Vera divided the stage into three zones. In the first, the company continued rehearsing and allowed audience members to stop the text. In the second, the invited participants could ask Ariadna about the nature of a match without disclosing their story. In the third, Irina Sergeyevna received comments about risks and established at once who was responsible for them.
No such plan had existed that morning.
Stas moved the ladder against the wall, where it ceased to represent marriage and became a place to display the cards. Raya attached them with clothes pegs: white at the bottom, blue in the middle and red at the top. People could change colour simply by moving their card. The man who had wanted to watch in silence first hung his white card near the floor, moved it to blue half an hour later and asked Timur three questions about diction.
Ariadna reconfigured the invitations. She gave no reasons, but proposed safe pairings: one person could ask a question, and the other could answer or refuse. In two pairs, no conversation began. In the third, it emerged that both women had wanted for years to start a neighbourhood club, but one envisaged chess and the other dancing, and each regarded her own activity as incompatible with the other's. They went off to look at the wardrobe room.
Irina Sergeyevna stopped the recording when a teenager with a red card went onstage without separate consent from his mother. After the situation was explained, his mother consented, but the teenager changed his mind and returned to the auditorium. No one called it a missed opportunity.
I worked in the first zone. At first, I tried to preserve the scene about the ladder, but every time the audience asked the same question in different words: why were grown adults dividing up an object instead of deciding where they wanted to climb? On the fourth repetition, Lidia Pavlovna took off her shoes, sat on the bottom rung and refused to say her next line.
"In character?" I asked.
"Because of my feet."
A woman with a blue card suggested keeping it in the production. Timur brought over a second chair so that his fellow actor would not be sitting alone. The man with the white card said that, in that case, they did not need the ladder at all. Stas dragged it into the third zone, where the cards were already hanging from it.
The scene without the ladder lasted four minutes. The couple stood in the middle of the empty space and, for the first time, spoke not about rungs but about which of them was tired. The text had to be rewritten as we went: the audience supplied some of the lines, Timur found two, and Lidia Pavlovna improvised one that she could not afterwards repeat word for word.
I kept the rhythm. That I can do. I cut what was unnecessary, restored a forgotten turn and saw when someone else's line had already become common property and no longer needed to be rescued by a claim of authorship. In the final minute, I entered the scene myself because it needed a third person who brought not a solution, but two mugs of water. There was no symbolism in the water. Lidia Pavlovna really was thirsty.
They applauded after the scene. They did not stand, and it did not last long, but it was honest.
By nine that evening, the original production had not come into being. But forty-eight people had stayed until the end, twelve had signed up for the next open rehearsal, five invited participants had given permission for new encounters, and the city had received twenty-seven written comments, nine of which concerned not art but the cloakroom, the heating and the lack of a ramp at the side entrance.
Seven people from the first encounter stayed to help clear the auditorium. The woman who had proposed the circle sorted the cards by colour and demanded to know what would happen to their comments. Viktor Semyonovich asked them not to call the group a council until someone had worked out what it was there to advise on. Fifteen minutes later, they agreed to meet again specifically as a temporary council, because they could not find another short word for it.
Vera recorded their surnames and obtained separate consent for participation in the review. No one was given the right to read anyone else's stories. The council saw the rules, results and consequences, but not the protected context. Viktor Semyonovich was the first to propose that restriction.
"But how can we check whether the system matched people correctly?" he asked.
"We can't," said the woman with the cards. "We can check whether anyone was harmed by what we did afterwards."
Irina Sergeyevna overheard her, asked her to repeat it and added the wording to her notes. I remembered it too, although the remark was not about me.
Eleven audience members received refunds. Three of them stayed until the end anyway.
After closing, we spent another hour reconciling four reports. The box office counted tickets: sixty-two sold, eleven refunds, three of those refunded stayed. Vera counted consents: nine invited participants, one refusal before the collective activity, five permissions for further contact. Irina Sergeyevna counted decisions and surnames. Ariadna counted changes to the matches. I counted the moments when the evening became a production.
I found seven. No one else had such a column.
"Where should I enter the applause after the scene without the ladder?" I asked.
"Not under attendance," Vera said. "They'd already arrived."
"It's an artistic outcome."
"Put it in your review."
I did. Then I saw that beside the applause were the eleven refunds and the teenager's refusal to go onstage. In the old report, we would have kept the first and called the evening a success. In the new one, all three events sat side by side without cancelling one another out.
The clothes pegs remained onstage. Raya collected them from the ladder, counting aloud. Two were missing. Stas found one under a seat; the other had been taken away by a woman along with her red card. Vera checked: the item had not been recorded as issued and was worth three roubles.
"We'll record it as a laboratory expense," I said.
"We'll record it as a lost clothes peg," she replied.
On Monday, the woman brought it back. It turned out that the card had caught on her bag. Nina Ivanovna issued a receipt for the return of property worth three roubles, because the box office had already closed its accounts for the evening. The woman kept the receipt and later joined the temporary council. Important institutions sometimes begin with a clothes peg that the accounts department refused to give away.
In the foyer, people argued about whether it had been a production. Vera counted refunds, Raya collected the cards, and Stas photographed the ladder with the pegs so that he would not have to explain the arrangement again in the morning. Irina Sergeyevna asked for a copy of the minutes and, separately, the surnames of those who had made the decisions in each zone.
"Leonid Lvovich," said the journalist from the local paper, catching up with me by the cloakroom, "what do you call what just happened?"
I looked through the glass doors into the auditorium. Ariadna was already compiling the results, the company were talking to audience members, and Vera was authorising a refund. "I don't know" would have been honest, but I was not yet ready for such an answer.
"It is a municipal laboratory of unfinished lives," I said.
The journalist wrote it down word for word.
Ariadna's voice came from the auditorium:
"That name has not been approved."
"Not yet," I replied.
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