The Audition at Forty-Two

At forty-two, Carla discovered that she could still remember an entire speech she had learned at seventeen. What she could not remember was how to enter a room without first deciding whether she belonged in it.

The community theatre audition was upstairs in a building that also housed a dentist. She arrived twenty minutes early, walked past twice, then stood outside reading the notice about access through the side door as though it contained a difficult legal problem.

Her daughter sent a message: Have you gone in?

Carla replied: Looking for parking.

You went on the bus.

She put the phone away and opened the door.

A young volunteer gave her a form and pointed toward the waiting room. Three people sat inside. One was quietly reading. Another stretched his shoulders with professional seriousness. A woman in red shoes ate an apple and watched Carla attempt to find a chair that didn’t creak.

“First audition?” the woman asked.

“In a long time.”

“Mine too. Though the last one was only in June. Time’s subjective when you’re waiting.”

Her name was Joan. She had auditioned for five productions and been cast in two. Carla found these numbers reassuring until she realised Joan seemed cheerful about all five.

The play was a comedy about a family running a small hotel. Carla had read the script three times. The part she wanted belonged to the practical older sister, the one who kept the place working while everyone else announced intentions.

For most of her adult life Carla had been that person without an audience. She managed appointments at a veterinary practice, raised a daughter and became capable of identifying which noise the washing machine made when something expensive was about to happen.

She enjoyed parts of her life. That was what made admitting she wanted another part feel ungrateful.

At school she had acted in everything available. She applied to drama college, received an offer and declined it when her mother needed help after an operation. She said she would apply the following year. Instead she took a job, met her husband and found that a decision postponed often became a decision made.

The marriage ended five years earlier. Her daughter was now at university. Evenings had opened in front of Carla with an amount of space she had spent years claiming to want.

The director called her name.

There were three people at the audition table, a jug of water and a reading partner who looked kind. Carla introduced herself, stated the part she wanted and forgot the first line.

She had known it on the bus. She had known it while brushing her teeth. Now it had gone somewhere inaccessible.

“Take your time,” the director said.

Carla took a breath and began again. The speech came back. So did an old rhythm, a pleasure in hearing a sentence arrive exactly where she wanted it. For ninety seconds she was not trying to earn permission. She was doing a thing she knew how to do.

Then the director asked her to try it differently.

“Less annoyed,” he said. “She’s trying very hard not to show she’s hurt.”

Carla nodded. She gave almost exactly the same reading.

He made another suggestion. She tried to follow it and became so aware of trying that every line sounded carefully carried.

They thanked her. She left the room with her face burning.

Joan offered her the remaining half of the apple. Carla declined.

“How was it?”

“I used to be good.”

Joan considered this. “At taking direction?”

“At acting.”

“Sometimes those get introduced separately.”

On the bus Carla told her daughter it had been fine. That evening she found the old speech in a folder, read it aloud once and put it away. She did not want to become someone who spent the next twenty years performing evidence of who she had once been.

The email arrived on Thursday. They offered her the part of a hotel guest who appeared in three scenes. Joan had been cast as the older sister.

Carla read it while standing beside the practice printer. Around her, people continued discussing a dog that had swallowed something it ought to have respected from a distance.

She wanted to refuse immediately. If she waited, she might have to identify why.

That evening she called her daughter.

“They don’t want me for the part.”

“Do they want you for another part?”

“A small one.”

“How small?”

“Three scenes.”

“Do you want to act in three scenes?”

Carla disliked being interrogated by someone whose laundry still arrived home in a bag.

“I don’t know.”

“Then maybe find out.”

She accepted the role. She told herself it was temporary, a way to test whether she still enjoyed rehearsals. This sounded sensible and allowed her to avoid using the word disappointment.

At the first read-through, Joan greeted her as though her arrival had improved the evening. Carla felt briefly ashamed of having resented a woman whose principal offence was getting a part she could play.

The director was named Stephen. He had a patient expression and no patience for actors who arrived without pencils. Carla brought three. She was not going to fail administratively.

Her character, Mrs Bellamy, was supposed to be unbearable without realising it. Carla gave her a grand voice and a manner she had borrowed from a difficult client. The company laughed. Stephen asked her to do less.

“She’s funny because she thinks she’s being reasonable.”

“That’s how I’m playing it.”

“Then let the audience work a little harder.”

She went home angry. At ten, she opened the script again and read the scene without the voice. For the first time she noticed that Mrs Bellamy asked every question twice because nobody listened the first time.

At the next rehearsal she tried that instead.

Stephen looked up from his notes. “There she is.”

The words pleased her so much that she had to spend the bus ride home pretending otherwise.

Weeks acquired a new arrangement. Mondays and Thursdays belonged to rehearsal. She learned who needed a lift, which cupboard held the mugs and how long an argument about a fictional suitcase could reasonably continue.

She also learned to be bad at things in front of other adults. She missed an entrance. She stood in the wrong place. Once she delivered a line while facing a curtain, to the considerable enjoyment of a man waiting behind it.

Nobody concluded that she should leave.

Joan worked hard on the larger part. Carla saw her struggle with a scene she herself had thought easy. She watched Joan take a note, ask a question and try something that failed. Then try another thing.

“You don’t mind looking foolish,” Carla said one evening.

“I mind terribly. I just don’t find it a useful instruction.”

They began taking the same bus home. Carla told her about the drama college offer. Joan said she had once wanted to sing professionally, then worked in a laboratory for thirty years. Neither story became an accusation against the life that had happened instead.

Three weeks before opening, Stephen asked whether Carla could understudy the older sister. Joan had a family commitment that might take her away for one performance.

For a moment Carla felt the old part reach toward her. Then she looked at Joan, who was waiting for an answer without defensiveness.

“Yes,” she said. “Tell me what you need.”

Learning the role was harder than she expected. Lines she had once thought natural turned out to depend on where everyone else stood. She spent a Saturday afternoon in Joan’s kitchen, running scenes between bites of toast.

At the end, Joan said, “You could play this.”

Carla waited for the triumph she had imagined when the casting email arrived. Instead she felt gratitude and a little embarrassment at the memory of how fiercely she had wanted another woman’s absence.

“I like Mrs Bellamy,” she admitted.

“She’s insufferable.”

“I’m aware.”

Joan’s family arrangements settled. She would be there for every performance. Carla felt a small, honest disappointment and allowed it to remain small.

During the technical rehearsal the hotel desk jammed against the floor. A set change ran late. Someone misplaced the only functional telephone prop. Carla spent an hour waiting in costume, wondering how an activity she had chosen for pleasure could contain so much standing around.

Then her scene began. She stepped through the door, asked her first unreasonable question and heard the company laugh from the back of the room.

She was exactly where she had chosen to be.

On opening night her daughter arrived with two friends. Carla saw them in the foyer before going backstage and nearly began explaining that the part was smaller than they might expect.

Her daughter kissed her cheek.

“Don’t apologise before you’ve done anything.”

The performance was untidy in the ways live performances often were. One laugh arrived unexpectedly and covered a reply. A chair moved too far. In Carla’s second scene, another actor skipped a line that should have prompted hers.

For half a second she saw the empty space ahead.

Then she listened. Really listened, instead of searching only for her own cue. She asked the question her character would ask. The other actor answered, found the missing line and brought them back to the script.

Afterwards Stephen caught her by the corridor.

“Good recovery.”

“Thank you.”

She did not explain why it should have been better.

Her daughter met her outside carrying flowers wrapped in paper. Carla accepted them with both hands.

“You were awful,” her daughter said.

Carla stared.

“As a person. The woman. I wanted to hide behind the reception desk.”

“Oh.”

“Which I assume was the idea.”

Carla laughed so hard she had to sit on the low wall by the door. Her daughter sat beside her, pleased with the result.

After the final performance, the company stacked chairs and returned borrowed clothes. Carla hung Mrs Bellamy’s coat on a rail and found she was sorry to let it go.

Joan asked whether she would audition for the spring production.

“What part?” Carla asked automatically.

“They haven’t announced the play.”

For a moment Carla considered how she might avoid disappointment next time: choose something easier, prepare more carefully, want less visibly.

Then she folded her script and put it in her bag.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll audition.”

At home, the flowers stood on the kitchen table. Her daughter had washed the vase before leaving, an act so unusual that Carla initially suspected a concealed breakage.

She opened her calendar. Monday evening was empty again. She wrote rehearsal in pencil on the first Monday of spring, knowing the date might change and the part might be small and she might not be cast at all.

There was room on the page for that uncertainty. She left it there, beside the word she wanted.