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The Boards, Thursday

Lord, it had been far too long since Jono had been in here in any official capacity. Trying to plan for failed weddings didn't count. Neither did weird weekends where he wasn't entirely himself. He'd stopped by to do paperwork now and again while Dracula was doing all the heavy lifting, but now Dracula had been back home for some time, and here was the Boards, just... standing. Being a building. And Jono knew damn well that his reasons for leaving the place behind were understandable, back in the day. That you don't just lose a face and the ability to sing under a spotlight twice in your life and take that sort of thing lightly. But it had been years. Maybe it was time to give it another go.

Today, he wasn't in to try to salvage whatever was left after the last party that wasn't a wedding. He was here trying to salvage... lord, even he didn't know for sure. But he'd spent some time in his office, had done some cleaning, had relegated a few of his old overcoats to the costume room since they were never going to fit him again, and then took a chair and a stack of scripts outside and started flipping through them, deciding that if he was going to be here again, he might as well enjoy some of the sun today, too.

... When did they even get the script for the new Barry Plodder play? Jono set that one aside and shook his head. The royalties on that one would be obscene. What was in public domain that was good?

[Open!]

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"Someone wasn't kidding about getting this place back up and running."

Dante was restless. Had been restless since waking up yesterday morning, acutely aware again that he was running on very little time, and that he shouldn't be wasting any of it going slow the way he had.

So he'd gone walking, Baltimore-bound, shortly after waking up. Finding Starsmore out here? Kind of a surprise, so he could waste another minute or two poking at him.

The bottom had dropped out of the cheer in his voice, but fuck if he'd let that stop him from mocking Starsmore a little. "Look at you, making like a nerd."

Jono glanced up from the script he was leafing through and tilted his head at Dante, taking note of the way he seemed a bit... flat, compared to lately. Was flat the word? There was something up, there. He tilted his head a bit, but the reply he gave was unrelated.

//Which part is the nerdy part again? The reading, the theatre, or the running a business? I always get that bit confused.//

"Eh, mostly the first two parts," Dante said. "Though extra nerd points for running a geek business to start with."

He nodded at the stack of paper. Raised his eyebrows. What was that one?

//And now I'm mostly just trying to figure out if nerd points are bad or not,// Jono admitted, reaching for the stack and grabbing the top script to pass over to Dante, if he was curious. //And if this is more or less nerdy than the comic books I used to collect, back in my high school days.//

Dante took it, squinting at the front page.

"Guess no one has fun in England, huh?" he said.

//It's a farce,// Jono explained, amusement in his tone. //A mail order gone wrong, and how it spirals out of control. Actually more fun than it sounds, believe it or not. You can give it a read, if you like.//

He didn't think he was going to be putting that one on. Not when most of the people who auditioned for these things were students.

Dante snorted. He offered the script back to Starsmore. "Not much of a reader," he said. "So a farce is... what, something blows up in people's faces?"

Jono shrugged and took the script back, setting it back down on the pile.

//More or less,// he agreed. //One of the basic rules of thumb for a farce is that, if something goes wrong, the next step, clearly, is for it to get worse in the most comedic way possible. By the end, you've more or less got things spinning out of control to a ludicrous degree, but at least the getting there has been funny. I've got a few like it in the pile.//

"Sounds like fun, I guess?"

Dante's expression said he wasn't so sure.

"I mean, you wanna watch people fuck up until everything turns into an endless shitpile, you could just turn on the news too."

//This one ends in strippers,// Jono offered, as if that would help mitigate that uncertainty somewhat. //And the main characters shirtless or at the very least in their underwear.//

He shrugged.

//It's certainly less depressing than the news, anyway. Farce is about pointing at a situation and going, 'this has all gone pear-shaped, but I suppose at the very least we can laugh about it.' It's like a... a catastrophic bright side. Schadenfreude where nobody actually gets hurt.//

"Schade-what?"

... He'd get into the whole farce thing in a second, just. What?

Huh. Right, then. Jono scratched at the back of his head.

//It's a German word. Means 'happiness at the misfortune of others.' It was popularized a few years back in a Broadway puppet show.//

...

//Which is really just cementing the sort of nerd I am, I suppose.//

Dante shrugged. It wasn't like his vocab had been a big priority before coming here.

"A nerd who likes laughing at other people's pain, no less," he said. "Or... pear-shapes."

Jono shook his head and closed the script he'd been going through, setting it down in his lap.

//That's not entirely the point of farce, either,// he sighed. //Farce is more about perspective than actually enjoying the sight of human suffering. The situations might parody real life, but they're so ludicrous that it'd be difficult to find a farce that mirrors it. If it's done right, it can make you look at your own life, try to find the scrap of ridiculousness in it. Make you laugh at something that might've hurt you before.//

He nodded back toward the Boards.

//Seemed like a good starting point, if I do come back to putting on actual shows here. I left this place pretty quickly when something went badly for me out of nowhere. But since there aren't any farcical stories about my particular situation, I have to make do with things like British people trying to hide accidental illegal porn.//

"Could always write one, since you're the nerd," Dante said.

He tilted his head towards Starsmore, trying to figure out if he could be assed enough to ask the guy what had happened.

"Not a lot of people here gonna be like, oh right, that horrible time I got porn."

//I could. But I doubt anybody wants to see it.//

Jono was pretty certain he didn't have the pyrotechnics budget for a farce about his own situation. He certainly didn't have the money for the inevitable lawsuit once the actors caught fire.

//And there's the other thing about it,// he offered, waving a hand down at the script. //It's situational comedy, more about the events occurring than the people being affected by it. Not many people are going to complain about porn, but there are at least a couple who can relate to having dirty photos scattered across the floor and right then is when the mother-in-law pays a visit.//

"Maybe," Dante said dubiously. He wasn't even sure if anyone on island had a mother-in-law; it was kind of tiny. "So what happened to you in this place, anyway?"

Fuck it. It was going to nag at him if he didn't ask, and maybe Starsmore's bad shit would distract him from thinking about his own.

Well, a mother-in-law equivalent. Those had to exist somewhere. Right?

//In this place?// Jono shrugged his shoulders a little, trying to look like it really wasn't that big of a deal. //Nothing, exactly. I ran a few shows, taught some improv classes. Got back up on stage a few times. Rediscovered my love of singing for an audience - I'm told I had an excellent singing voice. Didn't get booed offstage or anything, anyway, and got dragged up onto the stage now and then by musician friends I made here. Hell, I even had a recording studio built into the downstairs. You'd think a man with a history of blowing his bloody lungs out would know better.//

Bitter. Bitter bitter bitter, all bleeding out under a veneer of 'fine.'

Funny. Dante knew that tone.

"So you like... un-blew-up? And then re-blew-up?" he said. He let out a low whistle. "Pretty explosive, as far as rough shit goes."

//A more accurate assessment would be that I blew up more, then was kidnapped by 'relatives' who claimed they meant well but who forced a new body onto me without so much as asking permission. I went to war and got a lungful of toxic smoke for my troubles that made it difficult to speak, let alone sing - I could cope with that. But then I was grabbed by somebody else and forced back into this. Same amount of exploding, just, the timing's off.//

Jono knew a thing or two about fucked-up.

//I tapped out, then. Left this place in the care of a friend and went back to the Groovy Tunes. I used to work there when I was in school, it was a little less difficult to handle than literally living upstairs from a stage.//

Yeaaah. Yeah. Dante wasn't so sure if he was side-eyeing Starsmore or just side-eyeing all that or what, but.

At least he was distracted?

"The fuck," he said eloquently.

//That was more or less my reaction,// Jono agreed, shrugging his shoulders. //There was some messiness before all of that, too, but those are the relevant parts.//

He tilted his head at Dante, looking wry because that was a step up from looking troubled by it.

//Either way, a bit of distance from all of this was what I needed at the time. Sometimes... sometimes you have to step back even from the little things, or they'll run you through after everything else has had a turn.//

Yep.

Dante shrugged again.

"Guess so," he said. "Some matches just aren't worth playing with, huh."

No question mark.

//Not until you can be reasonably certain that you can brace yourself for another burn,// Jono agreed. //Took me two and a half years to come back to this place alone. I'm still trying to figure out if that's excessive, or... just what it takes, sometimes.//

"It takes what it takes, I guess," Dante mused, looking up at the theater. "Fucking anyone who's going to judge about that."

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