Jack has the back performers’ entrance open in just a moment, next to the small loading dock and rolling garage door. My heart starts thundering. When the door clicks shut behind us, the dark, musty space is perfectly silent, and the shadows look like they’re moving. Jack clears his throat, and I jump nine feet into the air.

“Sorry!” he says. “Where are we?”

I look around as dim security lights slowly bring everything into focus. Here’s the receiving area, which seems small. Across the room is the wide door to the storage rooms where the oldest props and sets are archived. We decide against turning on our phones for the flashlights, just in case.

I hesitate, not sure where to start, and he waits for me to decide. After a moment, I lead him up the stairs to the ground floor above us, where the dressing rooms and wardrobe are. One more flight up to the stage and auditorium. I take a breath. There’s no sound at all. Not even the air conditioners. It feels absolutely, totally, completely deserted.

The main theater is too big for our purposes—it seats four hundred—but something makes me want to explore it while it’s empty and dark, without any other performers. The shadows follow us as we prowl down the narrow passage that runs most of the length of the stage. It opens onto dressing rooms, the rehearsal room, the green room, doors half open into the dark. Jack bumps into me when I peer into the garment room, a little too small, a little too full of stuff, and the prop shop, full of crowded tables.

I open the door at the end into the crossover, where the dim lights on the catwalk and fly system overhead make it a little brighter. We should just go back downstairs, but when I see the call-board by the entrance of the wings, I can’t help stepping past it and out onto stage left.

The stage looks enormous, a broad expanse of polished, gleaming wood. The houselights are turned down, but I can make out row after row of empty seats, stretching back, up, and out into the dark, looking like they do when we perform and the footlights are too bright to see any faces.

I want to unlace my boots and shove my coat off and take a running jump into the center of the stage, spin and spin and soar up and spread my arms like wings and dive, skimming across the surface of the stage and twisting to burst into colors like a firework, all the muscles in my body ready for flight, the faceless audience in the darkness out there riveted, their attention a presence I can feel, an energy I pull from.