The reporters, if they are reporters, take a drink in sudden unison, as if choreographed. It strikes Edwin as strange, this Greek chorus of gesture, though he’s noticed that life with Father often feels staged.

When Father performed next, in the role of Richard III, a mob awaited him, creating such a pandemonium that he couldn’t be heard. He tried to communicate through placards—Grant Silence to Explain and Can Englishmen Condemn Unheard? The response was a continued din. Whistles blew, feet stamped, men shouted, women fainted.

The Wolves invaded the boxes. Driven back, they beat on the doors with their canes. Fisticuffs broke out and spilled into the street. Chairs and spectacles and noses were broken. The play proceeded briefly in pantomime, but eventually the company gave up and moved directly into the afterpiece, a farce in which Father did not appear. Father went home (to his wife, as Edwin now knows). The angry audience outlasted him by many hours.

Over the next week, though the number of Father’s supporters grew at each attempt, his detractors continued to shout him down. Roses from his supporters rained down on the stage, orange peels from the Wolves. Every show was an occasion for riot until, finally, at long last, rioting became a bore for everyone involved.

Father empties his glass. Another appears at his elbow. He says that, when finally able to perform, his interpretation of Richard was well received.

Modest Father! Surely Father’s Richard was a triumph. In fact, in London, Father has never ceased to be compared unfavorably to Kean. Rosalie would have known this, but Edwin doesn’t and wouldn’t believe it if he did. No role is so completely Father’s own as that of the murdering and murdered king. Over the course of his long career, he will play Richard 579 times.

This story has been changed from earlier renditions, less by Father’s artistry and more by context. When orange peels were the worst missiles being thrown, Father could make this story quite funny. But now it plays against the backdrop of the Astor Place riot in New York, a class war disguised as a disagreement over who was the better Shakespearean actor—the British William Charles Macready, representing the upper crust, or the American Edwin (for whom Edwin is named) Forrest, the workingman’s choice. The melee left some twenty to thirty people dead; no one knows the number with certainty. Scores more were injured. Many were bystanders, some children, shot by soldiers firing randomly into the crowd. Macready was forced to escape in disguise while Forrest’s followers tried but failed to burn down the hated Astor Place Opera House, built so that wealthy theater lovers wouldn’t have to mingle with the lower classes.