Triumph of Katie Bryne

Chapter One The girl sat on a narrow bench, center stage, her body bent forward, one elbow on her knee, a hand supporting her head. The thinker, deeply thinking, her body language seemed to convey. She was dressed very simply, boyishly, in a loose grey knitted tunic cinched by a black leather belt, worn with black tights and ballet slippers. Her long reddish-gold hair was plaited, the plaits wound tightly around her head, so that the finished effect was like a burnished-copper cap gleaming under the pinspot shining down. The girl's name was Katie Byrne and she was seventeen and acting was her entire life. She was about to act for her favorite audience an audience of two, her best friends, Carly Smith and Denise Matthews. They sat on straight-backed wooden chairs in front of the makeshift stage in the old barn which belonged to Ted Matthews, Denise's uncle. Both girls were the same age as Katie, and had been friends since childhood; all three were fellow members of the amateur acting group at the high school in the rural Connecticut area where they all lived. Katie had chosen to perform a speech from one of Shakespeare's plays at the school's upcoming Christmas concert. It was only two months away, and she had recently begun to rehearse the piece; Carly and Denise were also perfecting their chosen speeches for the same concert, rehearsing with her in the barn almost every day. Now, at last, Katie lifted her head, stared out into space, and focused her blue eyes on the back wall of the barn, as if she saw something visible only to herself. Taking a deep breath, she began. "'To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them. To die '" Abruptly, Katie stopped. She jumped up off the bench, walked to the edge of the stage, looked down at her friends. Shaking her head, she seemed unexpectedly uncertain of herself, she who normally had such confidence and self-possession. "I'm not getting it right," Katie wailed. "Yes, you are, and you're wonderful!" Carly cried, rising, stepping closer to the stage, the stage on which they had started to act when they were children. "Nobody does Shakespeare the way you do it. You're the best, Katie." "Carly's right," Denise agreed as she went to join Carly near the stage. "It's the way you act the words, say them. You make sense out of them, and there's never been a Hamlet like you." Katie burst out laughing. "Thanks for your compliment, Denny, but there were a few others before me ... Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton, to name a couple of them ... they were the greatest classical actors on the English-speaking stage, just as Christopher Plummer is the greatest classical actor today. And listen, I keep telling you, it's all to do with understanding the meaning of the words, the motivation and intention behind them. And also with punctuation, knowing when to run the words on without pause, and when to pause to breathe...." She let the sentence trail off, knowing now was not the right time to give Denise another acting lesson. Returning to the bench, she seated herself, adopted the thinker's position, which was comfortable for her, and sat ruminating for a moment or two. Whatever her friends said, however much praise they lavished on her, Katie knew that her performance was slightly off today. Her concentration was not what it usually was, and she wasn't sure why. Unless it was because she felt guilty at being here this afternoon. HerBradford, Barbara Taylor is the author of 'Triumph of Katie Bryne' with ISBN 9780385501408 and ISBN 0385501404.