A BRIGHT RAY OF DARKNESS

A movie star who has suffered total tabloid humiliation plays Broadway for the first time.

In a recent interview, Hawke explained that his fifth book is "everything I've learned about the theater in the past 35 years of work jammed together as if it all happened in one fictional production." It also seems to contain everything he's learned about living in the klieg-lit fishbowl of celebrity. At 32, William Harding has been a screen idol since he was a teenager; he begins rehearsal for his first Broadway role—Hotspur in Henry IV—on the heels of a meltdown in his personal life. His marriage to a beloved rock star has publicly imploded after the exposure of his brief affair with a woman in South Africa; he's living in a Manhattan hotel, seeing his children only in small doses, and experiencing venomous hatred from just about everyone he meets. The novel follows him from the first rehearsal to the closing of the show, in which he is directed by and plays alongside giants of the profession, giving him a complete education in the complexities of acting for the stage. "When a performance is going well there is no thought," he explains, "you are not amused at how well you might be "acting"—there is no you....The outside world tends to celebrate the most trivial superficial aspects of an actor's life, lifting their personality to a plastic God-like status, but the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality." Or as the director puts it, "There are only two kinds of Shakespeare productions: ones that change your life, and ones that suck shit." It's not just this "Irish Buddha" director character who is prone to long, profound speeches; poor William gets them everywhere he turns, from an alcoholic playwright in a bar, from an actor friend with a bag of cocaine in the back of a limo, even from his mother.

A brilliant insider's account of the joys and terrors of acting, the trials of celebrity, and the secrets of Henry IV.