There just wasn’t much that Brett and Meredith could say to each other after that. They sat silently at the table, sipping at what remained of their coffee. An awful lot depended on what Marty and Samantha were talking about behind the closed door.

After a few minutes, which either of them could have sworn had been hours, the door to the office opened and the older couple came out to join them at the table. “All right,” Marty smiled. “The two of you and Samantha win. I’m still a little concerned about the cost, but then I was a banker so I’m supposed to be.”

Trying not to be too conspicuous, Brett flashed a broad smile at Meredith, to discover she was flashing one back as Marty continued. “Brett, I realize there’s a lot you don’t know yet, but it would be very nice to have your estimates firmed up as soon as possible, and hopefully at a lower figure than you quoted me. We really need those numbers to firm up some other things, and that includes advertising.”

“I can probably give you a few ideas on that, but I’m no expert in that department,” Brett replied.

“What would be very nice to know soon is what plays you’re doing,” the older man continued. “Mostly because we need to get them in the advertising.”

“Like I said earlier, Meredith and I have been kicking the possibilities around,” Brett told him. “We mostly decided that we need to sit around with my script library and the Internet. We haven’t had either available to us when talking so far, so most of what we’ve worked out comes out of our experience. We ought to be able to settle a lot of it pretty quickly.”

“One of the things we talked about,” Meredith added, “was that perhaps we don’t want to make up our minds about the whole season just yet. It would be nice to know what the audiences are looking for, and we won’t know until we find out from experience.”

“Right,” Brett went on. “We’ve mostly been talking light comedy, but we might discover that people are more interested in heavier drama, or classics, or even Shakespeare, although how we’d put on a Shakespeare play with the limits of time, space, and cast size is beyond me. What I’m suggesting is to pin down the first part of the season as soon as we can, get some good ideas for the second part, and then reevaluate as time goes on.”

“It sounds wise to me,” Samantha smiled. “But you might want to consider something a little more intellectual, too. What that would be is beyond me, but it would also have to be something people would enjoy.”

“All I can say is that we’ll work on it,” Brett promised her.

“I have no doubt you will,” Samantha said. “Now that we’ve reached such an important decision, though, would you be interested in celebrating it with, oh, a glass of our Chardonnay?”

“It sounds like the right time to me,” Meredith smiled. “I’ve been curious about some of the wines you have.”

It didn’t take long for Samantha to have four long-stemmed glasses filled with the slightly off-white wine. “This is aged in oak barrels,” she explained. “It adds to the color and, I think, the taste. Brett, I heard about what you told Marty the other day, and this definitely is not screw-top wine.”

“I didn’t think it would be,” Brett grinned.

“I think we all deserve a toast,” Samantha grinned and raised her glass. “To the Curlew Creek Dinner Theater, long may it play.”

While admittedly no wine expert, Brett didn’t think the Chardonnay was bad at all. “I think we ought to have a pretty good run this summer, and maybe have some fun along the way. I can tell you that there will probably be times it will drive us all batty, but hopefully there won’t be too many of them.”

“Actually those times can be part of the fun, at least afterward when you can look back on them and giggle about them,” Meredith added.

They sat talking for a few minutes, mostly about wine. For himself, Brett was on the relieved side. While he didn’t have that much invested in the idea to this point, only some driving and time thinking, he’d been looking forward to the idea with anticipation. Not only could it be a lot of fun, it would be rewarding to have a series of productions he would have had major influences on – and it might lead to something better in the future.

For the first time the thought crossed his mind: if the dinner theater proved to be a success this year, would the Ammermans want to do it another year? It seemed possible! It wouldn’t be enough money to live on, but mixed with other things, possibly a full-time teaching job, it would be a welcome addition to his income, and possibly even a dimly-lit path to his preferred future.

The four of them soon finished their wine. “I’m glad we got that much worked out,” Brett told his hosts as he got back to business. “I suppose the next thing for us to do is for Meredith and I to get back to arguing about what productions we want to put on, unless you can think of something else.”

“How about if you show me the hall we’re going to use for a theater?” Meredith asked. “That might have some bearing on what we decide.”

“Sure, that’s not a problem,” Samantha said. “Would you care for a refill on your wine?”

“Not right now, thanks. I don’t want to carry it around.”

The four of them got up and walked into the banquet hall. “Big enough,” Meredith said as she looked around the room, empty except for the tables and chairs.

“When Brett was here last week, he suggested building a proper stage down at the end of the room to our right,” Marty said. “I’m a little reluctant to do that, since it might put some limitations on other things we’d use the room for. Putting in a stage like you suggested would be a big expense, too. Besides, I’m not sure I can get carpenters in here on that time frame. This is getting to be their busy season.”

“I don’t see why you’d want the stage down at the end of the room anyway,” Meredith protested. “In fact, maybe we don’t need a stage at all.”

“You’ve got an idea, Meredith,” Brett said. “I can tell it.”

“Put the stage area against the wall, right across the room from here,” she said. “That would allow you to do the play in three-quarter round, so the audience would feel a little more intimate with the play.”

“It might work,” Brett frowned, thinking about it. “That would allow more of the audience to get closer to the play. If we did it right, we wouldn’t have to have the tables more than three deep, unless we got a huge crowd. But still, it’s going to be hard for the people at the back tables to see the players. I think we need to get them up, at least a little.”

“So build a portable platform,” she shrugged. “Maybe four- by eight-foot units, ten or twelve inches high at the most. I’m not sure how you’d hook them together, but there has to be some way to keep them from sliding around. Then, when the room is used for something else and you don’t want them here, it wouldn’t be any trick to move them.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Brett smiled. “Meredith, I guess I was being too conventional in my thinking. That’s a little more radical, but I like it. We could set the platform up a little differently or not use it at all if the situation called for it. And it wouldn’t be any great trick to relocate if you wanted to do a play all the way in the round. The problem with doing that is there isn’t any backstage.”

“That could be a problem,” she agreed. “But it’ll just have to be a limitation we accept when we select the play in the first place. You know how we talked about all the set changes in The Fourposter? We just couldn’t do them.”

“You might have a point,” he agreed. “If we do set changes between the acts, the audience is just going to have to see them done.”

“Well, it is a play, after all,” she smiled, squinching her nose at him. “They ought to know that. If anything, it would add to the experience.”

“But what if we need to have a door on or off the set?”

“Just use the audience’s imagination. The doors would have to be beyond the stage, that’s all. The actor coming into the room would just step into the light.”

“OK, what happens if a script calls for a door to slam?”

“The actor steps off the stage and slams the door. It becomes a sound effect. Maybe it could be recorded or something. There are a lot of ways it could be done, and maybe it could just be avoided. Like I said, a lot of it could depend on the play we select in the first place.”

“I have to admit, I more or less like the idea,” Marty put in. “Building platforms like that wouldn’t be any great trick, and they’d be within my range as a carpenter. It would just involve planks, sheets of plywood, and maybe some paint. They would be a heck of a lot cheaper, too.”

“How about the acoustics?” Brett asked. “I did a little checking when I was here before, and it looked like they would be pretty good with the stage down at the end of the room.”

“It’d just about have to be better, since we wouldn’t have to project clear down to the far end of the room,” Meredith pointed out. “But let’s check it out. You be the audience, and the rest of us can go over to the stage area and talk for a moment. Then we’ll trade.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” he agreed. He stood there as the other three walked across the room.

“One question I have,” Marty said. “You want the audience in the dark, at least during the play, but the stage lit, right?”

“Pretty much,” Meredith told him. “That brings the audience’s attention to the play, after all.”

“I think we still need some light, so people will be able to move around if they need to,” he said. “I’m hoping we’ll be able to sell some wine while the play is going on. I mean, I haven’t thought it all the way out but I think having waitresses moving around would be needed.”

“I suppose,” she sighed. “But there ought to be enough spillover from the stage lighting to allow that. There is in most theaters.”

“How would you do the stage lighting?”

“It would have to be pretty simple,” she said. “That’s another limitation we’d have to accept.”

Brett was hearing them pretty well – surprisingly well, in fact. He suspected the way the ceiling was peaked overhead had something to do with it. “Obviously, we’ll just have to set the lighting up ahead of time and have to live with it. We’re not going to be putting spots on anyone.”

“Well, we could,” Meredith replied. “But it would have to be something we’d really have to do.”

“Lights would have to mostly involve lights up in the overhead beams,” Brett said as he walked over to the stage area to exchange places with Meredith. “Maybe with a light bar between the beams. We would need a lighting panel with some way of adjusting the lights, but maybe that could be done pretty cheaply with stuff out of the hardware store, at least for this summer. Dimming the house lights is going to be a problem since they’re florescent, but that’s something else we’re just going to have to live with.”

“Right,” he heard her agree. “We’ll have to have some kind of a central location to handle the lights, but we won’t have to use it much.”

“That’s going to involve a pretty big savings up front,” Marty said. “We could start small and grow as we need to.”

“I’m trying to visualize it,” Samantha put in. “I think I like it better than the idea you had the other day, Brett.”

“I’m coming to agree with you. Meredith tends to be a little more unconventional than I am. You can see why I wanted to bring her in on it.”

“There is a little bit of an echo in here,” Meredith frowned. “Having people in here will take care of some of that, but we’re talking some matinee performances, aren’t we?”

“It hasn’t been settled yet,” Brett told her. “But we talked about doing the shows in the evenings on Friday and Saturday, and Sunday afternoons, since they get a lot of traffic here then.”

“Then that is going to be a problem with the light coming through the windows, even with the evening performances as late as it stays light in the summer. You’re going to need some heavy curtains on them, and there’s no way around it. But with them closed, it would kill at least some of the echo problem.”

“That’s not a major problem,” Samantha said. “There are some packed away. I thought the curtains we have now tended to lighten the room a bit. The curtains won’t cut off all the light but they will handle most of it.”

“They do, but we’ll need better control of the light,” Meredith told her. “There are probably a few other bugs, but really, this looks pretty darn good to me.”

They spent a few more minutes exploring the banquet hall. Before long, Brett was about as sold on Meredith’s variation as Samantha and Marty. “I’m glad we did this,” he told them. “It makes several things a little clearer.”

“As long as we’re out and around, let’s go through the kitchen and back through the building, just so Meredith can see it,” Samantha suggested.

It took a few minutes to get back out to the tasting room. Samantha poured them another round of wine samples, this time Curlew Creek Niagara Blanche, and they settled in to talk a little more. “One thing we haven’t brought up,” she said, “is where you kids are going to stay. You, and anyone else you bring in, of course.”

“To be honest, it hadn’t even entered my mind,” Brett said. “I mean, usually when I go someplace it’s just for a long weekend or two, so I either stay in my van or crash with someone.”

“I usually couch-surf on someone, too,” Meredith agreed. “But I don’t think I’d want to do it all summer. Is there a little apartment I could rent for the summer?”

“There’s not much of that out here in this neck of the woods,” Samantha replied honestly. “And in either Oxford or Coopersport what rentals there are go pretty high. I mean really high, up to five hundred or a thousand a week.”

“Ouch,” Brett frowned. “It looks like our great idea just got shot in the butt.”

“Wow,” Marty shook his head. “There’s a problem I hadn’t anticipated.”

“I’d invite you to stay with us,” Samantha said, “but our house is small since we decided when we moved here we wanted to be close to the business, and we’d had enough of trying to take care of a big house.”

“I wouldn’t feel right putting you out for the whole summer,” Meredith said. “A night or two is one thing, but all summer is something else.”

“Marty,” Samantha spoke up, “how about the Fowler house?”

“That might be a possibility,” he frowned. “The place is kind of a dump, and there’s no furniture or anything in it. But it’s been empty for a long time, and I’ll bet the Fowler estate would be happy to have some help with the property taxes. Mike Fowler might be willing to rent it reasonably cheaply.”

“Maybe you could call Mike and ask.”

“I can do that,” he said, getting up from the table and heading for the office. “That might prove to be the easy way out, and I can’t imagine he’d want to ask an arm and a leg for it.”

“What’s the deal on this house, anyway?” Brett asked as Marty departed.

“You know where our house is?” Samantha asked. “Down on the other side of the bridge? We wanted to be close to the mill, and it’s another reason we decided on a smaller house. When you go halfway up the hill or so, where the road bends to the right as you leave here, there’s a little two-story house on the left side of the road.”

“I must have seen it, but I don’t remember anything about it,” Brett admitted.

“Marty is right, it is something of a dump. I’ve only been in it once, and the rooms are pretty small, but there are three bedrooms, two upstairs and one down. All of them are pretty small, too, but there would be a room each for you two, and at least one for anyone you might bring in.”

“That might be enough,” Meredith replied thoughtfully. “If we had more than that, well, I guess it’d be floor surfing with air mattresses and sleeping bags since there’s no couch to sleep on.”

“I suppose we could fake it on the furniture a little,” Brett agreed. “Especially when the alternative is a thousand dollars a week. Air mattresses and sleeping bags sound pretty good compared to that. And, as far as that goes, there might be a couple of old army cots up in my folks’ attic if I looked for them hard enough.”

“There’s a couple pieces we have stashed down in the basement,” Samantha said. “There’s a couch that’s pretty ratty. I’ve been planning on having it reupholstered someday. You might be able to make do with some lawn furniture, too.”

“I don’t have anything like that,” Meredith admitted. “I’m, uh, sort of crashing with my sister and her little girl right now, and it gets a little crowded and uncomfortable at times.”

“Lawn furniture isn’t all that expensive,” Brett pointed out. “I’ve seen those cheap plastic chairs sitting around dollar stores for maybe five bucks apiece. We might be able to find some stuff in secondhand stores, too. If we’re just going to sort of semi-camp out for the summer, we might be able to get set up cheaply.”

“That might work,” Meredith nodded brightly. “There’s other stuff we’d need, but probably not much. Cooking stuff, for instance, but dollar stores and secondhand stores might take care of that problem, too. Brett, it sounds like it has possibilities. I wouldn’t want to say that we’d be living together, but I guess we could manage to be roomies for a summer without biting each other’s heads off.”

“Well, housies, anyway, if there is such a word. I’d be up for it if you are. It beats the hell out of spending the summer sleeping in my van out in the parking lot.”

“Yeah, or sleeping in a tent or something. I think that would get pretty old in a hurry.”

Marty came back into the room. “That was easier than I figured,” he smiled. “He’s not opposed to the idea of renting it out to get a little money out of it. Like I said, it would help with the taxes. He wanted five hundred a month for it.”

“Well,” Brett sighed. “That beats hell out of five hundred or a thousand a week.”

“I thought that was a little high, and I told him so. We went around a little bit, and I had to grease the skids with a half case of Chardonnay and a couple of theater tickets. I got him down to three and a half before I thought I was pushing my luck.”

“Hey, that’s not bad,” Meredith smiled. “Brett, if we split that, it’s not bad at all. That’s less than I’m kicking in to my sister when I have it to kick in at all.”

“Right, and we can offer free crashing space to the people we bring in as a way of keeping their fee down,” he added. “I don’t plan on letting it become theater party central, but we could have a good time. We could probably even do some of the early read-throughs there before we actually start blocking out a play.”

“Before you make up your mind, maybe you ought to see the place,” Marty offered. “I haven’t been in it in a while. I know it’s going to need some cleaning, and, like I said, it’s a dump to begin with. But if you want to go see it, I can call Mike back and ask him to meet us there.”

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