the play was Edna Parker Watson’s performance—and I’m sure they were right. Even I, in my infatuated daze, could tell that Edna was brilliant. I’d seen a lot of theater in my life, but I’d never seen a real actress at work before. All the actresses I’d met so far were dolls with four or five different facial expressions to choose from—sadness, fear, anger, love, happiness—that they kept in rotation until the curtain went down. But Edna had access to every shade of human emotion. She was natural, she was warm, she was regal, and she could do a scene nine different ways in the space of an hour and somehow make each variation seem like the perfect one.
She was a generous actress, as well. She made everyone’s performances look better, by her mere presence onstage. She coaxed the best out of everyone. She liked to step back a bit in rehearsal and let the light shine on another actor, beaming at them somewhat as they played their role. The great actresses are not often this kind. But Edna always thought of others. I remember Celia coming to rehearsal one day wearing false eyelashes. Edna took her aside to caution her not to wear them in performances, as they would cast shadows over her eye sockets and make her look “corpselike, darling, which is never what one wants.”
A more jealous star would not have pointed out such a thing. But Edna was never jealous.
Over time, Edna made Mrs. Alabaster into a far more subtle character than what the script suggested. Edna transformed Mrs. Alabaster into a woman of knowing—a woman who knew how ridiculous her life was when she was rich, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be broke, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be running a casino in her drawing room. Yet she was a woman who bravely played the game of life anyhow—and allowed the game of life to somewhat play her. She was ironic, but not cold. The effect was a survivor who had not lost the ability to feel.
And when Edna sang her romantic solo—a simple ballad called “I’m Considering Falling in Love”—she brought the room to a state of silent awe, every single time. It didn’t matter how many times we’d heard her sing it already; we all stopped whatever we were doing to listen. It’s not that Edna had the best singing voice (she could be a tad chancy sometimes on the high notes), but she brought such poignancy to the moment that one couldn’t help but sit up and pay attention.
The song was about an older woman who was deciding to give herself over to romance one more time, against her own better judgment. When Billy wrote the lyrics, he hadn’t intended them to be quite so sad. The original point, I think, had been to create something light and amusing: Look, how cute! Even older people can fall in love! But Edna asked Benjamin to slow down the song and alter it to a darker key, and that changed everything. Now when she got to the last line (“I’m just an amateur / But what are we here for? / I’m considering falling in love”) you could feel that this woman was already in love, and that it was terminal. You could feel her fear at what might happen to her heart, now that she had lost control of herself. But you could also feel her hope.
I don’t think Edna ever sang that song in rehearsal that we didn’t stop and applaud her at the end.
“She’s the real deal, kiddo,” Peg said to me one day from the wings. “Edna is the real blown-in-the-bottle deal. No matter how old you get, don’t ever forget how lucky you were to see a master at work.”
A more problematic actor, I’m afraid, was Arthur Watson.
Edna’s husband couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t act—he couldn’t even remember his lines!—and he certainly couldn’t sing. (“To listen to his singing,” Billy diagnosed, “is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf.”) His dancing had everything wrong with it that dancing can have and still be called dancing. And he couldn’t move around the stage without looking as though he were about to knock something over. I wondered how he’d ever managed to be a carpenter without accidentally sawing his arm off. To his credit, Arthur did look awfully handsome in his costume of a morning suit, top hat, and tails, but that’s about