The Fourth Wall by Barbara Paul Page B

much of it was required for the amount of mess that was made, where it was bought. Did the ax blows indicate a right-handed or left-handed person. It looked as if Sergeant Piperson had been right about one thing—it was impossible to do that big a job without leaving some sort of calling card.
    I was now the subject of the same kind of intense investigation earlier given Sylvia Markey and Ian Cavanaugh. There was no doubt in Sergeant Piperson’s mind that killing the play had been the prime object all along. Who would be hurt most if Foxfire closed? Not Gene Ramsay; he had two other plays running and was in no danger of starving. Not John Reddick; a play he’d directed last season had only recently closed and he’d just started work on a new one. An investigation of the play’s financial backers had turned up nothing of interest. The actors would be hurt to a certain extent; New York always has a thousand times as many actors as it has roles for them to act. The crew people could find new jobs more easily than the actors, but eventually they would all move on to other things. So in the end it came back to me. A big hunk of my life was in Foxfire , bigger than anyone else’s. And there’d be no weekly check for groceries until I had a new play in production.
    The cliché speaks of someone’s life being an open book; well, mine certainly was now. Sergeant Piperson did a job on me, all right—he didn’t leave me a single secret. He dug up things I hadn’t thought about in years, people I’d known, plays I’d worked on, organizations I’d belonged to. At first his suspicions were directed toward my ex-husband, even though I hadn’t seen the man for ten years. But it turned out that on the day the set was wrecked he’d been in a clinic in Phoenix getting a hair transplant. Next Sergeant Piperson zoomed in on a man I’d lived with for six years, but he had been attending a workshop-seminar at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Piperson obviously wanted to uncover a sexual motive; I hoped he wasn’t too disappointed.
    But it wasn’t just the police. Newspaper and television reporters nearly drove me mad; eventually I just locked myself in and didn’t go out at all. I knew interest would wane before too long; Foxfire ’s problems would soon be replaced by some new sensation. But for a few days there during Christmas week I felt like screaming. The other Foxfire people were being harassed too; we were all curiosities, something to gossip about. Nobody was talking much, except Carla Banner, the most-quoted member of the company. Carla hadn’t yet learned that you don’t have to answer a question simply because somebody asks it.
    In realistic theater there is a convention known as the fourth wall. It is a tacit agreement between playwright and audience that what the audience is looking at on the stage is the room of a house from which one wall has been removed. Those within the three-walled room go about their business, revealing the intimacies of their private lives to the unseen but all-seeing audience. It is a convention first brought into prominence by Ibsen’s parlor dramas, but it also gave rise to the term “peephole theater” because of its spying aspect. It works only for plays in which all the action takes place within a confined area—there’s no fourth wall convention in Shakespeare, for instance. But in a larger sense the fourth wall works as a metaphor for all theater: we are observers of other people’s lives.
    I mention this convention now because I couldn’t shake the feeling that a fourth wall had been torn away from my life, leaving me exposed and vulnerable. I don’t mean the police and the curiosity seekers; they were annoying as hell, but in the long run that’s all they were—an annoyance. No, I mean the man who was doing this to me, who sat out there in the safe, darkened