Laughing, the two friends worked together on the flat, each using one of the shades of gray. The work went much faster now, which pleased Peggy, because she didn’t want to leave the flat half-finished when it was time for her to stop and go to her section of the readings.
In the early part of working on a play, the stage is seldom used. First readings usually take place in small groups gathered in any convenient spot, and it is not until the actors are fairly familiar with their lines and with the way the director wants them read that the play begins to take form on the stage. Come Closer was in the earliest days of rehearsal, and Mal was still in the first stages of familiarizing himself with his cast and them with the play.
The Penthouse Theater was ideally suited for the work they were doing. It was actually a very old theater which Peggy and Amy had discovered, under exciting and mysterious circumstances, when they had first come to New York and met Randy and Mal. The theater itself occupied the top floor of an old loft building, and when Randy and Mal had leased it, they had rented the whole building. Both the theater and the other floors below it had seen much alteration since, and it was now a unique actors’ workshop from top to bottom.
The boys had converted part of the loft space into compact apartments for themselves, and other rooms into living quarters for young actors whose rent, although low by city standards, was still enough to pay most of the costs of operating the building. The ground floor had been turned into a series of rehearsal studios, which, when not being used by Randy and Mal for a current play of their own, were rented to other groups. In its short time of operation, the Penthouse Theater had already become an off-Broadway institution.
For Randy and Mal it had proved to be the best thing that had ever happened to them. It not only gave them a theater in which they could stage their productions, but it gave them enough income so that they no longer had to work at other jobs while trying to pursue their careers in the theater world.
Before, Randy had worked in small night clubs as a song-and-dance man—a way of life for which he had the deepest contempt. Mal had been an actor in movies and television where, because of his tough face, he had been type-cast as a gangster. He not only didn’t like gangster roles, he found it hard to get them because of the cultured English accent that issued so surprisingly from that face. For both boys, the Penthouse Theater meant a new life and new opportunity, doing Randy’s plays, directed by Mal.
Peggy and Amy put the last touches on the clapboard wall, stepped back to review the work, and smiled with satisfaction.
“It looks perfect,” Peggy said. “Now I just hope that we stretched the canvas tight enough on the frame in the first place, so that it doesn’t flutter if somebody bumps into it. If anything looks terrible, it’s a clapboard wall that flutters!”
“I think it’s tight enough,” Amy said, “and besides, if it isn’t, it’s too late to think about it now.”
“You’re right,” Peggy agreed. “Not only that, but I think it’s too late to think about anything right now but my part. I’ve got to clean up and be downstairs for a reading in five minutes. Do you want to keep working here, or will you come down to hear us?”