She laughed. “Advantageous yet burdensome. Also, in my case, complicated by America’s ongoing misogynoir.”
The conference room was full as we entered, with most seats taken around the pushed-together tables in the center, as well as around the perimeter of the room. There were even more staff members at read-throughs than at pitch meetings, including from hair and makeup, wardrobe, set design, and the music department. Spread over the tables were scripts of the sketches and, because we’d be there for three hours, bottled waters and scattered platters of sandwiches, salad, cut-up fruit, chips (presumably not coffee-flavored), and cookies. Whether you considered this meal breakfast, lunch, or dinner depended on how late you’d been up the night before.
Danny, Viv, and Henrietta all took seats at the table that had been saved for them. I took a second-perimeter seat, my back to the windows that overlooked muffled honking traffic and muffled frolicking tourists seventeen stories below. Noah Brewster was in the middle of the tables’ south side, to the left of Nigel, who always narrated the stage directions in all the sketches. The worse the sketch was being received, the faster he read.
It happened that I was about twenty feet from Noah but directly in front of him, and when we made eye contact, he smiled and I felt a wild surge inside me, though I wasn’t sure if it was panic, excitement, or something else. He was painfully handsome, yes, but I had already known that. I reflexively looked away, as if we were strangers who’d accidentally locked eyes on the subway. Then I realized that looking away had been rude and odd, because we weren’t subway strangers. We were, if only for this week, colleagues, and part of my job was to make him comfortable. I quickly looked back, saw that his smile had been replaced with a more quizzical expression, and forced a smile of my own. When I did, he raised a hand and waved. Then a cast member named Bailey, TNO’s first nonbinary performer, leaned in from Noah’s left and said something, and Noah turned toward them and replied, and they both laughed.
Elliot, the head writer, called the meeting to order by sticking two fingers in each corner of his mouth and whistling, and we got down to it. Cast members who’d turned in sketches always gave themselves the leading role, which they’d read, whereas writers assigned roles to various cast members, and these assignments sometimes stuck and sometimes didn’t. If Nigel decided a cast member, especially a favored one, had a “light week,” he might unilaterally make reassignments as a sketch advanced.
We started with a sketch about the porn actress alleging that Trump had paid her to keep quiet about their affair, then there was a sketch where Noah was performing the national anthem before an NFL game as a duet with a famous diva played by Henrietta, and they were competing over the high notes. The first sketch to make me really laugh was the one now titled Blue-Eyed Soul, by Tony, in which Noah was the white politician preaching to a Black congregation.
Even after nine years, I found table reads fascinating because they represented the intersection of multiple creative and psychological forces. In a room filled with the people who mattered in my life, but with no outside audience, I was always desperate with curiosity to find out how my sketches would be received and what the other sketches were like; I was often shocked by the brilliance of some sketches and the crumminess of others; and it was unsettlingly easy to infer social dynamics by the laughter and warmth, or lack of, with which a sketch was received. More than once, it had been at a table read that I’d first suspected two people were romantically involved, or that someone was going to be let go at the end of the season.
An hour and five minutes in, we got to The Danny Horst Rule. After what I’d thought of as my best line, there was only half-hearted laughter, while, to my chagrin, the loudest laugh lines were the ones Danny had written for himself. Still, I could feel that the sketch’s catchily self-referential premise meant it was likely to make it to the next stage.
Formal feedback didn’t happen during a table read—whether your sketch ended up in the lineup for the show was the feedback. But before we went on to the following sketch, the writer Jeremiah, who was sitting behind Nigel, said, “What I really respect is Sally’s fearlessness in the face of offending half the staff here.”
From my chair against the window, I said, “I’ll take that as confirmation that it strikes a chord.”
A writer named Jenna said, “And they lived heteronormatively ever after,” and Bailey leaned back from the table to fist-bump Jenna.
By coincidence, my Blabbermouth sketch came right after The Danny Horst Rule, and Blabbermouth also got respectable if not inordinate laughs. Writers often sought out the cast members, including the host, who’d be reading their sketches to make suggestions about what tone to use. Though I hadn’t sought out Noah—I’d arrived at the read-through just before it started, and also, for some reason, I would have felt weird instructing him—he did a good job. The conceit was that the male judges of the singing competition were speaking over him, too, in addition to speaking over the female judge, and he and the female judge began doing other things, like filing their nails, playing checkers, and pulling out yoga mats and sitting in the lotus pose. The alchemy happened that I’d described to Noah the previous night, when a sketch went from words on a page to a much funnier live enactment.
After Blabbermouth, though, there was a string of duds, including one by a first-year writer named Douglas whom Henrietta, Viv, and I referred to behind his back as Catchphrase because his primary goal at TNO seemed to be to send a catchphrase into the zeitgeist. This week, the catchphrase that Catchphrase was trying to coin was “Ridin’ toward ya, ridin’ from ya”—the sketch featured Catchphrase himself on a unicycle—and I felt a flare-up of loathing. How and why had Catchphrase been hired? How and why was he so confident? In his second week, I’d suggested during rewrites for someone else’s sketch that a woman get on all fours to force a fart out before her date arrived. Referring to a viral sketch from seven years earlier, Catchphrase had said in a casual yet knowing tone, “That’s too derivative of My Girlfriend Never Farts.” I’d replied, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s because I’m the person who wrote My Girlfriend Never Farts.” Appearing not at all chastened, Catchphrase said, “Ah, so you’re a self-cannibalizer.”