The Stage Was Set by Lea Gremm

Writing inspired by 24-Hour Writing Challenge in October 2024

Use these three prompts to inspire a story or a poem (all three must be included):

– A birdcage (object)

– “If it’s true, then you have to prove it.” (line of dialogue)

– A theatre (setting)

The Stage Was Set

by Lea Gremm

The stage was set, the lights turned on.

For a minute, they were blinding Jules who sat in the front row of the empty auditorium, hair in a messy bun and eyes burning and red from lying awake all night, playing a hundred different scenarios of this day in her head until she finally fell asleep.

She was beyond nervous. Her heart was racing and she couldn’t stop her right knee from tirelessly bouncing up and down, while she desperately tried to focus on the silhouette that had just entered the stage of the Apollo Theatre in London.

It was Noah, smiling down at her like Christmas came early and Jules had a shining red bow wrapped around her head.

No, she reminded herself calmly in the privacy of her own mind, this is not Noah. It is Jonas. Well, Noah playing Jonas anyway. And the only reason he was grinning down at her from ear to ear was because it said so in the stage directions.

For a split second, their eyes met and Noah’s smile faltered slightly. Then, he caught himself again and gracefully launched into his opening monologue that Jules had so carefully written and re-written a thousand times over until it sounded exactly the way it did right now, spoken in the deep and melodic timbre of his voice.

There was a sudden silence that Jules noticed way too late.

“Line, please!” Noah said in a tone that suggested it was far from the first time he had uttered those words.

Jules winced – and did it again, when she noticed that everyone was staring at her. Lisa, the stage manager, had her eyebrows raised so high that they disappeared behind her brown bangs and Terence, the director, who sat right next to Jules, let out a long-suffering sigh. Even the sound guys were peeking through the stage curtains to shoot her confused looks. This was the final rehearsal and every single member of the cast had been off-book for months. There would be a show tonight – right here on the stage – and theatre lovers and critics alike would sit where Jules was sitting right now and watch her life’s work unfold in front of their eyes. And by tomorrow, she would be a real stage writer and everyone in the theatre community would know her name. Maybe then, they would finally take her seriously. But then again, her lead actor had just forgotten his lines in the very first scene of the play, so she might be on the safer side by managing her expectations.
She turned the first page of her script with shaking hands. She didn’t need to look at the pages in her lap, because she knew the words by heart – she wrote them after all – but glancing down gave her a short-lived escape from the prying looks directed at her.

In four months of rehearsals, Noah had never once forgotten his lines. He had been off-book from the start, because he loved the script that much.

“I am so in love with your writing,” had been his exact words that Jules hadn’t been able to get out of her head ever since.

“I am free“, she read out loud in a monotone voice. “Free to be, to breathe. Free to do. I have finally escaped this prison they have put me in. They have built their walls of expectations too high for anyone to climb but she…she has opened a window for me to fly through. – And then you open the-”

“I open the bird gage and let the lark fly out. Yeah, I know,” interrupted Noah tensely.

“Fine,” Jules shot back. “Might be a good idea to know your lines as well. We have a show tonight, in case you forgot.”

“I didn’t.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Noah shot her an icy look in reply.

“From the top, please!” Terence’s loud voice cut through their stony silence.

As Noah was starting off his monologue again, Terence leaned over to Jules.

“Do I even want to know what is going on with you two?” he muttered under his breath.
“It’s fine,” Jules replied without taking her eyes off the stage.

“I don’t think it is, but can I trust you to handle this? This is my play, too, you know?”

“Yes,” she sighed, all the anger and tension leaving her body at once in defeat. “Yes, I will handle it.”

And she would – just as soon as the rehearsal was over.
_

Two hours and thirty minutes later, there was the usual hustle and bustle backstage: cast and crew members were talking over each other, moving props back to where they belonged and changing out of their costumes. Jules just stood there and watched from a distance for a while. Every so often, her eyes glanced over to where Noah was talking to Terence in a corner, both of them looking serious and pointing to different sections in the slightly tattered script in Noah’s hand. She knew she should walk over to them – not only because they were probably talking about an important scene, but also because she just couldn’t stand the awkwardness between her and Noah any longer. She had promised Terence that she would handle this, because she was a professional before anything else. It is all about the play. This was the pinnacle of her career. This was what she had been working towards for as long as she could remember. She wouldn’t jeopardize something as important as the Opening Night of her very first play for – For what exactly? A fling? A crush?

Love? a small voice in her head chimed in.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she muttered under her breath in a desperate attempt to shut up any further insights provided by her brain, and finally walked over to the corner in which Terence and Noah were still conferring with each other.

“Everything alright…lads?”

Terence froze mid-sentence and faced Jules with a strange look on his face, while Noah averted his gaze and flipped through the script in his hands, but the corners of his mouth seemed to be twitching slightly.

“Lads? I am fifty-six years old, Jules, I am far from being a lad,” Terence finally responded with a bemused smile on his face. “I have never ever heard you use this expression before and I sincerely hope, you don’t plan on using it again in the future.”

“Only when I’m a nervous wreck like today, I promise,” Jules laughed, while her cheeks turned distinctively pink in the dim lights backstage. She braced herself and turned to Noah.

“Can I …talk to you for a sec? Privately.”

He finally looked at her and the earlier amusement had completely vanished from his face. Now, he just looked tired. “Sure. We can talk in my dressing room.”

The walk over to Noah’s dressing room was spent in complete silence. Jules could feel her hands shaking again. This was a whole other kind of nervousness that had nothing to do with Opening Night.

Noah closed the door behind them and the noise from backstage faded away completely. He leaned against it and folded his arms over his chest. “So…”, he finally said, looking at her expectantly. “What do you want to talk about? Are you here to give me a hard time for forgetting my lines during final rehearsal?”

“No, of course not.”
“Well, you seemed pretty upset about it earlier.”

His voice was completely nonchalant which unnerved her even more.

“Well, I was!” she snapped, letting out a frustrated sigh before raising her voice again. “Today is the biggest day of my career, so forgive me for expecting my lead actor to –”

“That is all I am to you, isn’t it?” he suddenly interrupted, his tone sharp enough to cut through the thick tension in the room. “Your lead actor. God forbid you might have something else in your life apart from your work.”

“That is not fair! You know how much you mean to me.”

“Could have fooled me,” he said coldly, throwing her own words from earlier back in her face.

He was hurt, that much was clear to Jules. The last four months of rehearsals had been the toughest and most rewarding time of her professional life, but it had also been filled with unexpected feelings of attraction and longing for him that only grew stronger with every day she didn’t resolve them. It didn’t take long for her to realize that she wasn’t alone in this and that Noah felt the same way about her. He had finally told her as much when the whole cast and crew had gone out for drinks after a particularly awful rehearsal in December. There had been a lot of mulled wine that night, followed by a slightly slurred confession from him and a kiss she had not been able to forget ever since. But the show must go on. So Jules was back at work the next morning at 8 am and she realized there was no place for those kind of feelings at work. Not, when the play was still a mess and her future as a stage writer depended on it.

“Noah…you have to understand that this play could be my breakthrough.”

“I want it to be. You deserve it.”

For the first time that day, his gaze on her softened a bit.

I am so in love with your writing, he had once said, drunk on mulled wine and hot apple cider in the corner of a London dive bar in December. Now, it was April, the play wasn’t a mess anymore and Opening Night was finally here. He understood how important this was for her. She had never been alone in any of this, not even from the start.

“This is the most important night of my career,” she repeated, not quite sure what else to say.

“I know that.”

He was so calm. There was no trace of doubt or stage fright in his voice as if this moment, right here, was more important than whatever happened on stage tonight. And maybe it was.

Jules, on the other hand, was completely frozen in place, wondering what his next move was going to be. With Noah, you could never quite predict what he was going to do next, not even on stage. It was what made him a brilliant actor and what made being around him so exciting. Slowly, he took a hesitant step in her direction. “I know how important this show is to you, Jules. But it is not everything you have.”

It felt like the past four months, the hundreds of hours of hard work and pretty much every day of her life until now have led her to this exact moment in time – to a conversation in a cramped dressing room that could change the course of her life forever before the curtain would even rise on Opening Night.

“I love you,” Noah said, choosing every world carefully. “I love you for the person that you are – I love you for the writer that you are – and I am pretty sure that you love me, too.” There was a genuine smile on his face that made the skin around his eyes crinkle. “But I don’t want to keep wondering,” he continued, taking another step towards her. “So, if it’s true, then you have to prove it. Just say the word and I’ll be yours.”

And when he put it like that, it all sounded so easy. In the end, it was Jules who took the last step and closed the distance between them. And the last thing she thought about before she lost herself in the feeling of his lips on hers was that whatever happened on stage tonight, this was the real breakthrough she had been waiting for.