Lives of the Circus Animals by Christopher Bram

handle actors.
    They ran through the scenes. They did not do them at full throttle, but it was more than just a read-through.
    The apartment made a good performance space. A ramble of high-ceilinged rooms, once nice, now dingy, it was still owned by Allegra’s aunt Alicia, who had moved to Miami. Allegra rented rooms to her theater buddies. Frank had lived here himself until six months ago, when he decided he was too old for this mattress-on-the-floor, six-people-one-bathroom kind of life. The circle of friends straddled thirty, but in the name of art they still lived like college students.
    Which was the subject of 2B: life in the lower depths of showbiz, or, rather, the bargain basement. The project was Allegra’s brainchild, born when she learned her new boyfriend wanted to write plays. She needed an outlet for her frustrated talents and those of her friends.Allegra Alvarez was Cuban, but her family had been in this country long enough, and possessed enough money, for their daughter to develop the bohemian ambition of a good, spoiled WASP.
    The show was a trio of one-acts chopped up and shuffled together. In the first plot, Toby played a young actor who is rejected again and again at cattle calls and auditions—which was true for the real Toby too. It was true for them all. He delivers a series of whistling-in-the-dark monologues about how good his life is, addressed to Chris, who sits in front of a TV like a big, butch, Jamaican sphinx and says nothing.
    â€œHad a great audition today. And an excellent job interview. I am so on top of things. You wouldn’t believe how much they want me for the new Sondheim. And Salomon Brothers. I’m too multitalented for my own good. What would you do in my shoes? Business or theater? It’s a hard choice…”
    The monologues grow more absurd as Toby—or “Toby”—grows more desperate over rejection, failures the audience must figure out by reading between the lines. Toby had brought in these monologues himself, an ingenious acting exercise—Frank detected Caleb Doyle’s hand here—but he couldn’t make them work. Chris continued to steal their scenes with her deadpan silence.
    In the next plot, Dwight played a smart-ass who has a safe, brotherly friendship with his roommate, Allegra. One night, when they’re both in a panic over the mess of their lives, they jump on each other and end up in bed. This tale was fiction. Dwight was smart-ass, funny, and overweight—he tried to give his pear-shaped face a little definition with a fringe of beard—but thoroughly gay. No, it was Frank who had gone to bed with Allegra, two years ago. The sex had been unexpected, frantic, and so quick that neither was entirely naked by the time they finished. Weeks passed before they could overcome the mutual embarrassment of having stuffed their faces into each other’s crotch. But they did, and they became friends again, laughed at what had happened, then forgot it.
    So Frank was stunned when the situation appeared in Boaz’s first draft. Allegra took Frank aside and confessed she’d told Boaz the story but changed the identities of the culprits. Frank wanted to drop this plot. Allegra insisted it was good comedy, which was true. They discussed and worked on the scene as if it were fiction. Curiously, after the first week, it had happened to two entirely different people.
    In the third plot, Chris and Melissa were feuding roommates. “You are such a girl,” Chris angrily spits, which was true. A feminine fluff-bunny from Texas, the real Melissa seemed entirely out of place here. She and Chris bicker over trivia: the phone bill, who used whose hair conditioner, toothpaste, toilet paper. Finally, a carton of spoiled milk ignites a screaming match. Their antagonism is revealed to be not over their being hot for the same guy, which was how Boaz first wrote it, but because they both auditioned for a dubbing job on a