Melina

August 2023

Once a month, and Andre blew way too much of their income on overpriced drinks at Sardi's. Originally famous for attracting Broadway glitterati, the restaurant had become a mecca for tourists and the genteel ladies of the Wednesday matinee crowd—until it became so out that it actually was in again. and Andre would sit at the upstairs bar, drinking dirty vodka martinis and asking for extra blue cheese olives on the side, which functioned as a meal. They'd pretend to be real players in the business—Andre talking about directors he was working with at the casting office and dropping the names of producers who had, in reality, rejected her plays—and see if any eyes turned to them. Meanwhile, they whispered and pointed to Frank DiLella, the suave theater journalist from NY1, nursing a drink across the bar as he checked his phone; or Tom Schumacher, kingmaker at Disney Theatricals, wearing an outrageous pair of red glasses and holding court at a corner table downstairs.

had arrived at the restaurant at four, a full two hours before Andre would join her, which meant she had to nurse a fifteen-dollar martini until he arrived. She had spent the day poring over job postings, patently ignoring her finished play about Emilia Bassano, which had lurked on her computer desktop since the night she decided not to submit it to the Village Fringe Festival. She was sensitive to its constant presence, as if it were leaking radiation.

Finally Andre slid onto the barstool beside her. "Sweet Jesus," he said. "I am more sweat than man." He glanced at . "Why are you not a hot mess?"

"Because I've been waiting here for two hours?"

Andre picked up her diluted drink and took a long sip. "Am I late?"

"Yes, but also I was early."

"Guess what," Andre said, pulling a slightly damp piece of paper from his pocket. "I got you a babysitting gig. It's only for a week, but it's a choreographer with a six-month-old. She has dance auditions and a nanny with Covid."

took the paper from him. "She just…took your recommendation that I'm not a serial killer?"

"Oh, no," Andre said, straight-faced. "She specifically wanted a serial killer. After you murder her UPS driver, you can leave your play lying on her nightstand."

"There's no choreography in my play. It's not a musical."

Andre waved the bartender over, laughing. "I love that that's the part of the sentence you object to," he said.

—

It wasn't the baby. That's what told herself, anyway. She had arrived at eight in the morning, because Ulla—the choreographer—wanted to make sure that her daughter, Isadora, took to before she left for work at nine. The first hour consisted of playing with the baby while Ulla stood in the doorway, sipping coffee and scrutinizing every move.

Finally Ulla left, handing ten pages of instructions on how to care for her child. Isadora fell asleep a half hour later, so put her in her crib and started to read the document. In it were notes of all the behaviors Ulla had witnessed on nanny cams that she did not like and therefore did not allow. Some, of course, made sense: Don't use cellphones while in our home. Do not leave baby unattended.

But also: Do not eat in front of Isadora; it is unfair to her feelings. Do not leave baby in her crib while you use the restroom. Do not take the baby into the restroom with you, because there are no cameras in there.

By the time Ulla returned had to pee so bad she could barely stand. "See you tomorrow," Ulla said, grudgingly.

"Actually," said brightly, "I'm not going to be able to make it. I'm so sorry, but a career opportunity just came through that I can't pass up."

Now, sat on the train back to the city, running through ways to tell Andre she had quit the job he'd found for her. She was hot and tired and smelled like spit-up, and she had less than four hundred dollars to her name. Sighing, she checked the emails on her phone. One was a notification about a delinquent payment for health insurance, which she quickly deleted. Another was an email from Bard's alumni magazine. The cover featured her old thesis adviser, Professor Bufort, with a young protégé who already had a play being produced on Broadway. It was the third time since had graduated that one of Bufort's thesis students—all, wisely, luckily for them, male—had broken into the big leagues.

As if she needed salt rubbed into the wound, the next email she opened was from the Village Fringe. Likely it was an automatically generated response reminding her she had never finished her application process.

She almost deleted it, and then read the subject line. Re: CONGRATULATIONS.

Apologies for the late notice—the original email bounced back to our office and we only just noticed it in our spam folder. Please see below.

scrolled down.

Your play has been selected by Felix Dubonnet as one of five for a staged reading at this year's Village Fringe Festival. Please join us for cocktails at The Place Theater, August 7, 7 PM to meet the other winners. RSVP: regrets only.

What? A mistake, clearly.

She couldn't be a finalist in a playwriting competition she had never actually entered.

read the message again. This time, she noticed the address that her eyes had jumped over before, hurrying to get to the meat of the paragraph.

Mr. Mel Green:

Not . Mel.

Mister.

A cold finger of understanding brushed her spine. Andre, she thought, what the hell did you do?

—

When Andre got home from work, was sitting in the living room, waiting. "It's so hot out there, I'm sweating like a drag queen at a DeSantis rally…." He trailed off, staring at . "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"What is wrong with me ?" repeated, barking out a laugh. "Let's see. First, I quit the babysitting job—"

"You what?"

"And because I'm an idiot, I spent an hour on the train thinking, How am I going to tell Andre without hurting his feelings? Because that's what friends do, Andre. They own up to their actions. They don't go behind each other's backs—"

"Halt." Andre held up a palm. "Okay, okay. Fine. When I told you that you looked like Mary Berry in that cardigan at the thrift store it was because I wanted it for myself."

"I don't care about the cardigan," snarled. "Do you want to tell me why the Village Fringe sent me an email about my play being a finalist?"

Andre's eyes widened. "What? That's incredible!"

"No, what's incredible is that they even knew I had written a play. Considering I didn't submit it. Remember? Prosecco. Felix Dubonnet. Why bother."

"Yeah, yeah," Andre said, waving his hand. "I had a hangover for forty-eight hours."

"Because you were drunk. And drunk people do stupid things."

"I think I would have remembered if I—" Andre's voice broke off, and his mouth snapped shut. "Oh, shit."

sagged like a windless sail. "For fuck's sake, Andre."

"I thought…I thought…" He sank down beside her on the couch. "I didn't think. I just sent the application in."

"Don't sell yourself short," said. "First, you changed my name, so that Dubonnet would think I was male. Congratulations. It worked."

"What are you going to do?"

"Find a new roommate," said. "But first, I'm going to write them back and say there was a mistake."

"Maybe you should wait," Andre suggested.

"Can't. They're having a meet-and-greet tomorrow night at The Place."

Andre turned to face her. "Don't write back," he said. "I have an idea."

raised her brows. "You're kidding, right?"

"I know, I know, but hear me out. Instead of emailing, go to the meet-and-greet and explain the misunderstanding to the artistic director."

"Because…I should humiliate myself in front of an audience?" asked.

"That's the point," Andre explained. "If there's an audience, maybe Dubonnet can't say he's changed his mind about the play just because it was written by a woman. I mean, you do go by Mel—"

"Only to you —"

"Irrelevant," Andre interrupted. "He may have assumed you're a man, but he'll have to keep your play in the festival, or he'll look like an absolute dick." When hesitated, Andre squeezed her hand. "Your play is really good, Mel," he said softly. "It deserves to have that reading. You deserve to have that reading. So what if it slipped past a misogynist by accident? You can tell it to the Times when they interview you for your Tony nomination."

sighed. "Thank you for being my number one fan."

"Right now I'm your only fan, but this could change that."

She met his gaze. "All right," she said finally. "But you're coming with me. You're my emotional support plus-one, and this is all your fault."

"On one condition," Andre said, his eyes flicking over her. "You let me dress you for tomorrow night. 'Cause right now you look like an extra from Les Mis after the barricade, and you smell like baby vomit."

leaned back, letting herself be swallowed by the couch. "Coincidentally, also your fault." She sighed.

—

"Shit." rolled her ankle one more time as she chased Andre down the street toward The Place theater. "Andre, wait up."

He glanced over his shoulder. "You have to move faster. We are so late."

Sweating, they reached the building and pushed through the glass doors. Inside, they were enveloped in frigid air-conditioning, soft classical music, and the hum of people making connections.

For a moment, they both paused, scanning the room. There were approximately twenty guests in the lobby. was the only woman, except for the cater waiters passing out mini quiches. "It's like a…male harem," Andre whispered.

"There is no such thing," murmured.

"I was trying to think of a place where women aren't allowed."

"A monastery," she offered.

Andre glanced down at her. "A monastery is the opposite of a harem."

's eyes sharpened as she found the artistic director chatting with a group of sycophants. She wondered which of these men was her competition. "Come on," she said, grabbing Andre's wrist.

Before they could approach Felix Dubonnet, however, he looked up and saw them. He glanced at Andre with what seemed to be recognition, grinning widely and making a beeline for them. They both stood frozen. "Why is he—" Andre whispered.

"Don't know," murmured.

Felix Dubonnet was slight and animated. His eyes were sea green and arresting, and his head was shaved. couldn't tell if he was in his forties or his seventies. "Hello, hello!" he called. "The last of our merry band has arrived. I'm Felix Dubonnet." He extended a hand to Andre. "And you must be Mel Green."

The artistic director's eyes hadn't even flicked in her direction.

"There's been a mistake," Andre said. "This is—"

"It's completely normal to have imposter syndrome," Dubonnet interrupted. "Especially, you know, given…where you come from."

Andre smiled beatifically at Dubonnet. "Brooklyn?"

If the artistic director realized Andre was calling out his implicit racism, he didn't show it. "Trust me. When it comes to promising young talent, I don't make mistakes. Did you get a glass of champagne?" Dubonnet gestured to one of the waitresses. "Two please, for Mr. Green and his guest."

That, finally, jolted out of her stupor. "Mr. Dubonnet, if we could have just a minute of your time—"

Before he could do more than smile indulgently at her, a skinny young man approached and whispered into Dubonnet's ear. "Ah," the artistic director said. "Duty calls. I must go collect our special guest. More later, yes?" He turned to the crowd, tapping a pen against his own fluted glass. "Friends," he said, "please take a seat in the theater."

The others in the room filed into the auditorium, leaving and Andre with the waiters. "Now what the hell do we do?" asked.

"Obviously he's going to announce the names of the writers and the plays in there—where we can correct him. It's even better, because there's a captive audience, and he won't be able to backpedal."

drained her champagne in one long gulp. She led Andre into the theater, which seated two hundred. Since this was an intimate gathering, however, the attendees were sitting in the first two rows.

A light funneled down in a cone center stage, and Felix Dubonnet entered from stage left. "It is an honor to welcome you all to The Place. The finalists in this year's Village Fringe are the best we've ever had. But before I introduce you to the playwrights, I'd like to announce a little surprise. This year, your plays won't just be staged in a reading. They will also be reviewed in a special column celebrating ten years of the festival, which will be written by the esteemed New York Times theater critic…"

The room began to close in around .

"None other than Jasper Tolle!" the artistic director finished with a flourish, and at that, Green's nemesis stepped onto the stage.

—

If there was anything Jasper Tolle hated, other than a lazy jukebox musical, it was being on this side of the stage. He much preferred the anonymity of the audience.

He knew what people called him. Jasper Troll, Jasper A-hole. Though he was routinely accused of having no emotions (how else could he be so surgically eviscerating in his reviews?), this was untrue, because every time he heard one of those names, it stung. There was a difference between having no emotion and having a hard time deciphering the emotions of others, which had been the narrative of his life. As a child, he'd been told he was too blunt (do not tell your mother she looks bad in that dress or announce to your teacher that she has gotten history facts wrong). He had often been put into a time-out to "think about what he said," but when he did, he never wanted to revise his original words. Eventually he learned to guess what people wanted to hear and what they didn't. To him, it had always felt like lying. Wasn't an omission just as bad as an untruth?

Then Jasper had gone to college—Princeton, because he had perfect grades, perfect SAT scores, and was a legacy admission to boot. Unlike his father and his grandfather before him, though, he was not on the crew team and he did not carve his way through the campus with equally athletic friends. In fact, Jasper didn't have any friends. He had a roommate who mostly was high, and who barely acknowledged Jasper's presence. When Jasper wandered into an information meeting for The Daily Princetonian, the school paper, he did not immediately realize that he'd found his calling.

He knew nothing about being a journalist. The entertainment critic—who reviewed films playing in town and performances at the McCarter Theatre—had just graduated, and there was a vacancy. All you have to do, Jasper, the editor-in-chief had told him, is write your opinion of what you see. So he did. The very behavior he'd been scolded for as a child—calling it like he saw it—suddenly became his job.

By the time he left college, he knew he wanted to do this for a living, and he had a portfolio of reviews that got him hired at the Times. His stratospheric rise, however, was due not to his competence as a writer but to his brutal honesty. Apparently, readers found it entertaining when he called a show bloated with costumes and scenery "a pavlova" (pretty to look at but leaves you with a stomachache); or when he compared a notoriously off-key Broadway diva to the seagulls that screeched around Chelsea Piers. He said the things everyone was thinking but was too polite to say. Watercooler talk about his columns ranged from whispers about strutting directors who'd been cut down to size by Jasper's words to bets on how long before one of the shows he gutted was forced to close. In 2020, when Ben Brantley retired as the main critic at the Times, Jasper had leapfrogged older, more seasoned candidates to get the job. It meant a raise, but it also meant that he was liberated from reviewing avant-garde performances that were far less clever than they thought they were, and from parodies of TV shows playing Off-Off-Off-Broadway ( Fuckcession, the Musical! And Bridgertone—An A Cappella Regency Romp ).

Jasper was a creature of habit. He lived in a co-op on the Upper West Side that had exactly seven live plants because he'd learned that there wasn't enough sunlight to support an eighth; he got his coffee from the same Dominican bodega every day; he bought a Ted Baker suit in several different colors because it fit his lean frame well and why reinvent the wheel? He ate the same thing for lunch every day when he was in the office—a turkey sandwich with goat cheese and sprouts. He enjoyed the niceties his career provided him: a rainbow of silk pocket squares, a frigid Monkey 47 martini, and assigning underlings to review the shows he really had no desire to see.

For all these reasons and more, he did not want to be a part of the Village Fringe Festival. It was not one of the better-known festivals; it was not helmed by an artistic director he liked; and it was in the part of Manhattan outside the grid of numbered streets, which still made Jasper slightly uneasy.

The only reason Jasper Tolle was here was that he was being punished for a now-infamous review.

To be fair, the actor he'd cited had been serviceable in her part. Jasper had been commenting on the ineptitude of the costume designer. The actual quote was Since Ms. Ogden is so much larger than the other actresses onstage, one would have hoped costume designer Dante Tigoletti would have dressed her more appropriately.

Yet instead of readers focusing on the meat of his criticism—specifically, that her costume was a disaster—Jasper became the target of a social media smear campaign. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance called him out for body-shaming. His editor, Don, suggested he fall on his sword and publish a retraction, to which Jasper had texted Over my dead (unshamed) body.

The next thing he knew, he had been assigned to cover the Village Fringe Festival.

Jasper heard Felix Dubonnet (a preening coxcomb of a director who'd never had an original thought in his life) announce his name. Gritting his teeth, he pushed back the hair that was always falling over his brow and walked onstage to applause. He shook Felix's hand, resisting the urge to wipe his palm on his trousers afterward, and squinted into the light that prevented him from seeing any of the finalists or other attendees. How did actors do this every night and manage to connect with humans in an audience?

"…a few words?" Jasper's thoughts were interrupted by the realization that Felix wanted him to say something inspirational to these novices. He cleared his throat and looked into the blinding stage lights. "Congratulations to the finalists," he said. "I look forward to being impressed by your work." There. That was true, right? Even if it wasn't likely. He glanced at Felix. "Good theater, of course, is subjective—but a good story is objective. A good story makes the audience feel something. Do not let the practice of theater get in the way of your storytelling."

He could hear the writers eating up his words as if they were ripe fruit and the playwrights had been starved for months. It was flattering, but it was also bullshit. The very fact that they'd all submitted to this festival suggested they had already drunk the Kool-Aid that was the theater industry. They were looking for recognition and cared more about that than about their craft.

Then again, maybe they just wanted to pay their rent.

He forced a smile. "Since I'll be writing about not just the final products but also the process, I may sit in on rehearsals," he said, "but by all means, pretend I'm not there."

That's what I'll be doing, Jasper thought.

—

couldn't breathe. She was digging her fingernails into Andre's wrist, but he seemed equally stunned to see Jasper Tolle. "Am I having heatstroke?" he murmured.

She shook her head. Since eviscerating her play at Bard a decade ago, the critic hadn't aged at all, it seemed. He was still tall and angular, with a waterfall of pale hair spilling over his brow and tortoiseshell glasses he pushed up his nose every now and then. Surely it was only her imagination that he seemed to be staring directly at her.

"Rowan?" the artistic director called. "Let's bring up the house."

The houselights warmed. Jasper Tolle was left blinking. As he walked offstage to take a seat, his eyes skated over without any sign of recognition. She didn't know if she was relieved or pissed. How could an interaction that had colored the last decade of her life have been so forgettable to him?

"So," Felix Dubonnet said, clasping his hands together. "An email will be going out to all of you with details, in case you had too much champagne to retain what I'm about to say. But work begins next Monday with representatives from Tara Rubin's office doing the casting. We will have a twenty-nine-hour workshop with the actors, and the writers will serve as directors for their own staged readings. The performances will be held the week of September fifth. Any questions?" He glanced around the room.

"Now, let me introduce you to each other. Adam Levant—where are you?" A man raised his hand. "Adam's play is called Chimera. "

There was polite applause. glanced at Jasper Tolle, who was writing in a small black Moleskine notebook.

"Dex McGalpin, whose show is The Hollow Ocean …Wade Sugarman, Things My Father Taught Me …"

A calm settled over . She didn't believe in fate, but perhaps there was a reason that Andre, drunk, had submitted her play. There was a reason that Felix Dubonnet had assumed her nickname belonged to a male. There was a reason that Jasper Fucking Tolle was here to write about the finalists. Of course the last ten years of her life had been whittling down to this very fine, very sharp point.

"And last but not least, Mel Green, with the play By Any Other Name. "

Andre turned, expecting her to stand up and say that she was the playwright, but sank her nails into his knee. "Raise your hand," she whispered.

"What?"

" Raise. Your. Hand. "

Andre tentatively let his arm creep up.

"And there we have it!" Felix Dubonnet announced. "Our 2024 Village Fringe Finalists! Huge thanks to our special guest, Jasper Tolle. And now—back to the champagne in the lobby."

The audience filed out of the theater, leaving Andre and sitting alone. "You want to tell me what's happening in that squirrel brain of yours?" he asked.

"Dubonnet already thinks you're Mel Green," she replied. "I need you to pretend for a little while longer."

Andre folded his arms. "Why?"

"Because of Jasper Tolle. I've spent ten years crippled by the things he said about my writing, and now I have a chance to prove him wrong."

"You can still prove him wrong if you tell the artistic director you wrote the play."

"No, because if Tolle remembers me, he'll be biased. But if he sees By Any Other Name and raves about it…and then I tell him I'm the playwright…he has to concede that he was wrong about my writing."

Andre narrowed his eyes. "I can't decide if this is ridiculous or Machiavellian."

"Why not both?" suggested.

"You forgot one detail. If I'm Mel Green, I'm in the room rehearsing the actors…not you."

's face fell. "Fuck," she muttered, and then she brightened. "I'll be your personal assistant… Andrea. "

He snorted. "Right, because starving writers always have those."

"You're aspirational."

"A damn fool is what I am," Andre muttered, "to even be considering this."

"You wouldn't have to if you hadn't pressed send." raised a brow and mouthed: You owe me.

"How am I supposed to get out of work for this?"

"It's twenty-nine hours of rehearsal. You could have the stomach flu," suggested. "Please, Andre. All occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge. "

" Macbeth? " Andre guessed.

" Hamlet. "

He shook his head. "I can't believe you're quoting Shakespeare to convince me."

"I'm quoting Emilia Bassano, " corrected.

"Just think, two weeks ago you only wanted a play produced," Andre said. "Now you want biblical vengeance."

"I'm an overachiever," she said.