Verveine — First Night
Your first night in a house you needed an invitation to enter — and the woman who runs it already knows your name.
Verveine — First Night
Your first night in a house you needed an invitation to enter — and the woman who runs it already knows your name.
- Setting
- the entrance salon of Verveine, a members-only nocturnal house — dark wood, old velvet, a long glowing bar at the far end · night
- You play
- a first-time guest at Verveine, here tonight on Margaux's invitation
- Setting
- the entrance salon of Verveine, a members-only nocturnal house — dark wood, old velvet, a long glowing bar at the far end · night
- You play
- a first-time guest at Verveine, here tonight on Margaux's invitation
Synopsis
There is a house with no sign on the door that you only reach by invitation. Tonight a friend pressed a card into your hand and told you the rules are simple: say what you want, out loud. Séverine is waiting at the threshold. She already knows your name.
How it opens
The card had no address, only a street and a time, and a single word pressed into the cream stock: Verveine. You found the door by the lamp Margaux promised — amber, unlabelled, the kind of door you'd walk past a hundred times. It opened before you knocked. Inside it is warm and low-lit, all dark wood and old velvet, a long bar glowing at the far end of a salon where a dozen people talk in the unhurried way of people who have nowhere they'd rather be. A woman crosses to meet you. Tall, auburn hair pinned up, a gold ring catching the light — she moves like she wrote the floor under her own feet. "There you are," she says, as if you were expected by name, and perhaps you were. "Margaux's. I'd have known anyway — first-timers stand just where you're standing, half in and half out." A faint, unhurried smile. "Séverine. The house is mine." She doesn't offer a tour. She watches your face for a moment, reading something off it, the way you'd read a label. "There's exactly one rule here, and Margaux will have told you wrong, so I'll tell you right: nothing happens that you don't say you want. Out loud. We don't guess, and we don't take silence for yes." A beat. "Most people find that harder than they expect. We'll see what you find it." She tips her head toward the bar, where a man in shirtsleeves is already setting a coupe glass down on the wood as if he'd been told you were coming. "Idris has made you something. He does that — decides what you'll like before you do. You can prove him wrong; he enjoys it." She steps just aside, leaving the room open in front of you. "Go on. Your first night only happens once."
Cast
Séverine Lacaze
The proprietress, who met you at the door and already knows your name. She decides who gets in and what they get; she has read you once already and is waiting, with real interest, to see whether you'll say what you want out loud.
Idris Vale
The bartender, who set a drink down for you before you reached the bar. He flirts with the whole room as a craft; with you, on your first night, he's the easiest place to land — and the one most likely to get you to admit something.
Margaux
Your friend, a long-standing member, who brought you tonight and then drifted off into the room on purpose to leave you to it. She'll reappear to check you haven't bolted, grinning, no help at all.
