[ WP ] While performing in a play , you suddenly realize that the props are not as fake as they appear , but it`s too late to warn anyone .

When legendary script writer, director, and recluse Alexi Mikhailov asks you to fly half-way across the world to perform a secret script in a hidden theater, you do n't hesitate. Why? Because Alexi does n't ask anyone twice. His every word in public is recorded and regurgitated by a legion of ninja-like paparazzi reporters and his plays never review as less than staggering life-altering events according to the critics. Alexi is the forward guard of the avant garde, the taste maker of your generation. You do n't ignore Alexi Mikhailov, *it just is n't done*. 
 
 You pack the overnight bag—you'll be living for weeks in costumes anyway—and you abandon your first five figure Broadway role to a Playbill-scorned understudy and then you wait impatiently at the airport to begin the seventeen hours of flights, airport pit stops, and more flights, until you step off a plane at a remote Russian airstrip. Everyone knows you by name, the support staff, the drivers, and even Anton the personal assistant you have never met before. Everything is taken care of, a foreshadow of the life you will soon be leading, one where you bask in the heat of limitless paparazzi flash bulbs as you step along endless red carpets, every theater company on the planet wanting your face on their productions. 
 
 That's how I found myself in a cramped, blacked out basement theater hidden beneath a cathedral in Rybinsk. It's an ancient city perched on the confluence of the Volga and Sheksna Rivers, responsible for its old name: Ust-Sheksna. I know that because Anton never ceases babbling, so thoroughly impressed with his new job that he spent the hours of driving from Moscow acting as my cocaine-addled tour guide while I desperately wished for sleep. The theater could have been setup in the uncleaned abattoir of a recently used slaughterhouse and I would have been just as thankful to escape to escape the car and take refuge inside. 
 
 The stage was a minimalist affair, a foot high, draped entirely in black. The floorboards, walls, what I assumed to be basement windows, and even the house itself. The seats were black, the armrests, and even the floors; although the boards beneath my feet were patchy. Shoddy. If there had n't been a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling at the middle of the stage, it would have been impossible to see, but that single source of light was hanging between me and the audience. They were silent silhouettes, no talking, moving to take their places with no fanfare. But I could hear their breaths, feel the temperature of the cold basement rise in degrees as they brought their heat along for the show. They would need it—the play was chilling. 
 
 When I first arrived, Alexi was everything I expected: a mess of wild black hair in all directions, a long beard and mustache against pale recluse skin, with breath that smelled of faint herbal medicine and a voice that barked rather than spoke. He laid out the production for me, giving my sleepless, hungover, jet-lagged brain only one chance to take in the vision he had crafted for me. For me alone, he said. It would be a one person production, a single attempt with no dry runs, for an audience that could only attend for one night. They had been informed in advance that the play would last exactly seventy-one minutes with no intermissions. I would have to hold their attention that whole time. 
 
 My instincts told me there was no way. I had no preparation, no wardrobe time, no chance to meet any of the staff, and I nearly backed out. But I could see the fervor in Alexi's eyes—I would never get a second chance. Backing out after agreeing would be a betrayal, it was riding on me, whom this famous director had chosen. Had flown me across the planet, envisioned the part for me alone. It would be a betrayal against myself, an admission that I had no future. I swallowed my fear and I ascended the stage to strip down and await the audience. 
 
 The last I saw of Alexi was his face sinking behind black curtains at the stage's edge, fingers trailing over the top of a large, red-lit clock displaying a countdown of seventy-one minutes. I closed my eyes, swallowed, leaned back in the antique asylum wheelchair, its wicker crackling dryly beneath me and I waited for the click of the button. The air was heavy around the stage until plastic met plastic and I opened my eyes. 
 
 There was no script; only a set of guidelines, a type of improvisational theater I had trained for years before but never actually happens away from a poorly advertised community stage. Critics are allergic to it, audiences are turned off by its mercurial form, its tiny flaws, and its unscripted, halting dialogue. Do it well and you would be remembered with awe, do it poorly and be remembered forever. I was to embody the character, their struggles, their passions, and their demons, and interpret them for a room of strangers. 
 
 My character was mad, sick with tuberculosis; a survivor of the great war and had fought against the Germans, crawling through the mud of Stalingrad with only a knife. I would be confronting delusions, hallucinations, completely silent and naked before an audience of strangers. A victim of a system that had forgotten, left to my own devices and forced to find my own medicine with only the power of my two hands. At the heart of my psychoses was the knowledge that although the world saw me as a man, I had never been a man, I had always been a woman. It was a story of catharsis and metamorphosis, a butterfly shedding its chrysalis of pain and trauma, a rebirth, and a journey that would transform the viewers of the audience right along with the character. 
 
 Alexi's vision was alarming and beautiful, and before he ceased describing it, breathless, and panting for air, I know it would be the hardest role of my life. 
 
 As the timer began to tick down, I felt my lips curl back in revulsion, and I threw my head back in a soundless howl of agony. A lost, mournful tone that should filled the small theater only to be eaten by the blackened walls. But no sound came out and no echo came rushing back, leaving me the illusion of being alone in that black room. I dragged my hands, fingers curled in angry half-fists, up along my body, across thin, emaciated limbs that felt useless. I rasped for air, my mouth filling with wet phlegm. I whined, wishing I could push away my body. Inside myself, in the back of my head, I was impressed with my own work already. I would have no problem filling seventy-one minutes. My character did n't even have a name, but he had become real. Or she, really, I should say. They were already fighting for dominance in my mind. 
 
 I was narrowly focused, hazy still from all of the travel and drunken in my motions as my hand raked across the metal instrument table next to the wheelchair. Numb, naked fingertips stroked along the handles of century old medical props, all reeking of alcohol sterilizer. It filled my nostrils and made my lungs shake, rasping again. I raised the scalpel, admiring its shine in the golden light of the bulb dangling above me, and waved it around in the air. Quit cuts, embodying the idea of its speed and its irreversible effectiveness. It was beautiful, casting a thin tracer of silver in its wake. It would do nicely. 
 
 Gritting my teeth, I hunched forward, and rolled my lips back to reveal my disgust as I stared at my knee. It was too thick, too dense, too masculine. It did n't match what I knew was underneath my skin. It did n't match the person I knew I should be, that woman who had taken my body. The woman who died with me and gave me that last, worthy breath of life I did n't deserve. She saved me from not only a German bullet but also my own cowardice, keeping me from being shot in the back as I fled from the battlefield. She died instead, at least in body, and I would die an ugly shell for her, wasted away. No. Not like that. 
 
 The scalpel bit into the flesh of my knee and blood welled up around it, a drop running down my bare calf and falling to the black paint of the stage floor. Red. So very red. So very real. I stopped, blood dripping from the cut, flesh split to either side to reveal gristle below. 
 
 It was a prop knife and I realized it should n't do that. 
 
 It was an act, so I should n't have been in pain. I groaned faintly and realized Alexi's orders were that the character remained quiet during the metamorphosis. It would be the role of my life, setting me up for years to come. I fought with myself, blood running from the scalpel's tip and down along its handle, onto my fingertips as I stared at it. Stared into the ramifications of the moment. Considered, as I felt my face contort in disgust at what I had already done. 
 
 I dropped the scalpel to the floor of the stage and it bounced away, caught in the muffling of the black curtains at the stage's edge. I slid down in the wheelchair, hollowed and empty. There was no script, it would need to be improvised with the tools at hand. The world's foremost director had recognized my talent, singled me out for the role, brought me across the world, set aside a theater, an elite audience, and a rare, one time engagement. But it seemed trivial next to the blood I rubbed between my thumb and index finger, viscous, real, and too tangible. What had I gotten myself into? If I walked away, I would be forgotten, a nobody who had walked away from a Broadway production and disappeared, to return in shame. If I stayed... If I stayed... 
 
 Off stage to my right, a faint cough barked out into the air. Alex Mikhailov, the director and world famous artiste, the god of theater was waiting in the wings. The tastemaker was waiting for me. A future of red carpets and flashbulbs were waiting... for me. I looked at the blood between my fingertips again. I frowned at it, angry at it, an obstacle in my way. I reached out to the medical tray and picked up the next scalpel, smaller, sharper, but duller in its color. 
 
 You do n't ignore Alexi Mikhailov, *it just is n't done*.
