They all went with him. In the restaurant he took a script from the brief-case and pored over it. “Ah!” He was on fire as though this were the beginning of the day. “Suppose we play it this way?” He read a scene, interpreting all the characters and etching the lines with a changed sense of value. But, brain-fagged, they could only goggle at him.
“Don’t ask us to go back,” Bert Farr pleaded. “We’ve been going for almost twelve hours.”
Wylie, smoldering, stuffed the script back into the case. “Nine to-morrow morning.”
“Vic!” Stella protested.
Wylie glared at her.
Stella’s laugh was resigned. “All right, Vic; nine to-morrow.” Waiting with Joe for a bus she said: “This period’s the hardest. After the show’s on a week or two it shakes down and the cast falls into a rhythm.”
Rehearsals became a nightmare. Joe got so he dreamed rehearsals. Rehearsals in the morning until Wylie had to rush off for the first of his two shows; rehearsals after the second show until, sometime in the night, weariness halted them.
Tuesday Curt Lake, the script writer, brought in more script. “How is it going, Vic?”
The producer held his head. “It reeks. I’m afraid to open the windows for fear the city’ll back in a garbage truck.”
Then, on Saturday, Vic Wylie ceased to be a fiend. The rehearsal shifted to Studio B at FKIP, and a sound engineer joined the cast to give the show its sound effects. The producer knew he had molded them as far as they could be molded. What he had now was what he would get Monday. Monday he wanted them easy and relaxed. And so, as they read the opening script three times, he was mild, almost gentle. On Sunday they ran through the script only once.