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They open with The Lovers.
It’s a simple stage set. A bed just wide enough to suggest it serves marriage, not sleep. A vase with dried flowers; a garland on the wall. The bed is freshly made; in the air, drifting onstage from behind the curtain, Meister Lukas’s ghostly countertenor. A wedding strain. It is enough to set the scene; the faint noise of guests leaving in the background.
The groom enters first. He is dressed in peasant finery, clean, God-fearing, and shabby. A young man, inexperienced and handsome. Two steps and he is at the bed. He stops before it, watches it as though it were a dog in a cage.
Sleeping.
Liable to wake.
The groom sits down on the starched sheet, keeping his weight in his thighs, so that only his buttocks brush the pert white linen. Again that long, suspicious look down the length of the bed, nervous and fretting. Then, for a moment as fleeting as a sneeze, some other note enters his gaze and one hand spreads on the pillow to a five-pointed star. And all at once the Smoke is there. It jumps from his mouth and hangs an inch off his chin, in the cone of light of a well-focussed lamp: hangs frothy, insubstantial, many-limbed.
Alive.
The groom sees it, claws at it, wishes to shove it back down his throat; leaps up, aghast, inspects the linen, and finds he has made a single crescent mark. A quarter buttock of Soot. His fingers trace it as they would a scar.
Then she is onstage. The bride. The audience have not seen her come on, transfixed as they are by the groom and allowing the light to guide their focus. That light flickers out now and a second comes alive, exquisitely timed; catches her wedding dress and makes a home in its starched cotton. She glows with her virginity, downstage, astride a low stool, tucked in behind a tiny dresser. On it stands a disk of mirror no bigger than her palm.
Oh, she is good tonight: so full of emotion that she is on the edge of Smoke—the audience can sense it, can smell it on the air—yet so terrified, so very meek and shy, as to make all thought of Smoke impossible. She shivers; tugs at her long, unadorned sleeves; crosses, uncrosses her legs (a murmur in the audience at this; a flicker of lust, disarmed by pity); watches the little mirror. The stagehand has positioned it well: it reflects back upstage to a second mirror, tall and rectangular like a doorway. A fluorescent glow spreads from this second mirror, cold, electrical, transforming it into a gateway to a ghostly realm. The bride’s inner self. It is hemmed by a plain black lacquered frame.
Half the bride’s face is visible on this cold slate serving up her soul: one eye, one ear, a twist of braid, and half of her delicate mouth. And next to this half-face—the laws of optics contracting the stage and folding space into a single frame—stands the bed, still unlit, a white rectangle, soft and hazy in its outlines. In its midst, just visible, like an inverted moon, is the crescent of Soot painted by her husband’s buttock.
The bride rises, gets her dress tangled in the stool. It falls, impossibly loud, accentuated by an offstage cymbal. At the sound, the lights go up and her husband steps out of the shadows. They link hands, bride and groom; it feels daring in the sudden blaze of light. They smile. A sigh goes through the audience, of goodwill and relief. The two love each other.
All is well.
But for all their love the bed stands unmoved, unwelcoming; burdens them with its suggestion; expects them, lily-white, for an act that cannot but douse them in sin.
The lovers try a kiss. It is brief, chaste, smokeless. When the bride starts crying the audience sees it in the mirror: she has turned her back on them. The Smoke that has started to rise in the auditorium now reflects these tears. It speaks of old pain. There are many here who remember: living in a world where they were ashamed of their needs. Their wedding night. It played out differently for every couple (as awkwardness; as pain; as guilt). How often was it that the wedding sheets were burned? Not in ceremony or celebration but shamefacedly, by a husband crouching before the hearth in tears; by a wife shaken in her deepest sense of her own decency, transformed by marriage into a whore. And these two here, they are hopeless: pious and simple, brought up in a world where the inside of each bedroom in the village was whitewashed afresh during the weeks of Lent. Their bodies burning with love and need each for the other, they find themselves contracted to a sacred union that obliges them to a first coupling that must repudiate all lust. They walk to their bed like thieves, taking care to avoid the other’s eyes.
(And then—as they stand before their marriage bed, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, not touching, not daring to scoot apart, unsure whether to sit or lie, to undress themselves or the other, fully or partially—just then, there is a pause, a hesitation, exterior to the play, like a hole within the fabric of the theatre. Within it, Balthazar can feel the audience like a living thing. It is there in its noise; in the web of its nascent Smoke. He stands at the threshold between stage and auditorium, hidden from the audience by a wooden screen. Wait, he signals to his actors and stagehands. Let frustration breed. Let them think you are lost out there, have forgotten your lines; or rather, that you have remembered yourselves: actors, not bride and groom. It will give you material that you can shape; Smoke-fabric you can weave. And then—three breaths, four—he gestures: Now.)
And so: a storm breaks. Meister Lukas again, raining down a barrel of peas onto a sheet of metal. Rain as loud and hard as hail. The large mirror turns window, shows a smear of cloud approaching in a moon-bright sky. It is a crude trick, a painted scroll that can be drawn across the screen, slowly changing the scenery, bringing the cloud closer along with its curtain of rain. Not just any rain: Smoke-rain, unmistakable now to those who have stood like these two, witnessing its first approach. Soon it fills the whole of the window and—a fine effect this, perfected after much trial—begins to patter as real water onto the stage at the bride’s and groom’s feet, then soaks their fronts, until that peasant shirt clings to his broad chest and her sodden dress discloses the woman underneath its virgin folds.
Next, the Smoke starts, pumped from beneath the stage through a crack in the floorboards, near enough the mirror-window so as to seem to blow in from outside. It isn’t real Smoke but a chemical concoction. Harmless and scentless, it billows around bride and groom. They breathe it; she utters a moan; he turns to her, cradles her cheek in his palm, bends down to her in a kiss that is almost a bite (a touch too much perhaps, an actor getting in the way of the pure language of the gesture).
And just like that their own Smoke—real Smoke—leaps out of bride and groom, thick and many-hued. It is caught on the draught of two hand-operated fans and carries out into the audience in rich tendrils of emotion. The lights die, are cut off all at once; the bed squeaks, as the bride slams the groom’s weight into its mattress.
Then: nothing. Not the sound of their lovemaking, which would push the scene into farce; no whispers or giggles or sweetly struck strings. Rather, a blank silence falls to be filled by the audience members themselves. The drama is theirs now, played out in their heads; on their skin, and in the air that binds them. It is guided by two well-positioned Shapers and contained by Etta May, the troupe’s Soother who is also in charge of the bell. Ten seconds, Balthazar has instructed her, fifteen at most, and shorter if the Smoke starts to taste wrong.