I'm Glad About You by Theresa Rebeck Read Free Book Online

frankly, to worry about whatever the casting assistant might or might not think. The guy in the jeans and baseball cap was hanging in the doorway again, smiling at her. “Hi, Alison,” he said, as if there was no one on earth he would rather see. “I’m John Maynard, I’m directing this week’s episode. Thanks for coming in.”
    “Oh, thank you! I mean, thanks for seeing me,” Alison replied, fighting her Midwestern impulse to seem overly grateful for absolutely everything. It didn’t matter; no one was really looking at her anyway. “This is our producer, Dan Chapek, the writer of the episode, Bill Wheedon, and our casting director, Leslie Frishberg.” John the director rattled off the names quickly, as if he assumed she would have no need to remember any of them, but Alison glued the names into her memory nonetheless, nodding quickly to each face at the table with what she hoped was professional charm. The casting director, the only other woman in the room, glanced up from the sheets in front of her.
    “Ryan Jones from Abrams is representing you?” she asked, blunt.
    “He’s hip-pocketing me for now.”
    “I just saw him yesterday, and he didn’t mention you were coming in.”
    “You’ll be reading with Michael,” the director noted, uninterested in the casting director’s clear if unspoken suspicions. Whether or not Alison and her friend had figured out a clever way to sneak her past the gatekeepers of the casting office to get her a reading for this unbelievably minor part, it wasn’t worth the time it would take to call her out on the lie. The crowd of actors waiting in the hallway was, in fact, enormous, and growing by the second. They had to move this ship along.
    “Great,” Alison nodded, turning her attention to Michael in the corner. He was sitting next to a camera on a tripod, and he looked bored out of his mind.
    “Can you slate yourself?” he asked rhetorically. She nodded. “Good. Whenever you’re ready.” There was no friendly eye contact or extraneous banter. He tapped a button on the camera and flicked his gaze at her, impatient before she had given any cause for it.
    “Alison Moore,” Alison stated clearly for the camera. Bored Michael looked down at the half page of type in front of him.
    “She saw something? That’s what she says,” he read, and then he glanced up at her, expectant. After all the waiting and hours of obsessive preparation Alison was not, in fact, ready. The stupid jerk had read the two lines together, as if it were one person’s line instead of two lines, from two different characters. It threw her for a moment, and she paused, trying to figure out why her cue wasn’t the same line she had had memorized. Then when she realized what he had done she had to take a moment to reconfigure how she was going to respond and just say the first line. It was just some people, people were running , she thought, but that wasn’t it, she knew the rhythms better than the words themselves by this point and those were off; she had momentarily forgotten the lines. And now the whole thing was going too fast. It was only two lines. How could she make two lines work? How on earth can you be an actress , she thought, when you only have two lines? No wonder her mother thought she was a moron. She was living like a hermit, or a rodent, in a hellish little apartment and spending her whole life worrying about two mediocre lines for an audition for a bad scene in a mediocre cop show. At least in Seattle she was actually acting. Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and even some Molière, plus all those bad readings by hapless playwrights, which were actually about something even if they were unintelligible. She hadn’t been making enough money to feed herself in Seattle, but she was getting out there and putting some art into the world, even if it was bad art. Now she was doing—what was this, anyway? She felt a tremor run through her body. She had given up everything for this, and