204 - Audition

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Choose the least important day in your life.

It will be important enough, but still, you know, at the bottom of the list.

Welcome to Night Vale.

Well, listeners, I did it.

I tried out for a play.

I haven't done that since college.

I certainly performed in my fair share of plays and musicals back at...

University?

We definitely did the classics like Tartuffe and The Ice Man Cometh and She's All That.

But we also did some more contemporary works like Tartuffe but all nude and the Iceman Cometh but set in space and she's all that.

But we did a new adaptation where we replaced every scene with a song from the musical cats.

And we were all dressed as dogs.

I miss doing theater.

I, of course, love performing, and I still get to do that every day here on the radio.

But the electricity of being live on stage in front of an audience, nothing can replace that feeling.

So I was thrilled this week to get a press release from the Nightvale community players, who were having auditions for their production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

It is going to be a faithful version directed by Penny Carrera, who of course in the past has been known for more exotic dramatic pieces.

She mounted a version of School for Scandal two seasons ago, set entirely in the woods.

She only cast live deer, and the audience was starved for five days and then handed crossbows.

A real triumph of immersive theater.

And last season, she directed a world premiere musical by Lynn Manuel Miranda.

Unfortunately, I didn't see that show.

Apparently, it was a huge hit.

They sold out every single performance, and everyone on Twitter hated it.

But I'm thrilled they're doing Our Town, one of my all-time favorite plays.

I've dreamed my whole life of getting to play the stage manager.

That's the narrator of the play.

Like, who is better than the voice of a community to play the voice of a community, right?

So, for my audition, I chose a monologue from King Lear.

His famous speech about how they don't call a quarter pounder with cheese a quarter pounder with cheese in France.

I really wanted to showcase my good-natured demeanor.

The auditions were held at the old Orpheum Theatre downtown.

It's a 150-year-old stage that was just remodeled last year.

This will be the first show in the Orpheum since Sondheim's Pacific Overtures in 1983, which is famous for being the most successful musical in history that no one has ever seen.

While I was at the Orpheum, I learned about the ghost of Mary Mulligan.

She was an actress from the 19th century, very famous in Nightvale.

But one night, While performing the role of Lady Macbeth, she said the word, Macbeth, while on stage.

Now, for those who don't know, Macbeth is an unlucky word to speak aloud in a theater, which is unfortunate for those who have to perform Macbeth because it's nearly impossible to do the play without ever saying that word.

Usually, everyone who performs Macbeth just agrees to rename the two leads, Scott and Lady Scott.

But Mary Mulligan, one night, accidentally said, Macbeth.

Then she died in the performance.

Apparently, a piano fell from the fly space.

Oh, it didn't hit her, but it splintered the wood floor, sending dagger-like shards in all directions, narrowly missing everyone.

But causing an audience member to cough up a peanut, and Mary Mulligan was deathly allergic to peanuts.

Fortunately, the peanut landed harmlessly on the ground dozens of feet from Mary, but an usher slipped on that peanut and then fell into the curtains, pulling them down to the stage.

Which didn't hurt anyone, but it startled a family of bats who swarmed the stage, causing Mary Mulligan to fall into the orchestra pit, where she was impaled on an oboe.

And to this day, she haunts the theater.

Anyone who says the word, Macbeth, inside the Orpheum will hear a loud, oboe-like squonk, and then they will die immediately in a mysterious Rube Goldbergian

accident.

Well,

we all avoided saying the forbidden word.

Though at one point I overheard Joel Eisenberg tell Elizabeth Sampson, I heard you just bought a new Mac, Beth.

And everyone halted.

and waited for the ghost of Mary Mulligan to do something.

But she wasn't going to bust people on a technicality.

She's a ghost, not a cop.

I'm not into superstitions, but I was curious about Mary's history, not only in life, but in death.

In death, she's a very active ghost.

She hasn't cursed or killed anyone recently, but she's often seen walking around the dark hallways at night, moaning and howling.

Sometimes she appears as a distant outline of a woman in dark corners.

Sometimes she appears up close, her pale white face, black lips and eyes, and long yellow teeth totally visible only inches from yours.

She sometimes yells, Boo!

if she's feeling playful.

Her favorite thing to do is this sustained

sound until both of you are screaming, stuck, unable to run.

But mostly, Mary Mulligan remains invisible.

Only the occasional creak of a board or the tick-tock of a clock that doesn't exist.

We all can feel Mary's presence there.

However, as a ghost, Mary Mulligan is somehow less frightening than she was when she was alive.

Mary was an ardent churchgoer, a Puritan who did not like any suggestion of impropriety, sexuality, dancing, or smiling at dogs.

She was known to go to the Sunlight All-Day Cafe in the New Town Square back in the late 1800s and slap coffee and cigars out of diners' hands.

Caffeine is the devil's ketchup, she'd shout, and then hand people a piece of paper with a Bible verse on it.

Her favorite scripture was Leviticus chapter 14, verse 55, which just reads, for defiling molds in fabric or in a house.

I think there's some missing context there.

Mary had her positive qualities, of course.

She ran a school and boarding home for orphans.

She cared a great deal for children, though she seemed to despise them once they became adults.

And despite her popularity on the Orpheum stage, Mary Mulligan hated actors.

She only joined the theater company to shame the artists she considered heathens in the eyes of her god.

She berated her fellow actors every day about their sins.

None of the other actors or crew cared to hear what she had to say about heaven or hell, but they did think she was an immensely talented actor.

The theatre critic Jonathan Murrow of the Nightvale Daily Journal in 1891 called Mary Mulligan's performance of Ophelia, quote, truly unhinged.

And in 1895, he said of her take on Lady Windermere, quote, tis likely that Mary Mulligan is not an actress, but a satchel full with seagulls and set aflame inside a lady's ball gown.

Yet, despite Mary's difficulty in getting along with her fellow actors, she maintained a job on the stage.

And I respect that.

Everyone is different, and what better arena than art itself is there for learning to understand one another, to grow as humans?

I wish I could have met Mary Mulligan in person.

She would have been a fascinating, although potentially offensive and maddening interview.

But what if, I thought, what if I were to try to get an interview with her spirit?

Has anyone attempted this before?

In all of history, has even one person tried to talk to a ghost?

I thought not.

Maybe if we just talked it out with ghosts, they wouldn't be so spooky at all.

The auditiones were all asked to wait till everyone had auditioned.

And then they were going to have us do some group auditioning.

Dance lines, cone drills, blood tests, things like that.

But after I did my two month logs, which I crushed, by the way, I got bored listening to Joel Eisenberg absolutely butcher his audition piece from Equus.

He made the text sound gritty and perverse.

And I was like, Joel, it's a play about a little kid who loves horsies.

Lighten up.

My brother-in-law, Steve Carlsberg, also auditioned, but for some reason he thought Our Town was amusical, so he sang both parts of All I Ask of You from Phantom.

Oh, I also saw Sarah Sultan there.

She's a fist-sized river rock.

And I heard she was going to perform a monologue from David Mammet's Oleana, and hers was the only audition I truly wanted to see.

Still, there were a dozen more people to get through.

So I snuck off to the bowels of the theater, hoping to find the ghost of Mary Mulligan.

I listened carefully for any ghastly noises,

but nothing.

I went through the orchestra pit.

I searched the storage closets.

I looked in rehearsal studios.

I poked my head into the green rooms.

Nothing.

And then I remembered the piano.

It fell from the fly space the night she uttered that cursed word.

So I slipped behind the curtains and looked straight up into the series of pulleys, ropes, scrims, and hooks, all covered in cobwebs and dust.

I found a ladder side stage and began to climb, gently so as not to create a lot of clanking noises.

I didn't want the director to notice I had slipped away.

Step by soft step, I climbed, looking up to the catwalk, some 30 feet above the stage below.

I glanced down briefly to see how far I had gone, but that was a mistake.

My equilibrium left me for a moment, and the straight lines of ropes around me began to spiral in my vision.

I lost hold of one side of the ladder, and both of my feet slipped from their rung.

With only my left hand, I held tightly to the ladder's metal sides.

I almost screamed for help, but I knew I could do this.

I only needed to collect my breath, put my other hand on the ladder, swing my feet back up, and then

it was her.

It was Mary.

She was hanging upside down only inches from my face.

Her eyes were sunken, twisted pits.

Her teeth jagged and broken behind curled lips, and her nose, oh God, her nose was completely gone.

Just a triangular hole in grey bone.

Her jaw stretched open, and she began to hiss.

Not like a cat, but like a balloon one slowly lets deflate.

And that hiss tightened into a squeal, which soon became a scream.

And I wanted to scream too, but I was too scared to do anything.

I watched helplessly as Mary's fingers began to pry mine loose from the ladder.

And soon the last digit gave way,

and I fell.

30 feet below me was not certain death, but something much worse.

30 feet below me was certain pain, followed by likely death.

Plus the embarrassment of falling in front of the other auditiones,

and the added insult to injury that my final moments would be listening to Joel Eisenberg's bike horn of a voice utterly destroy Peter Schaffer's Tony-winning play.

And as I fell, I thought of the last thing that has saved me so many times before, though I couldn't imagine it working here at a theater, away from my radio show.

But just as I was about to die, I uttered under my breath,

but first,

the weather.

One, two, three.

Oh, say hello to this future alone.

Where we both swallowed sleep and made love through our phones.

Cause I still

remember

only

days spent in your

something worth recalling.

Cause no one ever will come close to the wave.

You stabbed me

at my throat.

Cause sometimes it won't come around.

Hold me under till I drown.

And I just watch you in a frown.

And have you ain't my slate?

Cause the distance is awfully convenient, my love.

Does it substitute trying too hard?

Can we break this psycho fear enough?

This is not a bar, don't forget.

Way up, I thought I'd reach you credit up.

Gotta wanna scream.

Cause nothing ever will come close to the way you stab me in the throat.

Cause the death me won't come around.

Don't Don't hold me under till I'm drowned.

And I can spot you in a crowd and love you at my time.

Cause nothing ever will come close to the way you let

me decompose.

Cause I just may won't kiss again.

You're burnt to me as a dear friend.

But nothing can be of the trend.

You'll throw me all away.

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And what do you know?

The weather saved me.

Before I hit the ground, I felt something grab the collar of my shirt and yank me upward, like I was a troublesome kitten.

It was Mary Mulligan, or her ghost.

She pulled me high into the air and threw me down onto the catwalk, her rotted skull of a face hunched over mine.

She whispered,

What do you know

of weather?

I stammered.

I

didn't know what she meant, like rain or temperature?

Sometimes it's sunny?

My dear love, Herbert, was taken from me by a great storm, she said.

I'm sorry, I said.

We were to be married, Herbert and I, she growled.

Well, why weren't you?

I asked.

He drank.

He gambled.

He...

He danced.

He fancied other men.

He listened to...

music.

Of all things,

music.

And he sometimes smoked the wicked herb.

Mary was clenching her fist to her chest like a Celine Dion impersonator.

He sounds fun, I said too quickly, forgetting who I was talking to, forgetting Mary's strict Puritanism.

He was fun, she grinned a bit, but quickly reverted back to her comic book villain sneer.

But God

did not find Herbert fun at all.

The last time I saw my love, He was leaving my home to tell his family of our engagement.

The rain was falling hard, and Herbert sloshed away from my door, and his last words to me were, I shall see thee soon, my love.

But first,

the weather.

He disappeared into the night, and I never saw him alive again.

That's terrible, I said.

She added, The rain became a flood, and Herbert's house was infested with black mold, deep in the drywall,

just as it predicted in Leviticus.

And that's how Herbert died.

God's vengeance.

She sobbed, and I put my arms around her.

Well, she wasn't very tangible, so it kind of hurt to keep it held up around where her shoulders appeared.

But you know, Mary, I said, I don't think God killed Herbert out of punishment.

I think bad things sometimes happen to fun people, and fun things sometimes happen to bad people.

I like to think there's a God who sorts all this stuff out, and There probably are some pretty magical universal forces that we just don't comprehend.

But there's no God who deals in pure justice.

Otherwise Herbert would have lived.

And Joel Eisenberg down there would have caught another case of throat spiders before choosing to do that monologue.

Mary's face turned sour again.

I could see anger in those hollow eyes and gnarled teeth.

But it faded into thoughtful reflection.

Then consternation.

Listen, I said, I also don't believe the superstitions around saying Macbeth in a theater theater either.

She gasped at my fatal slip of the tongue, and somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard an oboe.

But honestly, it was probably a creaky pipe.

There are lots of weird old noises in weird old buildings.

No reason to cram every little detail into a pessimistic interpretation.

Mary,

why don't...

You audition?

I said.

You'd be an amazing narrator.

I I thought that part was tailor-made for me, but your nightvale history through and through.

You're perfect.

You got this part sewed up.

She smiled again.

And then she said, well,

I'd certainly be better than that thing you call Joel.

It's like he's never even seen a play.

Yeah,

you get it, I said.

So, Mary Mulligan and I went down to the stage, just just as Joel finished his performance.

Sarah Sultan was about to begin her audition when everyone in the theater saw us.

There was a collective intake of breath.

A couple of people passed out.

Some started to run.

Some pointed, trying to warn me about the ghost, over my shoulder.

I turned to the director, Penny, and said, Mary would like to audition for the part of the stage manager.

And so Mary did.

And she got cast!

Though it was for the part of George's mother, which I don't think is the best fit, but I'm happy Mary gets to act on stage again.

And she gets to act opposite Steve Carlsberg, who's playing George's father.

Joel Eisenberg got cast as Big Knuckle Sal, the mob boss who gets gunned down in the second scene.

And if you're wondering who got the part of the stage manager, it wasn't me.

I didn't get cast at all.

Oh, I'm not mad.

Apparently you have to come to rehearsals in order to be in a stage play, and I put on my availability that I was unwilling to work nights or weekends or during the workday.

So that's fine.

But interestingly enough, Sarah Sultan got cast as the stage manager.

And I hate that I missed her audition.

Steve told me it was fire.

But I look forward to seeing the play.

Stay tuned next for the sound of a single oboe played somewhere in the world at this very moment.

Its effect on your life?

Yet to be determined.

Good night, Night Vale.

Good night.

Welcome to Night Vale is production of Night Vale Presents.

It is written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Kraner and produced by Disparition.

The voice of Night Vale is Cecil Baldwin.

Original music by Disparition.

All of it can be found at disparition.bandcamp.com.

This episode's weather was, Yes, this is a song about you, and no, I'm still not over it, by Friends for Sale.

Find out more at friendsforsale.bandcamp.com.

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Today's proverb, ugh, I'm over the moon.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated.

It is.

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We're talking Parasite the Home Alone, From Greece to the Dark Knight.

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And on our new show, The Best Worst, we explore the golden age of television.

To do that, we're watching the IMDb viewer-rated best and worst episodes of classic TV shows.

The episode of Star Trek, where Beverly Crusher has sex with a ghost, the episode of The X-Files, where Scully gets attacked by a vicious house cat, and also the really good episodes, too.

What can we learn from the best and worst of great television?

Like, for example, is it really a bad episode, or do people just hate women?

The best, worst, available wherever you get your podcasts.