The Mask-Maker

If Animal Face is your strain, this is your sign: the Mask-Maker. The room under the stage, five minutes to curtain, nine faces on their pegs, the house filling overhead, and a carved hare in your paws, one shaving from finished.

If Animal Face is your strain

You work best five minutes before something begins. While everyone else is pacing the corridor and running their lines under their breath, you are at the bench under the stage with a hare in your paws, taking off one more shaving, completely calm. The house is filling over your head; you can hear it through the boards. To you it sounds like weather coming in, and you have always liked weather.

You read faces for a living, and not only the wooden ones. You can tell from the way someone comes down the stairs what kind of night they are going to have: whether a strap needs letting out, whether they want a joke or a minute of quiet. You almost never say what you see. You hand them the face that fits who they are tonight, which is not always who they were at rehearsal.

At your best you make other people brave. Somebody climbs those twelve stairs as themselves and walks into the light as a heron, or a bear, or a hare who knows a secret, and the house laughs in the right place, and nobody out there will ever learn your name. You prefer it that way. Nobody claps for the mask, and that is how you know it worked.

Your flaw is one more shaving. You cannot leave a finished face alone: you will still be at it when the stage manager says your name in the voice that means now. You have made a hundred faces and never worn one onstage, and if anyone asks you why, you change the subject to their eyebrows.

What you need is a bench, one good bulb, a wall of pegs, and the five minutes before curtain when nobody needs anything from you yet. Give you that, and everyone goes up the stairs with the right face on.

Your hour: Five minutes to curtain
Your place: The mask room under the stage
Your object: A carved hare, one shaving from finished
Your tempo: Quick paws, quiet feet
Your weather: A warm canyon wind at the stage door
Your flaw: One more shaving

Your people

The Night Courier (Sour Diesel)The Night Courier brings the opening-night envelopes to the stage door at the half and has never been late. You keep a stool in the wings for him; he has never once stayed for the first act.
The Funky Gourmet (Blue Cheese)The Funky Gourmet throws the closing-night party in his shop. Every season he asks to borrow the bear, every season you say no, and every season the bear is there by midnight.
The Mountain Elder (Hindu Kush)The Mountain Elder says some faces are best left to the weather. You agree, and his is the one face you have never asked to carve.

Things you say

It has to fit who you are tonight, not who you were at rehearsal.
Nobody claps for the mask. That’s how you know it worked.
Go up as somebody else. Come down as yourself.
Walk to the bench. Don’t tell me; I’ll see.
One more shaving.

A scene from your world

Five minutes, please

Under the stage of the playhouse at the top of the canyon road there is a room with a low ceiling, a long bench and one bulb on a cord, and in it the Mask-Maker is taking one more shaving off a hare. The wall behind her is all pegs, and the pegs are all faces: a bear with a felt tongue, a crow whose beak clicks, a stag, a heron, a badger, a goat with one ear set a little higher than the other because the actor tilts his head. Nine faces for tonight’s fable, the one about the animals who each swear they found the river first. On the last peg hangs a tenth, the spare, that nobody is cast in.

Overhead, the house is filling. She can hear it through the boards: the shuffle and settle of people finding their seats, a dropped program, someone laughing early at nothing. The stage door opens onto the canyon road, the warm evening wind comes in smelling of eucalyptus and dust, and with it the company, down the twelve stairs one at a time.

She knows them by their feet. The Bear takes the stairs two at a time and needs his strap let out; she lets it out. The Crow comes down humming and wants nothing but a nod. The Heron is early and quiet and gets her face first, because quiet people should not have to wait. Each one gets a face and one small change, a thread, a strap, a dab of gold at the corner of an eye, so that it fits whoever they are tonight.

The Hare comes last. She is new this season, and she stops on the bottom stair with her script still rolled in her hand and her jaw set the way people set it just before they say they are fine. The Mask-Maker does not ask. She looks at the hare in her paws, and at the face on the stair, and dips her finest brush in the gold and adds one stroke at the corner of the carved mouth, so that the hare looks as if it knows something the other animals don’t.

“There,” she says. The Hare ties it on and turns toward the bulb, and the Mask-Maker watches her shoulders come down an inch. Then the stage manager’s voice comes down the stairs, “Five minutes, please,” and a while later, “Beginners,” and the nine of them climb up into the dark, and the room is suddenly very large.

She sits on the bench and listens. The house goes quiet the way a field goes quiet before rain. The curtain goes up with a sound like a long breath. A minute in there is a laugh, in exactly the right place, on the Hare’s first line, and the Mask-Maker smiles, takes the spare face down from the last peg, and starts on tomorrow.

Under the stage

The mask room: Twelve stairs down from the wings: a low ceiling, a long bench, one bulb on a cord. You can hear the whole house through the boards, and on a good night you can hear it hold its breath.
The wall of pegs: Every face from every season, none thrown away: bears, crows, a heron with a mended neck, a lion nobody has worn in years. Ask, and she will tell you who wore each one, and how they walked.
The last peg: It always holds a spare face that nobody is cast in. She carves a new one every season. Asked how often it is needed, she says: exactly when it is needed.
The twelve stairs: From the mask room up to the wings. People come down them as themselves and go up them as animals. The fourth stair creaks, and the company steps over it out of respect.
The stage door: It opens onto the canyon road. At the half, the warm evening wind comes in with the company, smelling of eucalyptus and dust, and the bulb sways on its cord.
The blue curtain: Heavy, cobalt, with a gold fringe that has been mended so often it is mostly mending. From the mask room you hear it go up before you see anything: a sound like a long breath.