Cascade Read Online Free PDF Page A

it.
    “He usually kept it wrapped in protective cloths and stored in a dry vault, but on play nights, he’d set it on that.” She pointed to the red velvet plinth, turned pink and even white in patches. “It was one of the things that made this playhouse so famous.”
    “Who bought it?”
    “A collector, from Washington. He was building a Shakespeare library there.”
    “So it was the first one ever printed. Well, no wonder! And to think it was here, of all places.”
    “Well, no—‘first folio’ means it was part of the first printing, the very first run.”
    “Oh.”
    “But only about five hundred were part of that original printing, so they’re very rare, very valuable, especially in the condition my father’s was in. Only about a hundred are known to exist now. And if Shakespeare’s friends hadn’t published it, the plays would have been lost forever. Forever. Doesn’t the idea of something lost forever just make you want to weep? I don’t like the word
weep
but it’s the only word that will do.”
    “Oh, Dezzy.” For the first time Abby’s eyes were kind.
    “It’s like the thought of them tearing down all our buildings. How can you just flood a place as if it never existed?”
    “I don’t know, Dez.” Abby peered down the hall that linked the vestibule to the theater. It was still lined with the handsomely framed, autographedphotographs of the movie and stage stars who once flocked to Cascade because the summer stage gave them a certain cachet that Hollywood alone did not. These managed to impress her but not much else did, and when they entered the theater itself, Dez saw it, too, through Abby’s eyes: the weak light illuminating the rows of empty seats, the stark angular balconies, the bare wooden thrust stage. The rich tapestries that hung high on the walls, above the paneling and between the ceiling beams, seemed to have lost their luster.
    How different from how it once was. Her father had believed in reaching all the senses, so his productions were filled with color and noise and, when possible, with smells: smoke, perfumed oils, even hay bales reeking of horse urine.
    He had designed the theater himself: a carved wooden masterpiece with thrust stage, tiered balconies, and oak columns. Tudor paneling and amber lanterns lined the walls. A gilt lion roared down from the strap-work ceiling. Through the years, magazines and newspapers had made much of “New England’s bit of Elizabethan England,” stories that always recounted how William Hart visited Cascade as a young man, how he and his brother had just cast fishing lines into the river when a commotion in the reeds led them to save a three-year-old child, wandered off from her family. Years later, in 1906, a career in theater abandoned at thirty, he was eastern superintendent of J. P. Morgan’s New Haven Railroad and one day sat beside a young widow on a train. They got to talking, and, truth being stranger than fiction, she turned out to be the same Caroline Haywood whom William and Edward had saved from drowning. William was then forty-four years old, unmarried and restless, with enough personal wealth to leave the railroad and live a dream: to run a theater dedicated to producing the works of Shakespeare. He married Caroline and together they opened the Cascade Playhouse in 1908, the year the Interstate Commerce Commission began its infamous investigation of the finances of the New Haven Railroad.
    Fate had gotten William Hart out of the corrupt railroad in time; fatehad led him to Caroline. Fate would save the playhouse, he had believed. It simply had to.
    Abby dropped her head back to read the words printed in gilt on the ceiling above the gilded lion.
All the world’s a stage; And all the men and women merely players
. She wasn’t the kind of person who faked enthusiasm. “It’s so dead,” she said. “So dead you’d never—”
    The shriek of the train’s whistle drowned her out. William Hart always had to stage plays