♕ |[53]| The play's the thing

[had_not_lived]

Well... it looks like today's clear, so... Let's do the dress-rehearsal tonight, everyone? If that's all right... I know it's a little sudden, but with the curses...

And, as long as there isn't a curse... The performance of The Importance of Being Earnest will be this Friday, at seven p.m.!

Comments

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

As usual, Justin is in a corner. This isn't necessarily conducive to acting, but he's going over his lines once more. Not that it's hard to say "yes sir" and "no sir," but there are a few other lines, and when to say what is always a difficulty. Plus, being a corner minimizes socialization. After disappearing himself from the City for nearly a week, Justin isn't entirely ready to open himself to human contact.

Perhaps--perhaps--he'll work up the nerve to talk to the other actors. Rosella seems nice, and he has already spoken to Cain a few times over the network. And Neil, of course, is Neil.

Or perhaps he'll stay where he is.

[ooc: At school, but will tag about when classes finish up. ♥ ]

Rehearsal action; open

[primrosella]

Throughout rehearsals, Rosella has noticed that Justin tends to be one of the quieter members of the cast, and doesn't appear to be particularly inclined toward socializing with the others during the lulls in rehearsal. And for the most part, she's done her best to give him his space, just as she did for Todd when he was still overcoming his own shyness all those years ago.

But today he seems different somehow; sadder, or more brooding, or just generally more in need of a friend than usual. So once she is finished getting dressed in her costume, she retrieves a cookie and a napkin from the bag she brought with her and heads over to see him.

"Hello, Justin!" she says in as friendly a tone as she can manage, offering him the napkin-wrapped cookie with a smile. "How are you this evening?"

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

He looks up from the script ("No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself") rather quizzically, as if the words hello and Justin don't form an entirely coherent sentence. The look loses a good deal of its gravity thanks to the somewhat comical mustache Justin's wearing.

After a moment of analyzing the situation--yes, a pretty girl is talking to him, and no, there isn't someone else named Justin standing directly behind him--he returns her smile and accepts the cookie. "Rosella. Thank you." He sets the script aside and stands to talk to her properly, smoothing imaginary creases in his butler uniform. "I'm not-- ...I'm nervous. Slightly," Justin stammers. "And you?"

Rehearsal action; open

[primrosella]

"Well, tonight's a good night to be nervous, I should think," she answers brightly, twisting a little in place to make the skirt of her costume twirl about her legs, as though emphasizing the point. "After all, that's what dress rehearsals are for, aren't they? Giving us all the chance for a performance with no one watching, just to get all the last bits worked out?"

She pauses a bit, then grins in memory. "And goodness knows this one's already going much better than the last. At this point before the last play, we were all running around trying to fix our costumes to weather the midsummer snowfall, remember?"

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

"I suppose so," he replies, somber as an exceptionally dour mortician next to Rosella's effervescence. Nervousness seems to set well with her.

Justin actually smiles at the addendum, pleasantly surprised that Rosella remembers he was there, albeit in a minor role. And, of course, it was entertaining to watch everyone adjust their costumes to make them more weather-appropriate. "The fairies had the worst of that."

Rehearsal action; open

[primrosella]

The nice thing about living in a place like the City for so long--and really, for leading the sort of life she does outside of it--is that it's almost a relief to be nervous about something as simple as a play, rather than being eaten by wolves, or attacked by zombies, or married off to the hunchbacked son of a witch. Far better to worry about forgetting a line than what sort of mayhem a month like October might bring, too.

"I suppose you're right, but I certainly wasn't very pleased about pretending to fall asleep in the snow, whether I had a cloak on or not," she replies, playfully making a bit of a face at the thought. "Oh, but we did have fun, didn't we? And I'm sure this one will be just as much so. It's a wonderfully silly play, isn't it?"

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

Frankly, Justin would take several of the curses--not zombies or being eaten, perhaps, but some of the more mild ones--over being on stage, but Neil can be remarkably convincing when he wants to be. This isn't as bad as the last play, anyway, even without taking the sudden weather change into consideration. No worlds collapsed or lives ended during the first play; that bodes well for this one.

"That would have been uncomfortable," he responds agreeably. "It's... thought-provoking. The emphasis on the seriousness with which trivial things are treated and the satirical treatment of love..." Justin trails off, not quite sure how to end that sentence. "It's ironic that Wilde wrote farces when his own life was a tragedy."

Rehearsal action; open

[primrosella]

"Is it?" she asks, looking only mildly puzzled, but that's more to do with the fact that Wilde's works, unlike Shakespeare's, never made it as far as Daventry, and she has no idea about the man other than that he wrote a play full of humor that she knows is present but doesn't always...catch. Which is a slightly awkward situation, rather like laughing at a joke without understanding it, simply because one knows that one ought to laugh, and doesn't want to be the only one in the room not doing so.

"I'm afraid I don't know much about...well, any of it, really," she admits, looking slightly sheepish at that. "We picked a modern play on purpose this time, since we thought people might like it better than Shakespeare, but I'm afraid that also means I don't always understand the jokes when they make them. Or that I have to think about them a bit longer to get them, sometimes."

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

He nods and elaborates without the slightest bit of hesitation. "Wilde wrote it in 1894, only a year before he was imprisoned for gross indecency... six years before he died of cerebral meningitis at the age of forty-six. It was his last comedic work."

Having said that, however, Justin realizes that Rosella was referring to the thematic and comedic elements of the work and not her lack of familiarity with the playwright himself. He backtracks, suitably embarrassed. "Oh. ...That's not--it doesn't matter. Most modern audiences won't understand all of the jokes, either, but that--it doesn't stop them from laughing. It's fine."

Rehearsal action; open

[primrosella]

"Oh, I see!" Because really, she does find it interesting, and the fact that Justin is able to rattle off facts like that without missing a beat suitably impresses her--which shows on her face. And, seeing his embarrassment, she immediately tries to set him at ease by asking more about it, hoping to give him the chance to talk about something he's obviously knowledgeable about, and clearly feels comfortable with. "That does sound rather awful, yes. What other things did he write, though?"

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

Far be it for Justin to withhold information about any of his favorite writers, particularly with such an apparently captive audience. Captive audiences are difficult to come by when one's favorite things to talk about are criminology, philosophy, and the works of sexually deviant authors.

Adjusting his mustache, he replies, "He wrote everything. His best-known work is the gothic horror piece The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is also his only novel. He wrote short stories--The Happy Prince and his other fairy tales are good. Essays, dialogues, journal articles, eloquent letters, other comedies and a tragedy... a poem, near the end of his life. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Part of that ended up being his epitaph."

Rehearsal action; open

[primrosella]

Unfortunately, Rosella ends up missing most all of Justin's explanation, not from lack of interest in the rest, but because there's a very familiar name in the beginning, and she's so busy focusing on that one bit that the rest of it happens to go by the wayside in her surprise.

"He was friends with Dorian Gray? How--er, how very odd, he never mentioned that he had a book written about him," she manages to get out after a moment, her eyes slightly wider than usual. "Well. That's...really very interesting, yes. I had no idea, really."

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

It takes Justin a moment to backtrack and remember that Dorian Gray was actually in the City at one point. Without thinking, he corrects Rosella. "Wilde wasn't friends with him... he created him. Wrote him. Dorian Gray is just a character in a book where I'm from."

Rehearsal action; open

[primrosella]

She frowns a little, trying to make sense of that. She's had friends with movies and things made about them before, of course, and of course Dorian was absolutely the sort of person who would have his life turned into a story for others to read about--among other things, because Dorian Gray was a lot of things, and, er. Well. In any case, Justin's claim that he was only a character takes her a minute to process, but eventually she decides it must be that Dorian simply lived long before Justin's own time, and that's why he assumes he's nothing more than a character in a book. Yes, that would make sense, certainly. Rather like a legend that one eventually learns to be true.

"Is he? Well, he certainly was quite a character, yes." And an excellent kisser, but of course she's not about to mention that. Ahem. "Is it a good story, then?"

Rehearsal action; open

[absinthe_eyed]

It doesn't occur to Justin that Rosella's brain works differently than his. Therefore, he takes her acceptance to mean that she's on the same proverbial page as he is--that is, the page that questions their very existences and posits that at least some, if not all, of the people in the City are, in some world, fictitious. It also doesn't occur to him that a good many people would either dismiss that notion as an absurdity or go mad trying to come to terms with it.

There are reasons, you see, that Justin has very few friends.

"It's well-written," he replies carefully, trying not to let his disdain for the character--and the person, who he met only briefly--show. "It's thematically interesting where the concept of aestheticism is concerned, too, especially since Wilde was one of Britain's greatest aesthetics."

Rehearsal action; open

[had_not_lived]

Neil is Neil-- it's the kind of thing he'd laugh at, if it were said aloud, because it's true enough to be funny. Justin really isn't allowed to get away without at least a little socialization, and inevitably, before long his corner perch is invaded by the effervescent accidental director of the evening.

"Hey, Justin!"