November 9, 2014, by James
Das Bent
The blonde woman and the angry man look at me as one would a Tesco Value pork pie, one part anticipation to three parts certain disappointment.
I am in the New Theatre auditioning for a play. It’s called BENT and it’s about a gay couple during the holocaust.
‘You are a gay couple,’ says the angry man; he points to a fellow auditionee. ‘You love each other very much.’ We both nod. ‘You will go out there for five minutes, practice this script and then come back’. I do exactly as he says.
As we make our way out of the narrow door my new husband and I eye each other up. Angry cupid has been kind to me. While the Y chromosome is a deviation from my usual type I have to admire the haircut on my new spouse. It has lots of polygons and twirly bits, like Jubilee Campus but on a face.
He leans in to introduce himself. He has good teeth; I momentarily pause to imagine our adopted children. They’re beautiful. He offers me a handshake and it is just terrible. Like someone trying to feel up a Baked Alaska. Except more awkward. I will have to be the jar opener in this relationship.
‘So this script huh?’ he says, noting that I’ve been staring at his hand for longer than the social norm.
‘Yeah…’ I offer.
‘Who d’ya wanna be?’
‘The first guy?’ I feel conversation is going to be the cornerstone of our marriage.
‘The first guy! Yes!’ I say, maybe overcompensating for my earlier silence. ‘Let’s er… try it a bit.’
We begin; he’s good, very good. Not good enough to regain my affection but still, second date good.
‘That was good,’ he says. I love how we always say what the other’s thinking.
‘Was it coupley enough?’ he asks, ‘Or were we just like… two dudes in a lounge’. I scan my brain for the one gay couple I know. They spend their time playing FIFA and cooking each other omelettes, I decide these are unlikely to feature heavily in a heart-wrenching depiction of the Holocaust. Maybe we could improv a scene?
We do two more run throughs before the blonde woman appears at the door and asks if we would like to return. We both get the subtext, somewhere beyond the sound proofing the angry man is slamming the desk and shouting SCHNELL SCHNELL! He doesn’t know love can’t be rushed.
They sit behind a desk, blonde and angry, looking like two guardian angels of the terminally bipolar – The blonde one tells you to bake a cake and then the angry one tells you to destroy that cake and wear it’s corpse like the ghost of diabetes past.
We perform. The blonde one smiles at us, the angry one writes various curses in his notebook.
I didn’t get the part.
Hubby won’t return my calls.
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