EXT. STOOP—CRIME SCENE—DAY
Small groups of bystanders, milling about. McMurtry wanders through, looking for his witness. Spots the Uniform holding her to one side. He gestures them over.
McMURTRY
She saw something?
UNIFORM
That’s what she says.
WITNESS
It was just people running.
There were so many people.
McMURTRY
You see a gun?
WITNESS
(scared)
No. Just everybody running, and yelling.
Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.
McMURTRY
Sure.
She ducks away. A street tough in a sweatshirt waits for her, puts his arm around her, and walks her off. McMurtry looks to Ramirez, who has approached.
McMURTRY
She saw something but she’s not talking.
RAMIREZ
No one is.
Alison was auditioning for the part of the witness, a character so unimportant it didn’t even have a name. And yet it was a big deal that they had agreed to see her for it. She didn’t yet have an agent and no one—not even the girl who sits at the desk outside—would talk to you unless they could see on the list in front of them that you had been submitted by Abrams, or Innovative, or Paradigm, or Writers & Artists. The fact that she was being seen for this lousy two-line part was all due, again, to Lisa, who had called her agent and asked him to get Alison an audition, as a personal favor.
“It was just people running. There were so many people,” Alison murmured to herself, to see if there was a rhythm to the language that she might exploit. There was something there, she thought, something deceptively simple but humming with fear. “It was just people running, there were so many people,” she said, louder. The grammatical inaccuracy of “it was,” the image of the spilling, panicked crowd, then the repetition of that simple word “people.” When she tried it a third time, “It was just people—running. There were so many people,” she felt the whisper of this girl’s fear start to curl around her brain. Her eyes drifted down to her next line. “No. Just everybody running and yelling.” A breath, a shift. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Was he really her boyfriend? He was the source of her fear, that’s for sure. But that “no” was important; it was the place where she shut down. It stopped her, turned her in a different direction. She was scared of one thing on the first line, and something else on the second. The fear on that second line was a different kind of fear, something more personal and threatening. “NO,” she repeated, abrupt, a bit too forceful. Then, with an edge of defiance, “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Alison thought this chick was stupid talking to the cops like that. She toned it down to something more approximating a whine. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Made her sound like a moron. Alison hated playing scenes like that. Plus it honestly didn’t feel right. This girl was scared, first of what she saw, then of something worse. She didn’t have the self-control to try to manipulate the cops. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting,” she insisted, out loud. Forceful was better. She really shouldn’t talk to the cops like that, but the fear was fueling it.
Was she making this all up? The scene really seemed like nothing when you just looked at it as a whole. But then when she considered her little piece of it, those few words and what she felt when she said them, it seemed clear there was more there. All those coaches and teachers and directors and acting classes told her the same thing over and over: Let the words do the work. Whether it’s Shakespeare or Law & Order, the words are going to teach you everything you need to know about what to do. That wasn’t always true—back in Seattle she had slogged her way through dozens of bad new plays by half-baked young writers who thought they were deconstructing reality when really all they were doing was writing incomprehensible bullshit. In those cases you couldn’t let the words do the work because they were never doing anything but floating around the page. But this really did seem like it presented her with something to play. Not much, but something.