Brian Tames The Lion
By DB
Part 2
“Pleased to meet you” he said.
She moved over to the sofa and sat down without looking at him.
Brian got up from his desk, moved over and sat.
Sylvia, without looking up, said “I’ve looked over this schedule of plays and I’m going to make some changes.”
“Oh?”
“Of course. What is A Pinch In Time?”
“It’s a farce”.
“Oh, really. Mr. Sim, perhaps they didn’t tell you. This is a serious, professional theatre company. We do classics and traditional plays and the very best of modern plays. We do not do farces.”
“We will this year.”
Sylvia looked up with a grim expression on her face and said “Absolutely not. Now if we do a comedy I suggest Noel Coward. Perhaps Present Laughter. Yes, that would be a good one.”
Brian was silent but he was thinking: This is going to be fun.
“And we won’t be doing Harvey. It’s a silly play. It has no substance to it.”
“It’s on the schedule. Our designer is working on it.”
“I don’t care. Have him do something else. Who is it, Jeffry?”
“No. Jeffry is no longer here,”
“Why not. I hope they didn‘t fire him. He was one of the best designers we had.”
“No Miss DeLanne, he took a job in Las Vegas. More money.”
“Poor Jeffrey.”
“He said he might come back to design the musical.”
“Musical?” Sylvia was visibly shocked. “WHAT MUSICAL? We don’t do musicals. What musical? I don’t see one listed here.”
“It’s under To Be Announced.”
“I see. Well I’ll pick another play. We don’t do musicals.”
(To be continued.)
3 comments:
A storm is a brewing.
This conversation resonated with me. I did hear a lot of conversations for about 12 years when Raymond was artistic director of Playwright's Theater which were similar. Raymond's lady villain, his business partner, used to specialize in deadly dialogues with Raymond. You could have lifted these conversations verbatim and put them in a play and had the audience hissing. You can imagine when Raymond walked away from everything one day and instructed her never to call him or communicate with him in any way again! I think she was impressed by what he gave up so sort of heeded him.
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