Eli has no business sitting at the table between the mezzanine and the wide fan of the orchestra seats. This table is meant for designers, like Roscoe.
Most of all: it’s meant for the director.
Leopold insisted they fling the auditions wide open, so the Aurelia is overrun with what feels like every actress in New York who either is a teenager or thinks she might be able to pass for one. Eli knows that this is only a tiny fraction of the girls who sent in video auditions. She can’t imagine what it was like to weed through those, to tell so many girls that their talent and their prettiness and their dreams weren’t enough. Which is why she’s the light-board op, not the casting director.
The current redhead wraps up her monologue. There’s a lull between girls, which gives Eli a minute to dig out the food she brought from home. Eli keeps one Tupperware for herself and hands the other to her boss. Roscoe takes it with a wide-lipped smile. He gets so busy thinking about the lights that he forgets to eat. Almost forgets to breathe. That’s why Eli is here today: to help Roscoe. To take care of him, a little. He is lighting god and first-grader and nothing in between.
Leopold Henneman rattles out of his seat. He paces down the aisle and then right back. He hunches over the table with a pen, working his way through a pile of headshots. He draws a slow, deliberate X over each girl’s face.
His assistant, Meg, gathers the papers quietly and walks them over to the trash. As usual, she’s brisk and blond and mostly silent, and does whatever needs to be done.
Leopold uses two fingers to wave the casting director to his side. “I was under the impression you knew what I wanted for Echo,” he says in a low voice. “Was I unclear in some way?”
Eli tenses every muscle. In her family, if someone has a feeling, they all hear about it. None of this pinched whispering. Theater people are usually loud, which is part of why Eli loves them.
The assistant stage manager leads another actress out from the wings. There is a snicker of paper as her résumé is passed. Eli doesn’t even look down. She’s painfully aware of how skimpy her own résumé looks. Eliza Vasquez, nineteen years old, with a string of off-off-off-Broadway hits under her belt. Follow-spot operator. Light-board operator. Lighting designer, but only once. At some point Leopold is going to decide she’s not good enough to be here.
And then what?
Eli can’t let herself think about that. Thank God, or whoever is up there in the flies, the girl onstage is a very good distraction. Eli has watched every one of these actors and thought about how to clothe them in light and shadow.
This new actress Eli has to adjust to. She is already better. She is already more.
It’s about how she inspects the curtains. She sticks to them, lingering in their heavy shade, running a finger over their infinite redness. It pushes the Aurelia’s beauty to the front of Eli’s brain.
The girl’s smile is crooked in the best ways. Her hair hangs to her waist, a warm shake of cinnamon, eyebrows a few shades darker. About thirty white girls in a row have read for Echo: it’s not exactly Hamilton up there. But this actress becomes the first one in hours that Eli can see, instead of skimming over with tired eyes. And the way she looks at those curtains — Eli thinks, for a second, she might climb them.
Eli steals a glance at Leopold, to see if he notices the difference. He’s still pouring quiet words into the casting director’s ear. Eli can’t help thinking about Hamlet — wasn’t somebody poisoned through the ear? Not a good way to go.
Leopold puts a hand on the casting director’s shoulder. She nods and sinks back into her seat. Eli gets the feeling that she won’t be doing much casting today.
The girl onstage leaves the curtains behind, squares her feet, and says her name.
Zara Evans.
Then she launches into the act 1, scene 2 speech. The one that Echo spits at her parents before leaving the kingdom.
Echo and Ariston.
God, Eli hates this play.
Or maybe she just spent too much time with it, the way she did with Hannah.
They met during Eli’s first show in the city, and Hannah pulled Eli in with all that eyeliner and lava-soft kissing. She was the one who convinced Eli to move to the city and chase a full-time career as a lighting designer. Being with Hannah was being on the verge of every good thing. And then one morning over diner pancakes, it was done, before Eli even had time to pour the syrup.
Zara Evans is halfway through the monologue, and Eli should be falling asleep, but she’s not. Actor voices are usually sanded, smooth, powerful. Zara’s is garden-variety sweet. A little on the breathy side. Sometimes she takes a step forward, then back, a spiky dance that no partner would be able to follow. What she lacks in perfection she makes up for in honesty.
“I would live in this home and then the home of a man
Of your choosing. This Ariston. Your Ariston.
I would touch without feeling,
Kiss without taste.”
The girl is digging these words up, dredged in fear, glowing with possibility. It makes Eli want that feeling back, the one she had with Hannah. But now she’s older. Wiser. She knows what’s waiting on the other side of that feeling. She’s permanently, painfully aware of how it ended with Hannah. Not in death, like it did for Echo.
But it still wasn’t pretty.
She looks down the table and finds the whole crew staring. Even Roscoe is staring. Are they having the same sort of flashbacks? Eli can’t imagine Roscoe in love. She can barely imagine him tying his shoes.
Zara Evans ends on a trembling note.
No one claps.
Eli knows the monologue was good, but she also knows how little that matters when it comes to casting. Who’s beautiful? Who’s connected? Who does the public want to see smeared across the Arts section for months? There are parts of this that aren’t magic at all, cruel parts that balance out
the pretty.
Eli takes out her Leatherman, not because she needs a multipurpose tool, but because she’s developed a habit of flipping the knife blades when she’s nervous. Let this girl stay, she thinks. A callback, at least. Because Eli has fallen a tiny bit in love. Not the whole feeling: she’s not a lunatic. But the first piece is there, a sliver of brightness that makes the rest of the moon inevitable.