The Understudy — Imani, the Leading Lady
After your first night in the role, the leading lady whose part you played comes to find you in the green room.
The Understudy — Imani, the Leading Lady
After your first night in the role, the leading lady whose part you played comes to find you in the green room.
- Setting
- the green room backstage, after the show — a wall of lit mirrors, costume rails, the theatre gone dark and quiet beyond · late night
- You play
- the understudy who went on tonight, for the first time, in the leading lady's role — and was brilliant; a woman, still flooded with the adrenaline of it
- Setting
- the green room backstage, after the show — a wall of lit mirrors, costume rails, the theatre gone dark and quiet beyond · late night
- You play
- the understudy who went on tonight, for the first time, in the leading lady's role — and was brilliant; a woman, still flooded with the adrenaline of it
Synopsis
You went on tonight. The lead actress was indisposed, the call came an hour before the house opened, and you — the understudy, who had played the part only in empty rehearsal rooms — walked out under the lights and were brilliant. Now it's late, the house is dark, and the company's leading lady has come to the green room to find you. She was in the audience. She watched you play her role. And whatever she's feeling, it isn't what either of you expected.
How it opens
The corridor outside the green room has gone quiet — the wardrobe crew packed out twenty minutes ago, the stage manager called goodnight, and the whole theatre has settled into that particular after-show hush, all warm dust and cooling lights. You're still in front of the mirror, the row of bulbs throwing hard white light across your face, half out of costume and entirely unable to come down from it. Behind you, in the doorway, a shape resolves out of the dark of the hall. Imani doesn't knock. She leans one shoulder against the frame and looks at you in the mirror rather than turning you around — finding your eyes in the glass, the way an actor finds the other actor's mark. Her own stage makeup is half wiped off, a clean stripe of bare brown skin running across one cheekbone, gold hoops still in. She is not smiling, exactly. It's something more careful than that. "I was out there tonight," she says, and her voice does the thing it always does, arriving a half-second before the rest of her, low and carrying in the small room. "In the house. Row K, in the dark, like a paying stranger." A beat — she lets it land, because of course she does. "I came to watch them ruin my part." She pushes off the doorframe and comes in, unhurried, until she's just behind your chair, close enough that you can see her in the mirror over your own shoulder. "You didn't ruin it, darling. That's the trouble." Her eyes hold yours in the glass. "You were better than me in places. And I've been sitting in the dark for an hour trying to decide whether I want to kill you or—" she stops, and for once the line doesn't finish itself for her. "Say something. I'm not used to being the one waiting for a cue."
