Page 32 of Potion Sickness

“Damien is stable. His condition is unchanged, which seems to be a good thing, for now.” She pauses. “The show is proceeding, and tonight we work. Englebert stands in so Prudence has a Macbeth to play against. Gabe learns the role at the table. Nobody has to be brilliant tonight. You just have to be here, and you have to say the words in order.”

A few people nod. Mostly, everyone just looks exhausted.

“Places. Act One.”

* * *

On stage, the full company runs the play with Englebert as Macbeth. Off stage, at a folding table dragged in from the lobby, there’s Gabe, with his script and a pencil, learning the part he’ll play if Damien doesn’t wake up. The idea, according to Englebert, is that the production keeps its pulse while Gabe builds the role slowly.

Gabe, of course, needs people to read the other parts against him. He gets whoever happens to be available, which means his scene partners rotate without warning and without regard for who’s playing whom.

At one point he runs a soliloquy across the table from Dorcas. A minute later Dorcas is called up to be a witch, and Gabe is playing the same scene against Ms. Pelham, who keeps losing her place because she is also, simultaneously, knitting. Then Ms. Pelham goes up, and Gabe is left reading opposite a fifteen-year-old.

“You want me to do the wife?” Cody asks.

“Yeah. The lines I’m pointing at.”

“‘Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself,’” Cody reads, stumbling over his words.

“That’s the one,” Gabe says. “You’re doing great. You’re a natural.”

“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Englebert’s voice carries from the stage.

Pru is watching from the wings with her arms crossed and her crown pushed back off her forehead. When Englebert finishes, she uncrosses her arms.

“He is good,” she says to me, quietly. “Unfortunate that he’s a cat.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that. He’ll want his own dressing room. He’ll want a chair with his name on it.”

“He already wants those things.”

On the stage, Englebert has climbed onto a stool and is posed like a monarch accepting tribute.

* * *

Lily dies for the first time as the bell rings. The bell announces Duncan’s murder, which happens offstage, so technically nobody dies onstage, but Lily has decided this is a loophole rather than a rule. From her seat in the audience, she clutches her chest, makes a sound like a deflating pool toy, and slides out of her folding chair and onto the floor where she lies with one arm flung over her eyes.

Nobody reacts, which tells me this has been going on longer than tonight.

A little while later, she dies again. This one has more choreography. She staggers three steps up the aisle, delivers a soft “et tu,” which is the wrong play, and collapses across two chairs.

“She saw a video,” Hannah says when she catches me watching. “Some kid online. He does dramatic fake deaths. She’s been dying for days. She died into the bathtub on Saturday. She flooded the bathroom dying.”

“We’re done being knights?”

“Yeah,” Hannah says. “Knights were last month. Now we’re dead. Dying. Whatever. Repeatedly.”

At intermission, which Dana calls early because the fog machine needs to cool, Lily dies twice more. Once by poison, clutching a juice box she’s decided is hemlock, and once, ambitiously, by falling. She climbs onto a table and topples off it backward into Moonbeam, who catches her without breaking the conversation she’s having.

“She has such a strong life force,” Moonbeam tells Hannah, holding a horizontal six-year-old. “That’s why the death play is so important for her. She’s processing the whole cycle.”

“She’s processing a YouTube video.”

“She can do two things at once,” Moonbeam says.

Tiffany has been watching Gabe all night. Her attention keeps sliding away from her own role and onto the folding table where Englebert has begun, between his own scenes, to drop by and give Gabe notes.

She waits until Englebert crosses to Gabe for the fourth time, then puts her staff down in its designated spot on the props table and turns to me.