Auditions for Interference Theory

Emilee Prado

Act III, Scene II

Two people arrive more or less concurrently at the barricaded dumpster in the parking lot. The man is Scot Paty, twenty-nine, heartbroken, hungover. He has one hand free, so he swings open the wide wooden door for their simultaneous ingress. However, the woman begins a conversation and offers a trade, so rather than approaching the dumpster, they end up leaning against the gate.

The woman is known as Attway. She wears a once blue zip-neck sweater. She is two heads shorter than Scot and probably a decade older. Her aviator pants are a call to Amelia Earhart. Her hair evokes David Lynch. Maybe it’s the winter weather in the Colorado foothills—the sixty-five-degree invitation to wear a T-shirt challenged by the four-foot mound of snow plowed into a pile nearby—but Attway holds her box in two slackened arms and with a shiver, Scot clings his cache to his chest.

Attway shifts her box to her hip so she can pull out the Bluetooth computer mouse. She hands it over to Scot, saying, “It’s useless just sitting there in my desk drawer.”

Scot says, “Thanks,” and puts the mouse in his pocket. He rummages in his shoebox for something to exchange, but he finds nothing of practical use or general value.

Attway says: “Tell me the story behind those.”

“Let’s see,” Scot says, frowning. “The thing I remember most about these is that I got them the same day the roaches appeared.” He rattles the half-pint mason jar. What’s inside vaguely resembles a jumble of hair and teeth. “Two huge roaches in my kitchen. Each as long as a thumb. I’d never seen any sign of infestation before, but my roommates weren’t the cleanest, you know? This was, like, four or five years ago? But I was the only one home, so I had no other choice than to go get an old shoe.” Scot pauses, then groans inwardly. Maybe it’s the hangover or maybe it’s that right now he is reliving the feeling of the cockroaches’ exoskeletons cracking and crunching under the shoe in his hand, then the gooey little mess he had to wipe up after. “To kill something so early in the morning?” he says.

Attway exhales a gruff sound that is either a scoff or a vague noise of understanding, but the stark expression on her face does not change. She is listening.

“Like I said, I got these the same day.” Scot rattles the jar again. “I still had images of that brown bug-mush crawling through my brain when I had to machete-open a spaghetti squash for my Tasha—I mean, for my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—Tasha. I wanted to cook for her, something a little fancy, squash primavera or whatever it was. Anyway, I finally get the thing open only to find it growing inside itself. The seeds were already sprouting and sending out baby leaves and shoots—tiny plants inside. I Googled it and found out that it’s called vivipary.”

The woman nods. “When plant embryos begin a life while still attached to the parent.”

Scot had not expected her to know this not-so-common term, so he’s tripped up for a second. He looks down. He realizes he is still wearing the red plaid onesie he sleeps in, even though the sun has long passed the midpoint of the sky. His tan boots and zipped gray hoodie somewhat disguise the pajamas. He continues the story by saying: “So then I scooped out the sprouts and seeds and put them on a plate on top of the fridge, thinking: Since they were seedlings, maybe I could get Tasha some garden pots so that she could have a project for when she came over. She was always going on about how my roommates at the time were incredibly dull—but then I moved out and we got this place together not long after that.” Scot points a thumb at the apartment building behind him. “Anyway, I forgot about the sprouts on top of the fridge, but luckily they just shriveled up and didn’t mold.”

“Did Tasha like to garden?” asks Attway.

“I dunno actually. I never bought the pots.”

“And after all this, you put the seeds in the jar to document your failure at this particular endeavor?” Attway shifts her box again.

Scot blinks. “Well, after they dried out, I figured we could roast them and eat them. But I never got around to that either. They got covered in dust and I was going to throw them out, but I decided to put them in my memory box to remember the first thing I cooked for Tasha.”

Attway shakes her head. “A would-be memory of the tangle of death and new life.”

Scot holds out the jar to her.

Attway hesitates, then shakes her head again.

“You don’t want them?”

“No, thank you,” she says.

“We just broke up,” says Scot. “Me and Tasha.” He hook-shots the jar over his head and it lands softly on whatever trash is already padding the inside of the dumpster. Scot digs a hand around in his shoebox again.

“I’m telling you. There’s nothing valuable in here. Take the whole thing if you want,” he says.

“Value is never an intrinsic part of an object,” says Attway.

Scot’s face is still turned down. He rolls his eyes, thank you, wise-sage-of-the-dumpsters for that economics 101. The woman had intercepted him as he came to throw out this childish part of his life, the part of him that clung to the past. If Scot could prove to Tasha that he was capable of some sort of existential growth or strength of character, well, that’s what she was always indirectly asking from him, wasn’t she? Tossing his stupid memory box was the first step to getting her back.

“Here, just take it,” Scot holds out the box.

Attway once again shakes her head. “Tell me about the medal.”

Scot looks in and pulls out the medal, which isn’t metal but plastic, coated with some sort of shimmery gold veneer. It hangs by a red, white, and blue striped ribbon. “It’s from the 100-meter dash I ran in seventh grade. The last time I did anything of merit,” Scot says.

“I doubt it,” says Attway. She looks up at the sky. Scot glances into her box, but can’t see the contents under a plastic bag crumpled on top. It’s the two-handled kind of box that characters on TV carry out from their desks when they get fired.

“Thanks for the mouse, but I’m not feeling well. I’ve got to go. Here.” Scot sets his shoebox into Attway’s box and walks hunch-backed toward the apartment building on the west side of the lot.

Attway changes her mind about throwing it all out and turns back toward the east.

Act II, Scene I

The stench leaching from the dumpster and into Scot’s being is far too similar to the smell of the regurgitated Crown Royal he’d spewed into the toilet only a few hours prior. Scot thinks it all might still be in his nose even though he’s back in his living room now. The place looks ransacked.

Scot looks at the empty bottle he’d maliciously chugged from the night before. The expensive whiskey had been a gift from his father and a symbol of fatherly pride back when Scot got the job offer. Scot’s more of a wine drinker though, so the bottle just lived on the bookshelf until Tasha finalized her move-out. Scot is still staring at the bottle when he hears Tasha say:

“Just start with what’s visible from the sofa. Then take a break if you want. Starting is always the hardest part for you.”

Great. Now a hangover hallucination of Tasha is trying to help him clean up.

“Don’t give me advice like you know anything about this,” says Scot.

“I’m just trying to be one of the guys,” says imaginary Tasha. “Isn’t that what you want? For me to be as dull as your friends who use their degrees in communication to start up little businesses by day and play video games by night?”

“Tasha wouldn’t say that.”

“Yeah, but you know she felt that way,” is what Scot imagines imaginary Tasha saying.

Scot moves the dirty dishes from the coffee table to the sink, re-stacks the tipped-over game discs, returns the cushions to the sofa, and collapses face-first onto them. There’s a knock on the apartment door that makes Scot’s heart leap a little. Could it be Tasha? Maybe she’s coming to take it all back—or give it all back, whatever.

Act I, Scene II

At the east end of the parking lot, Attway kicks open the unlocked and ajar backstage door of the theater. She crosses through the workshop and drops the box of scripts and office equipment on the floor next to the desk she’d just cleared out. She picks up Scot’s shoebox and dumps the contents onto the desk’s surface. Even if the young man hadn’t said so, it was obvious that he’d just been through a break-up. Why else would anyone try to grow up by throwing out a box of childish treasures? Attway picks up the plastic medal. She pulls the length of the ribbon through her fingers, then examines it. It’s painted in gold, so she’d assumed it had been the award for first place. However, the word Participation is printed across it. Attway raises it with both hands and slips it around her neck. She looks into Scot’s memory box again. There’s a story here somewhere, she can feel it. She runs her hands over the key chains, movie tickets, concert tickets, airplane tickets, a ski pass, a toy pine tree, a bookmark. Okay, so she’d have to create a much more interesting character, but there was something. It was all pointing somewhere … but where?

Attway imagines. The curtain opens: A spotlight blinks to illuminate a series of vignettes. It’s the Memory Box Boy, progressing in age, acquiring each item for the box. Would Memory Box Boy grow up just to throw it all away? This play has to be about transformation. Would the story be Memory Box Boy’s journey from timid child to Tycoon? No, who isn’t sick to death of Cinderella stories? What if she doubled him: Two characters on a bench, swapping trinkets of their lives? No, that’s too close to Albee’s Zoo Story, and it all has to be bigger; more players must be involved. Maybe the main character is an obsessive collector, family and friends try to help him without success. The contents of the box grow, filling the house until the character literally suffocates in memories. No, no, no. Too many stories are stuck in the past. Besides, these ideas are still too small. Attway needs to think grand, not only for art’s sake but because the stakes are higher now since her last show flopped. As the character pulls out each object, the chorus illustrates the memory by breaking out into a musical number?

Attway groans.

She turns back to the contents of the shoebox and picks up an eerie-feeling wad of tinsel. She drops it. There are a few beer bottle caps, each with a single-digit number written inside with black marker, a hospital ID bracelet with Scot Paty’s name on it, a photo that is labeled as Scot and his girlfriend Tasha, a faded purple lanyard, a tiny folded paper that Attway unfolds to discover a phone number with a big bubbly heart drawn next to it. A few other things.

“Insignificant details,” Attway mutters and urges herself onward. She finds nothing but the cliché about the indistinguishability of trash and treasure.

Attway picks up the ID bracelet and sees that Scot’s birthday and address are printed below his name. He is older than he looked in the photo. At first, Attway had taken Scot for one of the waifs from the local university. Maybe what she needed was a better character study, just to see if there was any hidden depth.

Act II, Scene II

Scot squints down at the woman standing outside his door. It’s definitely not Tasha. The woman is burying Scot in a story about how she runs the community theater, just right over there at the other end of the parking lot, and how she wants to write a play about a box of memories. Is there anything he can tell her? She likes that a memory can be wildly divergent from the object itself.

“Look,” says Scot, holding himself up with the doorframe. “I threw out the shoebox. That means it’s worthless. My stories are as junk as whatever surrounds them. People have always collected stupid things. Some people collect rocks, some people collect stamps. How dumb is all that?”

“Scot?” says imaginary Tasha from the hallway. Scot looks at Tasha through the theater woman’s hair, which is mussed—or possibly styled—to look held up by invisible balloons.

“Tasha,” mutters Scot as he clutches his stomach and slowly shuts the door.

Attway turns to Tasha.

“I really thought he’d want to talk,” Tasha says to the closed door.

“I think he will,” says Attway. “I think he had a rough night.”

“It looks like it.”

Attway continues with Tasha where she left off with Scot, emphasizing just how important it is for her next play to get at something good.

Tasha is suddenly aglow. “I can’t tell you how much I love the community theater. I spent so much time there as a kid, taking dance classes mostly.” Tasha wonders aloud what changed and what remained the same in memory and reality.

Act I, Scene III

Tasha enters the workshop and begins ogling the set pieces that are leaning against the walls or half-tucked-away, saved from various strike parties for reuse.

Attway asks why it didn’t work out between Tasha and Scot.

Tasha says she’s unsure about everything right now, but maybe she and Scot aren’t really finished.

Attway recounts the last play performed here and the booing incident. The show that closed last week was a modern retelling of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, which was originally set in 1923 and featured the story of two recent college graduates who set off from America to prove that they can be cultured in Europe. The community theater performances were not unfamiliar to sparse attendance or even slightly fewer audience members after intermission, but never in Attway’s twenty-year career had someone actually shouted boo. And—because who brings vegetables to theaters anymore?—a Starbucks cup was thrown.

“But you’re working on the next show now?” asks Tasha.

Attway doesn’t confess that she’s asking the same question. She doesn’t say that she is barely post-thoughts-of-destroying-it-all. Instead, she says: “We need to break with the formulaic. The predictable action of the three-act play is doing my head in. Audiences need something more. Today I’ve been thinking about the avant-garde, about letting senses, feelings, and vague concepts guide the story. I think this theater needs a move toward what’s next in experimental. We need what would have been Krapp’s Last Tape, but more! And now!”

“Krapp’s Last Tape?”

“Oh, it’s about a constipated old man who is unable, stuck in a loop in every way imaginable. How do we get out? Less importantly, but unfortunately vital: How do we get the experimental to pay the bills?”

“I’m not sure about the play,” says Tasha. “But for the bills … Being empty on a Saturday afternoon is kind of a waste of the space, isn’t it? When I was doing my dance minor at the university, the theater and dance students had a tightly scheduled use of the space. Everyone felt like they never got enough time. What about working up some sort of contract and renting the stage to students while you’re developing the next play?”

Before Attway can respond, Tasha’s phone rings. “It’s Scot,” says Tasha to herself, surprised. Her thumb hovers between red and green, then she answers the call and steps out into the hallway that led her in.

Attway returns to her office to scribble down a few ideas. The page has grown chaotic with ink by the time Tasha appears in the doorway.

“Thanks for letting me look around. I’ve got to get going, but can I leave you my number? I’d love to get involved here if I can. I’d hate to see this place disappear.”

Attway nods and promises she’ll be in touch.

Act III, Scene I

Attway has inked up a few more papers when she hears footsteps in the hall outside her office. She looks up, expecting to see Tasha again, but no, it’s Memory Box Boy, Scot.

“Tasha said she was having a look around here?” says Scot.

“You just missed her.” Attway nods toward the exit on the other side of the wall.

“Goddammit.”He would have passed Tasha’s car in the apartment parking lot if she were still here.

Then Scot laughs. Attway looks up.

“You’re fond of my medal then, eh?” he says.

Attway forgot that the participation medal was still hanging around her neck. The contents of the shoebox have been pushed into an arc surrounding her papers. She picks up the shoebox with one hand, makes a hook with her other arm, and sweeps everything back into the box.

“Have you heard of interference theory, Scot?” Attway brushes by him and heads toward the stage.

“What?”Scot hesitates before following.

Attway flips a switch, and a row of work lights comes on. She drops the shoebox near center stage and goes to the right to heave down on the purchase line that opens the grand curtain.

Scot, stage left, shuffles a little.

“Interference theory is a term used to describe how memories can be disrupted and rewritten. Memories are delicate when pulled to the forefront of the consciousness. If you input more information while the memory is fragile, you can imbed the old memory with something new.”

“Okay,” says Scot.

“What does this remind you of?” Attway goes to the shoebox, bends, and holds up one of the objects.

Scot squints in the dim light. “I can’t see it,” he says.

“Come closer then.”

Scot moves to center stage but instead of looking at Attway or the box, he says, “What’s this?” and points to a black harness dangling from a wire and hovering a few feet from the ground.

“It was from our last performance,” says Attway. “We had one of the actresses flying around for the duration of the young women’s trip to Amsterdam.”

“I saw Peter Pan here when I was a kid,” says Scot looking up into the fly loft where screens and painted backdrops hang high above.

“That would have been before my time.”

“Can I try it? I’ve always wanted to—” Scot stops to watch Attway dump out the contents of the shoebox onto the stage. Didn’t she just say memories were delicate?

Attway shakes the box and shrugs. She disappears into the wing behind the long black curtains at stage right. A moment later, the harness descends in front of Scot.

“Do you know how to put it on?” says Attway.

“Yeah, I’ve done a bit of climbing up in the Flatirons.” He does up the waist and discovers that there is also a vest. He guesses that it will shift his weight, so he’ll be suspended from the middle of his back.

“Tell me when you’re hooked up,” calls Attway from behind the curtain.

Scot calls out “All set,” when he is.

“Here’s how it works. I’m hooked up to the other end over here. Since you’re heavier than me, you’ll stay on the ground until you jump. When you’re in the air, I’ll catch a rod that’s bolted to the wall back here and you’ll hover until I let go. Then I float up and you return to the ground. You decide when you go up and I decide when you go down. You can move left and right but stay on the same plane crossing through center. Got it?”

“Aye-aye,” says Scot. “Ready?” When Attway doesn’t respond, he takes a few quick strides and jumps into the air, keeping his feet pointing down in case it doesn’t work. But there’s a little jolt and he floats. He lets his weight shift forward until his stomach is almost parallel to the ground. “Wee!” he says, grinning like a kid.

“You won’t know when I’m going to let you down, so be ready,” says Attway.

Before Scot has a chance to consider this, he finds himself dropping and he gets his feet under him just in time.

“Wee!” he hears Attway say … mocking him?

“You know my friends would pay to do this?” says Scot. “You could charge people just to come take flying lessons while you’re between shows.”

Scot jumps into the air, and Attway says, “Tell me about something from your box.”

“What?”

Attway repeats herself and adds, “Tell me about one object until I let you down.”

Scot surveys the strewn contents of his shoebox. His stomach churns a little, the hangover letting him know that it has not completely subsided.

“There’s a movie ticket stub. To the first Paranormal Activity,” says Scot.

Attway doesn’t respond.

“From the time I went to see the movie. Everyone was raving about it because the fake found footage thing seemed so real. Hyper-real is the new real, I guess—except for the demons, maybe.”

Silence.

Scot floats over the stage. He reaches up to brush back his hair, and this motion makes him start to move from a sway into a slow spin.

“Who saw the movie with you?”

“It would have been back in college,” says Scot. “I dunno, friends? It was before I met Tasha.” Scot imagines Tasha. On the phone earlier it sounded like she wanted to see him. She would love this. If only there was another harness.

“Why did you keep the ticket?” calls Attway. “Did you love the movie? Why did you want to remember that experience over the experience of any other movie you could have streamed from your TV at home?”

“I don’t think I had a good reason for keeping it,” says Scot. “I just thought that movie tickets were something people kept. Since I had the box, I always felt a little obligated to find things to put things inside it.”

The harness is pressing into his stomach. The circling. Scot regrets this now.

“Hey, I’m not feeling so great. I think I need to get off this thing.” Scot barely finishes speaking when he descends.

“Of course!” says Attway. “The box comes first, not what’s inside.”

Scot catches himself with his hands and knees, the length of the wire keeps him from much impact. He pushes himself to his feet and begins to wrestle the straps free. He runs side stage and makes it to a trashcan before his lunch reemerges.

Scot decides to lie down on the cool floor. He feels so much better now.

It’s a while before Attway comes back. She must have been in her office, because she has a pen and a clipboard in her hand and another pen behind her ear.

Attway looks down at Scot on the floor. She extends a hand. Scot lets her help him up. She tucks the clipboard into her armpit and takes the plastic medal from where it still hangs around her neck. The clipboard clatters to the ground as she reaches up with both hands and places the medal over Scot’s head.

“Thank you for your participation,” she says. “Maybe Tasha will want to hear about how much you’ve grown today.”

“I’ve … What?” Scot watches Attway cross the stage. She exits into the light of her office.