TO BE OPHELIA Francia Oborn The stage was a painting: the drab background and subdued, gray shaded colors of a 17th century Rembrandt. At each side and along the top, maroon velvet hung heavily in hot dusty folds, masking the green; proscenium frame. Instead of a stage apron the floor in front of the proscenium stretched in gray-carpeted stairs across the width of the stage front and down to the orchestra floor. Black cyclerama circled the upstage acting area. A single slash of yellow cut through it to fall around the tensed body of a young girl. She knelt alone in the harsh spot-spill of a work light. Behind her in the half darkness beyond the light's yellow circle Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, watched Ophelia's "mad scene." The girl's head was bowed with her face in shadow, and dust particles flew in the light around her long, mussed blonde hair. Stiffened like gnarled oak brush branches and outstretched as if in prayer, her fingers curled slowly into fists. The fists unclenched, relaxed, then tightened into fists again, and she began to speak. "'I hope all will be well.'" Her voice was high with a quality that sounded almost off-pitch. She lifted her head quickly, and the shadow fell away from a young face, colorless in the yellow glare. Pale eyes that were already round with a blank, expressionless stare became rounder still, and she darted her head to one side as if to answer someone. "'We must be patient.'" The clenched fists raised slowly to her face, became fingers again, and wound themselves into the tangled hair along her temples until the skin on her forehead tightened her eyes into slants. 20 "'And yet'," her voice became a whine. "'I cannot choose but weep, to think they have laid him in the cold ground.'" The whine sirened higher until it climaxed in a scream that blasted the dusty maroon silence and made the spill area on the worklight spot almost shiver. "'My brother shall hear of it!'" Then the scream faded; her hands dropped, and so did the blankness in her face. Tight-lipped disgust replaced it. The girl's head tilted back while one hand jerkily brushed tangled hair out of her eyes. She said in a flat whisper, "Line." The sound of the director's voice came into the light before he did, and cut-glass sarcasm crackled in the yellow glare. "We open in three nights." The stage floor squeaked as he stepped into the circle of light. His shoes were the worn brown color of unvarnished redwood. "Do you think that by the night we close you'll get through it without breaking?" He put one hand on his hip, and with the other, pushed his gray-striped ivy-league cap forward on is head until the beak formed a parallel with his heavy brown eyebrows. She looked up apprehensively into his face, like a small child caught at a cookie jar, and then turned quickly away from the disgust in his eyes. "I didn't forget it, you know." She pushed her hair back and dragged her hand down the side of her face to her neck. As she stood: up, she glanced at him again, and the hand relaxed and dropped to her side in a hopeless, final gesture. "I can't do it this way." She walked away from the director and out of the circle of light. "It's wrong." She could fee the director's eyes on her back until she passed the heavy maroon that drew the line between stage proper and the wing area. In the safety of backtage darkness she stopped. Behind her she heard his voice. "The prayer scene. Get Claudius in here." She shut her eyes while a cold shiver crawled up her back; then she sank down onto a rickety folding chair that squealed at her. The first line of a nursery rhyme about a girl named Curlylocks ran through her mind, only now it said, "Ophelia, Ophelia, wilt thou be mine?" She put her head down on the plastic-topped table at the side of the chair and rubbed her hot cheek along the plastic's coolness. "It was stupid to walk off," she thought. "Oh well, stupid, be stupid." Her throat began to tighten, and she could feel the pressure of heat behind her eyes and the salty taste of tears. She tried to swallow. For half a second she told herself it would be stupid to cry; then she didn't care. "Are you tired?" Gertrude's voice was black silk in the darkness, and the sound of it was the touch that calms ruffled cat fur. 21