it so real. I decided boys
can play girls better than people think. Maybe they should do it a
little more often, and girls play boys too.

Then Sid-Macbeth came back to his wife from the wars, looking
triumphant but scared because the murder-idea's started to smoulder in
him, and she got busy fanning the blaze like any other good little
_hausfrau_ intent on her husband rising in the company and knowing
that she's the power behind him and that when there are promotions
someone's always got to get the axe. Sid and Martin made this charming
little domestic scene so natural yet gutsy too that I wanted to shout
hooray. Even Sid clutching Martin to that ridiculous pot-chested
cuirass didn't have one note of horseplay in it. Their bodies spoke.
It was the McCoy.

After that, the play began to get real good, the fast tempo and
exaggerated facial expressions actually helping it. By the time the
Dagger Scene came along I was digging my fingernails into my sweaty
palms. Which was a good thing--my eating up the play, I mean--because
it kept me from looking at the audience again, even taking a fast
peek. As you've gathered, audiences bug me. All those people out there
in the shadows, watching the actors in the light, all those silent
voyeurs as Bruce calls them. Why, they might be anything. And
sometimes (to my mind-wavery sorrow) I think they are. Maybe crouching
in the dark out there, hiding among the others, is the one who did the
nasty thing to me that tore off the top of my head.

Anyhow, if I so much as glance at the audience, I begin to get ideas
about it--and sometimes even if I don't, as just at this moment I
thought I heard horses restlessly pawing hard ground and one whinny,
though that was shut off fast. _Krishna kressed us!_ I thought,
_Skiddy can't have hired horses for Nefer-Elizabeth much as he's a
circus man at heart. We don't have that kind of money. Besides_--

But just then Sid-Macbeth gasped as if he were sucking in a bucket of
air. He'd shed the cuirass, fortunately. He said, "Is this a dagger
which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?" and the play hooked
me again, and I had no time to think about or listen for anything
else. Most of the offstage actors were on the other side of the stage,
as that's where they make their exits and entrances at this point in
the Second Act. I stood alone in the wings, watching the play like a
bug, frightened only of the horrors Shakespeare had in mind when he
wrote