Page 40 of The Drama King

I nodded, moving into position as the current performer reached his climactic moment. The audience applauded politely as he exited, and a tech crew member quickly reset the minimal staging for my piece. A single spotlight would follow me, creating an intimate circle of light against the darkened stage.

"Good luck," the senior whispered as he passed me.

Then the stage manager was giving me the signal, and I was walking into the blinding lights, my heartbeat thundering in my ears. For a terrible moment, I thought I might actually faint. Thefaces in the audience blurred, the script I'd rehearsed for weeks vanishing from my mind.

But then something strange happened. As I took my position center stage, the panic didn't recede so much as transform. It crystallized into something sharper, clearer. A heightened awareness that made every sense more acute. I could feel the collective gaze of the audience, smell the lingering sandalwood that clung to my skin, hear my own breathing amplified by the theater's perfect acoustics.

And suddenly, I understood exactly how to play this. Not as Kate's genuine submission, but as a performance within a performance - a woman saying what she must to survive in a world that demands her subjugation, each word carefully calibrated, each gesture a masterclass in subtext.

I lifted my head, meeting the audience's gaze directly, and began with quiet intensity.

"Fie, fie, unknit that threat'ning unkind brow, and dart not scornful glances from those eyes to wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor."

My voice carried a subtle edge, as if each word cost me something precious. I moved across the stage with deliberate grace, my body language suggesting both compliance and coiled resistance.

"It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads, confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds, and in no sense is meet or amiable."

The theater fell silent as I continued, my delivery walking a razor's edge between sincerity and irony. Each line became a question rather than a statement, challenging the audience to consider whether Kate truly believed these words or was simply playing the game required of her.

"A woman moved is like a fountain troubled - muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty." I paused, letting the ugliness ofthe comparison hang in the air. "And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty will deign to sip or touch one drop of it."

In the front row, I caught a glimpse of Dorian's face, and what I saw there stopped my heart. Gone was the calculated cruelty, the predatory amusement. Instead, his expression showed something I'd never seen before - recognition. As if he suddenly understood that I was performing for him specifically, turning his attempt at dominance into my own commentary on power.

"Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign." The words should have been declarations, but I delivered them as a list of chains, each title another bar in a cage. "One that cares for thee and for thy maintenance; commits his body to painful labor both by sea and land."

I moved downstage, closer to the audience, my voice growing stronger but never losing that undercurrent of barely contained rage.

"Such duty as the subject owes the prince, even such a woman oweth to her husband." Here I smiled, but it was sharp as broken glass. "And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, and not obedient to his honest will - what is she but a foul contending rebel and graceless traitor to her loving lord?"

The questions hung in the air like accusations. Against whom, the audience couldn't quite tell.

"I am ashamed that women are so simple to offer war where they should kneel for peace." My voice cracked slightly on 'ashamed,' genuine emotion bleeding through the performance. "Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, when they are bound to serve, love, and obey."

Robbie's lighting shifted subtly, creating shadows that made me appear to fracture into multiple selves - the woman speaking, the woman listening, the woman judging.

"Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, unapt to toil and trouble in the world, but that our soft conditions and our hearts should well agree with our external parts?"

I let my hands trace the outline of my body, a gesture that should have been submissive but instead felt like an inventory of weapons.

"Come, come, you froward and unable worms!" The insult cracked like a whip across the theater. "My mind hath been as big as one of yours, my heart as great, my reason haply more, to bandy word for word and frown for frown."

This was the pivot, the moment where Kate revealed her true strength even as she claimed to surrender it. I delivered it with fierce pride barely disguised as humility.

"But now I see our lances are but straws, our strength as weak, our weakness past compare." I paused, letting the audience feel the weight of the lie. "That seeming to be most which we indeed least are."

The final lines I delivered directly to Dorian, finding his eyes in the darkness and holding them.

"Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, and place your hands below your husband's foot." I knelt slowly, ceremonially, but my eyes never left his face. "In token of which duty, if he please, my hand is ready, may it do him ease."

I extended my hand, palm up, in the classic gesture of submission. But the way I held it - steady, unwavering, almost like a challenge - transformed the offer into something else entirely. A dare. A threat wrapped in silk.

For several heartbeats, there was perfect silence. The kind that performers dream about, when an audience is so captivated they forget to breathe.

Then the applause began, scattered at first, then building to a thunderous wave. Someone in the back row stood, then another, until nearly half the audience was on their feet. I rose from mykneel with liquid grace, gave a deep curtsey that managed to be both perfectly proper and subtly mocking, and exited stage left.

Stephanie was waiting in the wings, her eyes wide with something between awe and vindication.

"Holy shit," she whispered, pulling me into a fierce hug. "You just turned the most problematic monologue in Shakespeare into a feminist fucking manifesto."