The Accidental Playwright After

Note: this story was originally published on 11 December 2023, on my Substack newsletter, The Traveller’s Literary Supplicant.

The Accidental Playwright After

By Christopher Deliso

Amy had never meant to be a playwright; it had merely come out of a roguish suggestion from her husband who, like her, was an ordinary physicist. And, both having been so employed since well before such expertise was considered fashion-worthy under society’s bright lights, well before the masses had marveled over the time it might take a galaxy to be born or die, they were both likewise too humble to attend her play’s premier.

Well, that’s not exactly true, perhaps, for they had flirted with the idea. The production’s flamboyant director, Danny, had begged them to attend: they might gaze like lazing lions from the front row, even if the playwright herself did not want to come up on stage to receive a bouquet of flowers afterward. Indeed, Danny too had skin in the game; it was also to be the director’s own first showing at that little seaside town’s college theater, and he thus sought warm bodies to reinforce his front line.

Danny had already irritated the lighting director with odd effects and signals requests that, when rebutted, were uselessly explained according to the anonymous playwright’s background in the hard science of theoretical physics, the behavior of atoms and time-space and many other things that Danny could not quite communicate, being unable to understand them himself… no question, Amy’s play was a hard nut to crack.

She was flustered by the overheard griping and feared for the failure to come. Watching the final round of rehearsals with dread from the back row, as requested, unacknowledged as the author, Amy wondered whether the actors would not but flub and fumble their lines; she conceded it likely the play would be pronounced dead on arrival, at its apportioned hour.

But at least her name would not be on it; unlike with a scientific paper, the arts at least indulged her desure for anonymity. Still, despite the author’s unusual antipathy to fame, Danny was happy to take the project on. He saw it as a good enough trial work, revolutionary, even… and such a backstory, too! When Danny imagined how he would narrate this improbable backstory privately among the huddle of college benefactors and administrators later- well, it was clear, to him at least, that it it would only strengthen the overall budget for bigger and better productions to come.

“But, you could just stand in the side-stage area in the back and watch from there,” Amy’s husband replied that night. “No one will see you, and Danny will be happier. You’ll be happier too, knowing if it was received like you expected. I’ve read of other playwrights using this technique in similar close situations.”

Amy protested, but realized her husband was right. She did want to know how an anonymous theoretical physicist’s experimental play would be received; and she knew that one had to be present to know for sure- that simply seeing a recording or other digital replay of the event would not suffice, as one could not smell the relative ardor of sweat, or feel the crowd energy that prickled sweaters with static electricity through an emotionless flatness of a screen…

Danny the direector, of course, was delighted to hear this compromise offer. Thirty minutes before the play was to kick off, he sat the playwright safely side-center on an upturned crate, a big body in which costumes and uniforms were usually interred, well behind the liminal burgundy curtain between the worlds of the observers and the observed, to which Amy established herself as a third and complementary world… she saw the knotted hung rope running down from the scaffolding rig, tied at the bottom to a heavy sandbag. The playwright could see the players nervously warming up, but only a portion of the crowd setting in for the play… She felt her own excitement rise with the theater’s temperature, as the stage lights came on and the little arena came alive, a portion of the audience still trickling in and on their feet, removing coats as the curtain rose. Although she discounted it as an unoriginal observation, she realized that theaters do achieve a living nature unique to the encroachment, infractions, and relative neutrality of their audiences…

The performance began; the anonymous playwright officiated every utterance, judged every gesture, and in her mind, penalized every empty prolonged pause. But what she really wanted to take a closer look at, it seems, was the audience’s reaction to all the stimuli– scientifically, seeking out any relationship they might reveal to her own secret authorial intent.

Luckily or not, the crowd laughed when it was meant to, and held its breath when it should have, too; everything seemed in its right place and order, though much was left dangling. Nothing is revealed, Amy thought, with a certain insouciant grimness…

And so Amy felt a surging disappointment when the last act was done. The audience had responded as expected, and not caught on to her unstated intentions, and for this failure, she could not decide whether they were deficient as a theatrical audience, or as involuntary students of physics, or merely as humans. Then she thought perhaps it was actually the actors who had failed to convey the secret meaning of their parts, though it had never been entrusted to them to know…

She quietly slipped out, unseen and unknown, as the college’s giddy young players were merrily saluting one another and Danny was calling Amy’s name, in vain…

………….……..

“So how’d it go?” the husband said sleepily, from the end of the couch.

“The audience didn’t follow the play at all,” she brooded. “Of course, if the actors had interpreted their lines right- oh well, I guess I’m not meant to be a playwright, after”-

“Or maybe they’re a bunch of idiots, and you’re a fantastic playwright,” the husband jumped in. “Who knows? But what does it natter- you were telling me you hoped they didn’t get the point or catch on to your signals, anyway. That they would have to be super-geniuses…”

There was a pregnant pause as Amy sat beside him; she felt the sensation coming, but failed, in the end, to yawn. A false alarm.

“What if I had written the second part in that other way I was considering?” she persisted, as if arguing with herself. She ceased this contemplation, seeing her husband more successfully yawn. The contagion of the false yawn was, and is, a scientifically-noteworthy phenomenon of physics, one that will inevitably someday be gifted with its own equation…

The anonymous playwright observed that her husband was watching something she considered stupid on the miniature stage of his phone, and thus not paying her the attention her just-complete play should award her. She wondered, for the first time in a new light, why she had been inspired by what had possibly been his prank of a challenge, to write a play in the first place…

Without anger and now drained of her post-play embarrassment, Amy announced she was tired and retiring to bed.

“Uh huh,” came the reply. “I’m coming in a minute. I just got to see how this play ends.”

“You know how it ends!” she retorted, with the irritation of one possesssing definite knowledge. “It’s the same football game we were forced to watch at your father’s house on Thanksgiving!”

“It’s the two-minute warning!” the husband pleaded. “It’s about to be the last great play!”

“The last two minutes always takes fifteen!” she fumed.

“Only when it’s live! And when I watched it live, it was different… I didn’t know then about the center’s tell before the safety, on the fumbled snap in the end zone!” the husband replied excitedly. “Can you imagine? I was thinking to bet on it, too! I would have lost thousands! Totally rigged. Damn, dad was right. Football is so scripted.”

“Who cares? You said you’d stop talking about that!” scolded the new playwright, suddenly drained of words herself. She exited stealthily left, vanishing down the dark hall, shutting the bedroom door behind her.

“You did a great job, man,” the husband murmured over-indulgently into his hand-held screen’s glowing scrum; and with that magnificent cadence (which only this storyteller could relate) the husband, in his own inscrutable way, jointly saluted the service of this tale’s thespian trinity, of wife, director and coach.