.Vaudevilliput: Story in 10 acts (& Intermission) | By : keithcompany Category: Titles in the Public Domain > Gulliver's Travels Views: 1437 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0 |
Disclaimer: This is a work fiction,based on Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift. |
Everyone thinks the intermission is for the audience. To a degree, they’re right. There’s food, drink, toilets available. But it’s more for the performers than the viewers. A known break for the bathroom means that the actors aren’t distracted by lots of people getting up during the act. People walking out on a performance may not MEAN to snub the actor, but that’s what it looks like from under the lights.
But ultimately, the intermission belongs to me. We’ve worked for five acts (or four, depending on your opinion of the purpose of Act One) to get them excited about the last half of the show. And if we did it right, they’re not digesting those appetizers, they’re telling each other what a wonderful time they had, and how much they’re looking forward to whatever comes next. They’re keeping that Act Five climax stoked while they’re in line for popcorn, while they’re smoking on the steps, while they’re looking at authentic Lilliputian costumes at the gift table. They’re doing my work for me, and they paid me for the chance. It’s a great job I have, I tell myself every day.
Act One is designed to get them to their seats, taking into account that there may be delays, distractions, confusion about seating, etc. During the intermission, though, there was no traffic. Blinking lights gave them plenty of warning that the show was about to start again. We even check the lines to make sure we’re not punishing people for limitations in the concession manning, available plumbing, or other things that are out fault. But when we do start the show, we start the show.
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Act Six was The Spanning Spinners. In most Vaudeville, it’s the act that brings them back to the spot they were at when the curtain fell on Five. For Vaudevilliput, there was even more to it. The idea of the first half of the show was little people trying their best to perform, or perform in, human acts.
The last half was concentrated on showing what little people could do in the given format, not replicating the acts of those that had slapsticked before.
I was initially disappointed with the Spinner. A juggler?
He walked slowly out onto the stage from the very center of the back curtains, already juggling. The man’s costume was a uniform gray set of tights, with a hood, covering him from head to toe. His hood had two slits for eyes. The man within was a cypher, moving with robotic precision as he tossed his spheres before him. They were simple gold spheres, moving in a gentle pattern. Not exactly what I’d have put in Five, I was thinking.
I should have remembered that John was, indeed, good at our job.
The balls started to move. At the top of their arc, they spread their arms and legs into a gymnastic or trapeze pose, then tucked back in to be caught and tossed again. Lilliput women were being juggled.
Their costumes had flaring fins at head, elbow and feet, so when they tucked in, they looked like solid balls. When they unfolded, they looked like celestial objects, reptiles, or metallic birds…
Just as the slowest member of the audience would have finished realizing, gasping, and ‘ooooh’ing in wonder, the lights started to change. I had no idea how, but the costumes reacted differently with the new lights: his costume got darker, theirs got brighter, and different colors blossomed from the gold.
With no discernable signal, they released ribbons. Patterned streamers flowed from their backs and ankles, turning them into spangly comets flying around before him. I still hadn’t noticed any woman repeating a pose when they moved on.
The man suddenly stopped. He froze with women in mid air. The yellow star-costumed woman fell towards his left hand, obviously about to miss.
I swear, I was just trying to see better when I surged up out of my seat. Accusations of my crying out in horror are, I assure you, grossly exaggerated.
Anyway, there was some sort of wire or fishing line attached to his wrist. I don’t know how she caught it, but she did. She looped around his wrist in a tight circle, flying off towards his right arm, where she started to orbit the wrist. The red bird-woman caught the wire or whatever around his left, and circled it a few times.
Now, very gentle movements of his hands kept two women in motion. The third, the frilled lizard in blue, in his hand, climbed carefully to his shoulder, and dove off.
Instead of falling straight to the ground, she looped to the side as if outlining a bandolier or baldric.
The lights got even darker, then. The juggler faded into the background, and the women shone like stars. They’d loop from hand to hand, get slung up to a shoulder, where they’d loop down to opposite hip. When they came back up, it was on the other shoulder, and they’d loop to the other side, coming back up to his forearm to start it all over again. Then more women appeared. Secondary and tertiary colors, in stars, meteors, flowers, geometric shapes and god only knows what else, swarmed around him: loop, loop, lift, loop, loop, then spiral to the ground around his legs.
I don’t know how long it lasted. I’d finally stopped trying to guess the mechanism and just drank it in. At the climax, he had 12 women or so flying around him like a cloud of fae.
Then they disappeared in the order they’d appeared. Ribbons disconnected at zenith and fell gently to the ground around him, they tucked back into spheres and he started juggling them again. The lights came back up, and we finally had a gray man juggling three gold balls that posed in mid-air every so often.
I started clapping, when he suddenly grasped one of them and threw it at the stage as hard as he could.
It bounced all the way out to where I sat. I caught it easily. He’d replaced the women, or at least that woman, with a rubber ball. I never saw the switch. Then as the last two women still came out of their tucks at the top of the pattern, he backed away through the curtains.
I signaled my personal assistant. When he was close, I handed him the ball. “This goes back stage, and have flowers sent to John Cradden’s hospital room.”
“Is there a message?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. ‘You bastard. Sincerely, Olin.’”
The segue act waited until I was through with this exchange to go on. For comic relief, they kept to the theme of the first half for the little skits.
Right now, a woman in lion-tamer costume led a chihuahua out onto the stage. She cracked a whip and shouted, “SIT!”
It looked at her expectantly.
She cracked the whip again, shouting “SIT!”
It licked her in the face, knocking her down.
“Damnit, dog, you’re supposed to SIT!” It did. “NOT ON ME YOU-“ and the rest was lost in muffled screams. The light went out.
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