A Substitution
Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Saïd Sayrafiezadeh about his writing process.
Three days before opening night, the lead actress quits my play to do summer-stock theater in the Catskills. “Occupational hazard,” the director tells me, meaning this is what happens when no one’s getting paid for two weeks of rehearsal for one performance only in a basement on the Lower East Side that seats 40 on folding chairs. In other words, opening night is the same as closing night. Never mind that I’ve put my heart and soul into this play, that it’s taken me three years to finish the script, writing weeknights and weekends, and that in three more years I’ll be 35, which is when I plan to ask my boss if I might be promoted from my permanent position as full-time temp. He’ll say, “I thought you wanted to be a playwright.” Indeed, this is my fifth play (not counting the bad ones I wrote in college). And to make matters worse, I was the one who’d insisted on casting the actress in the lead role, against the better judgment of my director, and solely for sentimental reasons: because she reminded me of my mom, blue eyes, etc., and my mom’s been dead for almost a year. She’d been my biggest fan, single mother that she was, coming to all my productions, starting when I was a little boy, back when I wasn’t thinking about that thing called career, putting on plays in the living room in front of an audience of one who gave me a standing ovation every time. “Bravo, Billy,” she’d say. She’d hug and put me on her lap. “One day you’re going to be on Broadway.”
Now I’m sitting in the back row of a sweltering theater with 40 seats and no AC, listening as the audience chuckles along to my two-act about two couples on a beach chatting about themes of life and love. Apparently, no one’s able to tell that the lead actress has rehearsed only twice. The play is light—witty banter, pleasing setting, happy ending, box-office appeal—but it’s while everyone is exiting the theater post-performance, shaking my sweaty hand hard, congratulating me, saying all the right things, beaming with the glow of a comedy that has not taxed them, making me think that there’s still some hope for my so-called career after all, that I’m surprised to see the original actress standing in front of me. Doubly shocking because of how closely she resembles my mother. We smile at each other warmly, solicitously, even though I thought she was supposed to be in the Catskills doing summer stock. For a moment I think I might sob on her shoulder from this strange, ghostlike encounter. Then she asks me, point-blank, if I’d ever considered how my play is. In fact how white my plays are, and also how middle-class. “Have you ever considered that?” she asks. She happens to be white and middle-class too, so the question almost seems like a contradiction—or at least unfair. “It’s about themes of life and love,” I say. I’m confused. I’m flustered. “I’m not talking about themes,” she says, “I’m talking about .” I want a second opinion, but most of the audience has already left,
