee. The production was terrible—full of scenery-chewing and ad libs, for which our director, a sometime preacher, had a special bent. But I knew enough about acting (I’d begun studying Stanislavski) to try to impose some discipline. I spent months reading about the Franks, imagining what it was like to live crammed in an attic for two years, forced to tiptoe all day long. I conducted sense- and emotion-memory exercises, trying to conjure tears, and sat for days in a radio studio recording passages from the diary. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. The sentence became a mantra.

      The night we moved into the Fulton we scoured the backstage for props to transform our plain gray set into the Franks’ Amsterdam annex. We hauled a bucket of paint onstage, a Mexican flag, utter junk. But I painstakingly put up pictures of movie stars on the wall in Anne’s room and came into the theater well before call each night to sit on her narrow mattress and summon her spirit. My devotion to Anne was a combination of ego and homage: I wanted to be as famous as she was. At the same time I felt immense pity for her, for all of them.

      I had a crush on Anne’s Peter, too. In my case he was a sweet Mennonite boy with blond hair, a wispy moustache, and a beautiful singing voice. Our director so worshipped him (Mann’s Tadzio comes to mind) that he refused to let us rehearse with one another and instead conducted private sessions in which the director played all other relevant parts. The first time Peter and I ran our scenes together was onstage in front of an audience. I awaited his kiss as eagerly as the original Anne must have. Bathed in blue light, he leaned into me, and I felt the soft hairs of his mustache and then his rouged lips on my mouth, and afterward I floated out of his room as if on air.

      Early the next morning my mother burst into my bedroom waving the local paper. “Anne Frank Is a Gift from Leslie Stainton,” the headline read. For a day I again floated on air, and then it was over, our short run, the marquee billing, the star’s dressing room. I went back to my life. Alive, golden-haired, insecure. I waited for another Anne Frank, but she never came.

      In those moments before performance each evening, when I sat alone in Anne’s room and thought about the night ahead, I felt for the first time the uncanny power of that space. The Fulton was mostly empty: maybe a house or stage manager in the wings, but there were no other actors, just me and the character I desperately sought to invoke. I doubt I ever got her. I doubt my Anne was a gift to much of anyone (there’s a reason I no longer act), but something did take place in that groping, in my desire to be her, to take on Anne Frank’s suffering at a time in my life when already I’d outlived her.

      For the length of our run the Fulton stage became that iconic attic space. Theater exists in the moment when action becomes metaphor, a friend reminds me. I knew then that this place was somehow holy (I would eventually learn Grotowski’s phrase), and I had come to worship. Perhaps the sparse audiences we attracted did too, though I suspect they were there primarily because we’d dragooned them into coming. One night the director, who also played Otto Frank, asked me to ad lib the name of a friend of his who was in the audience that evening, and I did, ashamed but obedient.

      Anne for me was real, and I tried desperately to make her so. The power of the actor, Michael Goldman writes, is dangerous, and we harness it at our peril. I was giddy with authority: my name on the theater, my body onstage. The spotlight, the wig, the yellow star I’d sewn by myself onto my sweater. The gesture was heartfelt: I wanted to bring Anne back to life. Anyone who takes on that role is hoping to resurrect the dead.

      Anne Frank was my last production with that company. I never got together with the boy who played Peter, but I did date his brother. The director went on producing Christian plays for another three decades, until one day he was charged with corrupting minors and arrested. Two teenage boys accused him of holding nude acting classes in his basement. The director pleaded no contest and was fined and put on probation, and a few months later he killed himself.

      Theaters hold emotions, a ghost hunter named Rick Fisher told me one morning as we stood on the Fulton stage together, and “that emotion, that energy, stays here.” I’d asked Rick to show me how he worked, and he’d turned up at the opera house with an infrared camcorder, a digital tape recorder, a thermal scanner, an electromagnetic field meter, a motion sensor, and one assistant. The three of us walked through the basement together and then went upstairs to the stage. It was a summer morning; a couple of crew members were on the pin rail hanging lights. Rick and his friend snapped away, and after a minute or two Rick called out, “Looks like we got a little friend here.” I looked at his camera. There on the screen, beside me, was a white orb,