Every cue in a show is fired from the prompt desk and logged with the time and the operator, and the lighting desk logs the state it goes to. Every night at ten past one the log shows a go, from the prompt desk, with no operator, to a cue number our current show does not have. The lighting desk brings up a state nobody plotted: one warm spot, downstage centre, at the height of a face, and the follow spot in the box swings to it on its own.
I am the deputy stage manager at a repertory theatre and I sit at the prompt desk, which is the desk that runs the show.
The desk.
A book with every cue written in it, a panel of cue lights to the crew, and a go button to the lighting desk. I say standby, I say go, I press it, and the lighting desk does the change it has been plotted to do, and both desks log it. Time, cue number, operator.
At ten past one, every night, the log has a go with no operator, to cue forty seven point five.
Forty seven point five.
A point cue is a cue added between two others in rehearsal, when the director wants something extra and nobody wants to renumber. Our show has a forty seven and a forty eight. It does not have a forty seven point five. No show I have run in this building has, and I have checked the archive's prompt books back to the nineties.
The lighting desk does it anyway. It logs a go to forty seven point five and it brings up a state, and the state is not in the show file, and it is one lantern, a warm one, from the front of house bar, focused downstage centre at the height of a standing woman's face, and everything else out.
And the follow spot, in the box at the back of the circle, which is a hand operated lamp with a seat behind it and nobody in the seat, swings. From its rest position, where it is parked with its lid on, to downstage centre, and its lid opens, and it holds there, on the mark, for the length of a speech.
What has been checked.
The prompt desk, replaced. The lighting desk, reloaded with a clean show file. The follow spot, chained to its rest position. The cue fires and the state comes up and the follow spot, in the morning, is on the mark and the chain is on the floor.
The stage at ten past one, by me, from the desk, which is in the corner of the stage where I can see it. The spot comes up. Downstage centre, at the height of a face, a warm circle of light on nothing. The follow spot swings and opens and finds the same nothing, and holds it, and I have sat and watched an empty circle of light held by two lamps for the two minutes and forty seconds that a speech takes, and in the last thirty seconds of it, every night, the circle is not empty.
Not a person. The light lands on something. It has the quality light has when there is a face in it, the small warmth of skin on the front of a beam, the shadow that a nose throws on a cheek, without there being a nose or a cheek, and then the state goes out and the follow spot closes and parks, and the log says cue complete.
The speech.
Two minutes forty. I asked the archive. She went to the box of prompt books and came back with one from 1987 and opened it at a page with a point cue pencilled in, forty seven point five, in a hand that was not the DSM's, and beside it a note: her speech, hold spot, she asked.
An actress. The archive knew the name. A woman who had done one season here, one play, one speech in it that was, the archive said, the best thing anybody had seen in this building, and who had asked the lighting designer for a point cue for it, a single warm spot and a follow, because she said she wanted to be seen doing it, and who had died in the interval of the last night of the run, in her dressing room, before the second half, before the speech.
The cue was never fired. The play finished with the understudy and the point cue was skipped because the understudy did not know the moment.
What is done about it.
The go at ten past one is on both logs every night as an unattributed cue and the chief electrician has stopped trying to lock it out, and the follow spot operator, who is a student, has asked to be moved to the other box.
What I do.
I run the show.
I sit at the desk at ten past one. When the standby light comes on, which it does, on its own, thirty seconds before, I say, standby LX forty seven point five, into the headset, to nobody, because that is what is said. And when it fires, I say, go.
She does the speech. I cannot hear it. Two minutes forty of a warm circle of light on the mark and the follow holding her, and in the last thirty seconds the light has a face in it that it does not have, and then it goes.
I say, thank you, LX. That is also what is said. And I have started to say something else, after, that is not in any book, which is, that was lovely, because she asked to be seen doing it and she has been doing it every night for thirty nine years to an empty house, and somebody at the desk should have told her.