Premiere: A Love Story (5 page)

He knew she was somewhere backstage now, he could feel her. He wondered if she’d stay back there for the entire rehearsal. Peter looked up from his notes again. She was going to try and avoid him—understandably so, but she wouldn’t be able to hide forever. Like it or not, they had a job to do.

Three actors were now onstage. Two young men, one with very dark hair and the other with light brown, and a young woman with long dark hair tied into a tail low on her neck. She was several inches shorter than the boys, and they were all laughing as she stood on one of the boxes to achieve eye contact.

Spencer called the rehearsal to order.

“Okay, let’s take it again from the top of Phillip’s dream sequence. This is the first time the audience gets to be inside Phillip’s head. It’s only a dream, but in Phillip’s mind it’s real, so we need to bring it to the audience.”

“Jacob,” he said to the actor with the almost black hair, the one that looked like a young Peter, “remember that Phillip has known Sally his entire life, so there’s history that we need to see, but there’s also something new. Do you get what I’m saying?”

Jacob nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets, testing out the physicality he would need to play young Phillip.

“Great. Let’s give it a try from the top.”

Sam stood in the wings and wondered if Peter had had a hand in the casting. The young woman playing Sally looked so much like her. She pulled the three actors’ headshots out of a folder Candice had given her.

Minka Randolph, from Los Angeles, had been cast as Sally. Sam looked at her photograph. She had big brown eyes, even Sam’s freckles. Christ, Minka could be Sam’s younger sister.
Unreal.
Minka was now in the middle of a scene with the young actor.
What was his name again?
Sam sifted through the file once more. Jacob Pratt was obviously playing Phillip. He too was a dead ringer for Peter back in the day. Wow, was this a damn autobiography because the actor standing next to Phillip, eating an apple, could he be Grady’s long lost son?

The three of them, well their actor counterparts, stood onstage, and Sam couldn’t look away. Grady’s character, Greg in the play, turned and exited stage left, right past Sam. The other two stood lost in each other’s eyes. Both still holding scripts but managing to look nervous and awkward, hearts racing and full of something Sam recognized, but hadn’t felt in a very long time. They were terrific actors. When Sally touched Phillip’s face, Sam’s heart jumped. It was as if she was right there.

Sally said, “I never realized your eyes had that little dark brown part. I guess this is the first time I’ve been this close, I thought they were just green.”

Phillip nodded and let out a deep breath. Sally closed her eyes and grinned.

“Mmm . . . your breath always smells like Life Savers.”

Sally opened her eyes and Phillip moved closer. Sam’s hand came instinctively to her chest, she could not breathe. Her heart was clinging to the actors, and she felt a pull toward a time when what she and Peter felt was possible.

“Okay, hold it,” Spencer said jumping back on the stage.

“Let’s go back three, no four lines. I need you both to make your way further downstage during those lines, so you end up,” he took three large steps downstage and looked back at them, “here by the Lifesaver part. Let’s try that again.”

Sam sat in a folding chair in the darkness, put her hands to her warm cheeks, and told herself she was being ridiculous.

What the hell was this scene? A dream?
She knew Peter was only giving out the play in pieces, but maybe she needed to read the whole damn thing. Exactly what story was Peter going to tell all of their friends and family? Sally, Phillip, and Greg? Those weren’t exactly names meant to disguise, were they?
The Life Savers, he put the Life Savers candy in there?
Was any of this fiction? There was no way their story was a feel-good play—more like a cautionary tale. Sam wasn’t sure how their story would even make good theater. No one likes a sad ending, especially not in Pasadena.

Her phone vibrated with a text from her brother asking if she wanted to go on a blind date with an actor from one of his films. Sam sighed, slid her phone back in to her back pocket, and decided she needed to leave. She had solved some problems, taken a few pages of notes. She’d seen enough to tell Candice things were under control. There were suppliers to contact, union reports to file. She didn’t have time to spare exploring Peter’s childhood dreams, if that’s what this was. She had dreams of her own now, and Peter was not part of them anymore. With one last look onstage, Sam wrote her mobile number on the Dry Erase board, checked in with Chris (who was still moving scenery), and went through the green room to make her exit.

Chapter Five

T
he production was off and running. The actors and the crew were all adjusting well, with the exception of Julie. Along with Spencer, Peter had brought Julie, his neurotic, psychic, Queen of Fixing-All-Things-With-Superglue, stage manager. Julie was a handful, she was actually a pain in the ass, but she never missed a thing, and, according to Spencer, she had no life outside of the theater. That was maybe a little sad for her, but a huge benefit for him. Sam considered herself detail oriented and maybe a bit of a worrier, but Julie started stressing about things long before anyone else had even begun to think about them. Peter and Spencer fed her chamomile tea and chose to focus on her sheer brilliance at putting up any show, because otherwise she was just plain crazy.

Peter was very protective of his play. Act I had been given out at the first rehearsal. Subsequent scenes would be distributed one week before they were to be rehearsed. Spencer was the only one with the entire script. The cast and crew were given a pretty detailed overview, but Sam imagined it was tough for the actors to put together a character without all the lines. It was unorthodox, but no one seemed to mind. The cast and crew appeared thrilled at the opportunity to work with Peter. Sam had majored in acting, she’d worked in professional theaters for years, and she was well versed in the artistic temperament. Peter wrote a one-act at UCLA that had literally five lines of dialogue. It had received rave reviews, but it was a huge risk. Apparently Peter liked risk as long as he could hide behind a script.

Relegated to watching the scenes as they played out, Sam observed intently every chance she had, just to find out the story, Peter’s version of their childhood. So far, she was intrigued. His dialogue was real and he conveyed so well what it was like growing up in their little world. Peter showed the joy and the pain of his own childhood with such eloquence.

They were starting to block scenes with the three friends: Sally, Phillip, and Greg. Sam was a little confused because the Sally character seemed to be a bit of a priss. If she was Sally, Peter had definitely taken artistic license, or maybe he saw her as the type of girl who would send poor Phillip back into the house to change into a more appropriate jacket.
I never did that,
she thought and then reminded herself this wasn’t her life.

Spencer began walking through what looked like a high school scene. Rolled up script pages in his back pocket, his hands were flailing around showing the three principals how he wanted the hall scene entrances to go. Sam was backstage, sitting near Julie, who was at her podium barking orders into her headset before calling for a ten-minute hold while they fixed the lighting cues. She ripped off her headset in a huff, releasing her blonde, frizzy hair. Sam feigned sympathy as Julie plopped herself down into her chair as if the weight of the world was sitting right on top of her.

“You okay, Julie? Maybe it’s time for some tea?” Sam laughed a little to herself.

“No, I’m fine.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“I would give up my right arm if Gordon could get his lighting together. I mean, you’d think this was the first damn time he’s done this? When we worked on that revival of
All the Way Home
—did you see that one? Oh, of course not, you live here. Sometimes I forget where I am. Anyway, he pulled the same shit with that one. He’s so unorganized. Lighting guys are usually meticulous, yeah not Gordon. He’s trying to drive me crazy.”

“I’m sure that’s not it. You’re doing such a wonderful job and everything is ahead of schedule. It’ll work out.”

Sam tried to appease her. A calm and collected stage manager meant a happy cast and crew. Sam would stroke Julie’s ego all day long if that’s what it took.

“Sure, right now we’re ahead, but you know how these things can turn, Sam. I need this to go perfectly for Peter. He’s so . . . so damn brilliant and this needs to be right. I think he’s nervous about this one. Hometown, saving the theater, you know.”

She pumped tea from the little Thermos tied to her podium with a yellow bungee cord and yelled across the stage to some poor stagehand: “Stop! Just stop. You cannot run those cords through there. Back it up!”

He did as she instructed and looked like a bunny caught trying to cross a four-lane freeway.

“So, you grew up with our Peter,” she said, sipping her tea.

“I did. We like to think of him as our . . .”

Appease,
Sam reminded herself.

“Yes, yes, I grew up with
your
Peter.”

“This is a cool little town. It’s so relaxing. Your food is pretty bad, but Peter always tells me I’m a New York food snob.”

She let out an odd pseudo-laugh that told Sam Julie didn’t laugh much.

“Do you see yourself in any of this? In the play? I mean what you’ve seen so far?”

Sam was caught off guard and looked at Julie’s crinkled little nose as she tilted her head and waited for Sam to respond. Was she serious? It was obvious Julie had no idea what “her Peter” was to Sam, and there was no need to share.

“Oh well, not especially. Peter and I were good friends, but the play seems mostly about him. You know, at least semi-autobiographical, his experiences, so . . .”

“Good friends? Christ, are you Sally? We’ve all, all of us from New York that is, been trying to figure out who he based her on. She’s so vivid and clear. She must be someone in this town. You’re the only one of his female friends so far . . .”

“Is that your headset going off?” Sam asked quickly, trying to change the subject.

“Shoot,” Julie put her headset back on, and Sam was saved. Julie waved her off and began barking at Gordy. Sam slipped away to the side stairs and walked down to sit in the front row corner. Worst seat in the house, but it was quiet and Sam needed to finish the day’s notes for Candice.

A few minutes later, Julie and Gordy were toe-to-toe onstage, still arguing while Spencer and Peter looked on in exhaustion. Rounding out the New York crew, quite literally because he was a big boy, was Gordon. Peter had met him through Julie. Gordon and Julie had actually dated at one point, which, according to Spencer, was a huge disaster. Since their breakup about a year ago, Julie had not stopped yelling at him, and Gordon seemed to be eating his feelings. Peter apparently didn’t care because Gordy—as everyone but Julie called him—was “an artist with light.” That’s the title Peter had given him in an article Sam read a week before they arrived.

“He took forever and always had powdered sugar in his beard, but no one lit a show like Gordy,” Peter had added. The New York Times went on to say that the three of them, Spencer, Julie, and Gordy, were Peter’s team, his backbone. They had started together when Peter was still in theaters with leaky ceilings and broken house seats, and he had insisted on them when he went to Broadway. Now they had agreed to return home with him.

Gordy was pointing to his lights and trying to explain the difficult angle to Julie, when Spencer called it quits: “Thanks everyone, that’ll do it for tonight. We’ll pick up right here tomorrow. Julie, please make note of area that’s still giving us trouble.”

Julie nodded and hurried off while Spencer collected his things and talked to Peter, who was on his third or forth coffee at this point. Black, three sugars.
Funny the things you remember
, Sam thought. She closed her notes, grabbed her purse, and walked back toward the lobby. Peter made his way through a row of seats; she saw him out of the corner of her eye. He was wearing a shirt she had given him for his birthday when they were in college. She would recognize it anywhere. It was orange, his favorite color. Plaid flannel with patches on the elbows.
That shirt is five years old, why wear that shirt? Is he doing this crap on purpose?

“Sam, I want to talk to you for a minute.”

“Right now? I should get going.”

They’d been doing well, and it was late. Late and Peter’s rumpled, birthday-present shirt were not a good combination for her right now.

“If this is about the paint, I already talked to Spencer and I’ll have the samples for him in the morning, but . . .”

“It’s not about the paint. I need to, we need to talk.”

His eyes changed, and Sam knew in an instant what he wanted to talk about. It was easier if she kept moving. She wasn’t sure why they needed to talk now, things were fine. Almost two weeks had gone by, and they were making things work as colleagues. In fact, despite her past being played out every day on that stage and the realization that her nagging question—”why”—would never be answered, Sam was proud of how professional she’d been.