image: the-real-meal.com
A series of mini-dramas based on public conversations, as overheard and rewritten by local playwright/director Aurora Stewart de Peña.
Overheard at Bazara
A table of people in their mid-twenties, none of them with any particularly outstanding features or garments, pass long, rectangular plates of expensive sushi.
Aviva: This is the one with the pine nut and avocado.
Marshall takes a roll between to silver chopsticks. He goes to dunk it in soy and wasabi.
Aviva: No don’t!
Ian: (across the table) No, she’s right. It doesn’t need soy.
Marshall puts the roll in his mouth, chewing like a thoughtful professor.
He swallows.
Marshall: It’s…
Aviva and Ian watch him. Marshall tilts his head up to the ceiling, presumably thinking about what’s just happened in his mouth.
Marshall: It’s unexpected.
Aviva: Yes!
Ian: Definitely.
Aviva: You don’t expect it. You don’t expect the pine nut.
Ian: I think that one’s my favourite.
Pause.
Ian: So what was it you said you were up to these days?
Marshall: I’m curating content for a porn website.
Pause.
Aviva: Oh, so you…
Aviva trails off.
Marshall: I go through the pictures and videos we get submitted to us and decide what goes up.
The whole table is looking at Marshall, now.
Ian: Oh man. That is an amazing job.
Aviva whacks Ian lightly on the arm.
Ian: Do you ever, like… do you ever… get to meet the girls?
Marshall: I mean, yeah, sometimes. But it’s not like–
Ian: Dream job!
Marshall: No, not really man. I mean you look at it all day, it starts to look like just … I don’t know, big tits, spread legs, cum shot, whatever.
Aviva: Seriously?
Marshall: It’s all just inventory.
Aviva nods. She picks up another long, rectangular plate full of expensive sushi.
Aviva: Have you tried this one with the mango and butterfish?
Marshall takes a roll.
Aviva: You do want a bit of the soy and wasabi with that.
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Aurora Stewart de Peña is half of the theatre company Birdtown & Swanville (the other half is Nika Mistruzzi). You can follow her on Twitter at @Aurorahhh.
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