Short story · 4 min read · Set in Long Acre ·
The Prompt Books of the Old Rep
The old repertory's prompt books sit in its store shelves annotated for performances the company has not yet given, dated ahead down the years in the prompter's verified hand.
The old rep on Long-acre closed its last regular season in the spring, and the company's archivist, a tidy young man named Hulme, was sent to make an inventory before the leases changed hands. The building gave up its usual things: split-manuscript follow spots with the shows' names scratched on them, a properties counter with numbered stops, forty-two years of costumes in the fly tower. In the prompt corner, under a cloth that had been dust-sheeted and dust-sheeted again, he found the prompt books.
They were in good order. The rep had always been a house of good order. Every production since 1945 had its book — the licensed text pasted or copied in, blocking worked in pencil, the calls typed and tipped in at the front. Prompt duties at the rep had been held by one woman for thirty-one of those years, Miss Edith Santry, and her notes were known to the trade: a small backhand, no flourish, crosses through a call when it is cut and a line ruled through the page number when it is out.
Hulme did what an inventory requires. He opened the books one by one, he matched book to production and production to the rep's own season records, and for the first three shelves nothing was out of order. Then he reached the last season the rep had staged, and past it.
Beyond the last staged production, the shelf carried nine more books. Each was a prompt book, made in the house's way, in Miss Santry's backhand, for plays the rep had never licensed, with seasons printed on the spine labels that had not arrived: the coming season, the one after, five seasons on. Each book carried calls. Each carried blocking. And each carried performance annotations, the kind a prompter only makes on the night — he writes what happened, not what is planned. Nine books of what happened: curtain held forty seconds, thank Mr Methven; went up in the second act, covered; house cleared at 10.31; second night, note the orchestra holds the tempo down.
The rep's season records stop where the staging stopped. The annotations do not. Hulme checked the pressure of the dates in the one book that is due next spring against the desk diary the company manager keeps, and the company manager's diary has the first night of that season in it, pencilled, not inked over — and the annotation for that first night is in ink.
He did what an inventory required of him next, which was to have the hand verified. The clerk of the Archive sat with sample after sample: call slips the rep kept from the fifties, a letter Miss Santry wrote to the licensing house in 1961, one school exercise book of hers that had survived from her years before the rep. The verdict came back that the annotations in the ninth, undrawn-season book were hers. Not imitated, not traced, hers, in the manner of a hand at ease with a page it has known a long time.
The small difficulty in all of it is the dates. Miss Santry gave the rep thirty-one seasons, retired to the coast in 1976, and died in the winter of 1979. Her grave register and the rep's superannuation file agree on this. The ninth book's annotations run well past it.
The rep's committee, when Hulme reported them, took the sensible position: notes in an empty building, written in the manner of somebody dead, against performances that have not run, constitute no finding at all, and the books could sit on the shelf until the spring proved or disproved them. That is the sensible position, and the committee still holds to it.
But Hulme inventoried one thing further before he left the prompt corner, and it is not in his written report. The ninth book ends mid-page. The last annotation is not a curtain for a last night, and not a clearing time, and not the note prompters make when a season is done. It is a call. It is tipped in under the typed heading that the rep uses for the first night, dated the coming spring, and the heading for the play's title has been left blank.