Act I Scene i: Introduction
The evening is still, dark and unseasonably cool, the preamble to a tempestuous night. People in all manners of dress rush down the road, much like animals in the wild returning to their burrows in anticipation of a storm.
The bustling crowd winds down the serpentine street, mostly oblivious to the storefronts that line it. A tiny bookshop is closing up, blocking out the night with heavy, velvet curtains across a single window; An old woman manning the desk of a mom-and-pop drugstore is graciously welcoming the third customer of the day, a man who ignores her as he ducks behind the racks and surreptitiously stuffs his inner pockets with candy bars and aspirin; Two clubs are coughing up bouncers along with smoky air, leaving the Herculean guards in clouds of fog to watch the entrances; a single bar, just as smoke-filled and well-populated as the others, is left defenseless, the front door propped open a few inches by a wooden wedge.
It is into this last bar that a young women with flaming red hair and a short, slender figure ventures. She gracefully exits the horde and silently slips through the crack between the door and its frame, into a picturesque lounge with a hazy atmosphere and a dream-like quality...