You chose IIB: The Stage Manager

YOU CHOSE A (Graduate school in Syracuse)

You complete your graduate studies in upstate New York, where your thesis project, a Brechtian production of Cats, earns you maverick status. You move to the big city to search for work. In the classifieds, you find an opening for a crewmember on a new, musical adaptation of Hemingway’s story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. The producer, R.L. Shromp, is a gregarious, pink-cheeked man, but your gut tells you there is something sinister about him. At the first production meeting, he insists that a live lion must appear onstage. After much fuss is made, a lioness is hired on contract from the circus, as is the young lion tamer who is to maintain (and contain) her. The tamer turns out to be the very same smoldering beauty whom you saw during your visit to the circus, years ago. The spark you felt then now becomes an inferno, though he/she is cool and impossible to read.

One night, you arrive at rehearsal to find that the production has been shut down by the successful efforts of animal rights activists. Shromp vanishes. The lion tamer now needs a place to stay for a few days, and you would like it to be your apartment. Of course, the lion must stay somewhere, too. Do you
A) Take the tamer home with you and hide the lioness in the basement of your building
B) Let the tamer borrow some camping equipment to hide out with the lioness in Central Park or
C) Let this one go and look for another job

YOU CHOSE B (Makeup artist in circus)

You are employed as a circus makeup artist. You try to attract the attention of the apprentice lion tamer with the evocative limp, but he/she is too focused on work to pay you any heed. Finally, in a burst of inspiration, you make an elaborate and life-like lion costume for yourself. You wear this to the Halloween party and finally see a flicker of interest in the smoldering eyes of the apprentice. You manage to get him/her alone behind the big top, where at last you taste the lips for which you’ve longed. The two of you become an item, but you often feel insecure. The glamorous machismo of his/her profession, you feel, so radiantly outshines your own.

A new lioness named Lenore is brought to the circus from a rehabilitation facility in Texas. From the talk in the makeup trailer, you gather that the cat is troubled and restive, and the old man is unsure of what to do with her. One night, walking back to your trailer alone, you see the new lioness, near the trailers, standing on a card table where the clowns play gin rummy. She glances up at you, her tail twitching. She flattens her ears and issues a throaty snarl. Do you
A) Call for help
B) Pick up a wooden chair and attempt to distract the lioness yourself or
C) Run like hell

YOU CHOSE C (Internship)

You successfully complete an internship at the local opera company and are hired on as a costume assistant. Some nutcase of a director wants to use live animals in a new production of Aida, and you spend many hours gluing sequins onto harnesses. At the first dress rehearsal, you meet an animal wrangler, who is a young apprentice lion tamer from the circus. With smoldering eyes and an slight limp, he/she is the most mesmerizing creature you have ever met, and you hurry your cleanup each night so that you can linger by the lion cage each night. Your friendship blossoms into mutual love, the likes of which you have never known. As the show draws to an end, he/she asks you if you could be persuaded to work for the circus. You know that you might never see him/her again if you don’t join the troupe, and then there is that childhood dream of yours to work with lions... Do you
A) Run away with the circus
B) Tell him/her you will give it more thought
C) Ask the lion tamer to stay with you

GO!