Stage Door Short Story

    “Wow” said Kim. “I can’t believe we have to go downstairs to do the stupid read through.” It was Saturday afternoon, and Kim was in theatre rehearsal for the play Stage Door. She was playing Terry, the main role, and new she had about 300 lines to memorize.
    The main reason Kim didn’t want to go downstairs was because it was about a hundred degrees down there. The basement of the theatre had a bunch of heating pipes running through it, so it constantly felt like you were in a sauna.
    “Come on” said Kim’s partner, Joe. “It’ll just take a few hours.”
    “Yeah, only a few hours of sweating like a pig. Let’s just try and get this over with as soon as possible.” Kim knew Joe was just being optimistic. That’s the way he always was, which was one of the things about him that annoyed Kim.
    Kim and Joe carefully walked down the steep spiral staircase to the basement. As soon as they were about half way down, it felt like a wall of heat had just swept over them. They could hardly breathe, and the smell of heated wood was all around them. One thing Kim hated about being in the basement was that the heating pipes always made funny clanking noises, and it was well known that the theatre was supposedly haunted.
    Kim descended the last couple of stairs and, without waiting for Joe, walked into the room with all of the old moth-eaten couches. In this room there were about 5 windows that looked up about a foot above the sidewalk beside which the theatre stood. She opened every one, and stuck her head out to wait for a breeze that would never come. She sighed and plopped down on one of the couches beside Joe.
    In this play, Joe was playing the famous movie producer, David Kingsley. Kim and Joe were told to practice and perfect each of the scenes they had together, which included at least five ten page scenes. They would first read through each scene until they had it all memorized, and then they would work on the long and complicated process of blocking each scene.
    Kim thought it was strange that the theatre’s new director would have them do this: Kim had done a lot of professional theatre in her life, and never had she had a director that left it up to the actors to create a scene themselves.
    “Ok” said Joe. “Which scene do you want to start with? Should we start from the beginning and work our way in, or do you want to start with the easy ones?"
    “I don’t care” said Kim moodily.
    “Ok then. Why don’t we start memorizing from the beginning then? And after we’ve done all of our scenes, we’ll work out the blocking, then run the scenes through a couple of times.”
    “Whatever,” Kim said irritably. She reluctantly opened her script and gazed at the long and very likely unpleasant task ahead of her.