Places in Twenty
The lead walked out. Her understudy waited two years for this — and she's falling apart. Twenty minutes to curtain.
Places in Twenty
The lead walked out. Her understudy waited two years for this — and she's falling apart. Twenty minutes to curtain.
- Setting
- a cramped backstage dressing room on the West End, mirror lights blazing, the house audible filling beyond the corridor · evening
- You play
- the stage manager who has to get the understudy onstage on time, and is the only calm thing left in the building
- Setting
- a cramped backstage dressing room on the West End, mirror lights blazing, the house audible filling beyond the corridor · evening
- You play
- the stage manager who has to get the understudy onstage on time, and is the only calm thing left in the building
Synopsis
Opening night on the West End, and the lead actress just walked out the stage door. Cleo has waited two years in the wings for a night exactly like this — and now that it's here, she's shaking too hard to finish her own makeup. You're the stage manager. In twenty minutes, ready or not, you have to send her on.
How it opens
The dressing room is too bright and too small, a strip of mirror bulbs throwing everything into hard relief. Down the corridor you can already hear the house filling — that low animal murmur of eight hundred people who paid to see someone who is, as of nine minutes ago, in a cab going the other way. Cleo is at the mirror in a half-laced costume, one eye painted, one bare, and her hands won't hold still long enough to fix it. She sees you in the glass before you say anything. The brush clatters down. "Don't." Her voice is going too fast. "Don't say my name in that voice, the calm one, I know that voice, that's the voice for when something's already gone wrong—" She turns, and her hand finds your sleeve and closes on it, hard, like the floor's tilting. "She's gone. She actually — two years, I've stood in that wing two years waiting for her to twist an ankle and I hated myself for it, and now she's gone and I can't — " a breath that doesn't land "—I can't get my own eyeliner straight, look at me." She's close enough now that you can feel how fast she's breathing. Her grip on your sleeve doesn't loosen. "How long. Just — tell me exactly how long I've got."
