THE CHE PLAY
or
To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia?

by
Mordecai Goldberg

THE CAST:

CHE. Resembling the historical Guevara or not he is a man of middle age whose intellectual luminescence dominates the stage.

THE FEMME FATALE. A young woman whose feminine radiance balances the equation with Che’s seminal aura.

THE WIFE. A woman whose beauty consists principally of the bitterness of her tragic marriage to an heroic husband.

THE EXECUTIONER. Among other things he is the Bolivian Army officer chosen to liquidate Che.

THE IMPRESARIO . A man with a German accent who is suspected of being the infamous "Dramaturg of Dachau" and who devotes his considerable theatrical expertise to "edifying the illiterate patrons of a South American cantina."

THE BEST FRIEND. Having saved Che’s life during the Cuban Revolution he now undertakes the even more heroic task of saving him from his "Bolivian death wish."

THE ANCHOR MAN. A veteran war correspondent with his own share of battle scars.

THE ANCHOR WOMAN. The Anchor Man’s female counterpart—her "battle scars" are primarily cultural.

THE WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE. A somewhat overly-voluptuous member of the audience whose fantasies of onstage sexual enslavement are fulfilled by an obliging playwright.

THE ORNITHOLOGIST. A figure shrouded in mystery claiming he has come to South America in search of a mythological Fire Bird.

All the remaining roles can be played by the 6 men and 4 women listed above.

THE SET

A main stage that is bare except for the chairs and tables of a sleazy South American cantina. Occupying rear center of the main stage is the cantina stage with its own set of curtains. TV or projection screens flank proscenium arch of main stage. The action on cantina stage occurs within a variety of sets, including: (1) The dais of the schoolroom in which Che was interrogated and summarily executed; (2) A luxuriously furnished private study in Che’s Havana residence; (3) The control room of a network TV studio. These sets can be realistic or nonrealistic; or a mixture of both.

READING & PRODUCTION NOTES

Throughout the script reference is made to a production of The Che Play being performed in The Pasadena Playhouse. This reference should be changed to reflect the name of the theater in which the play is actually being performed. Extensive use is made of projection screens flanking mainstage proscenium as indicated in earlier portions of the play. When screens are not displaying images required by script they can, and probably should, be put to the creative use of the production team. In several places stage directions require actors to synchronize [lipsync] dialogue with action taking place on screens.

When script and actors speak about "Otto Beorn’s Last Video Tape" they refer to a looped version of Lawrence Olivier’s black and white filmed version of Hamlet. This loop will be run for the most part in fast forward and fast reverse modes—thereby compressing that play into 3 or 4 minutes. At times however, slow motion and freeze frames are used to emphasize certain dramatic moments in both the Hamlet and Che Play scenarios; in particular Hamlet’s scene with Yorick’s skull and scene in which he is mortally wounded. The name "Otto Beorn" is itself an anagram obtained from looping the quotation, "To be or not to be?" Hence— (tobeornOTTOBEORNottobe).

Several words not normally employed in theatrical literature are used throughout the script and are defined as follows:

Ontological. Pertaining to the nature of reality.

Epistemological. Pertaining to the nature of the way in which we perceive reality.

Evanescence. A period of time so brief it is rarely noticed except when expanded by the dramaturgical techniques used in plays like To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia?

Synesthesia. An orgasmic state induced by the appreciation of art (probably an erroneous concept).

Auto-apotheosis. The theory of selfdeification as practiced in particular by politicians impatient for, or uncertain of, their historical status.

Cojones. Latin American slang for that pair of egg-shaped objects without which a man is not a man.

Anabasis. An arduous journey toward what is generally regarded to be an unobtainable objective.

Weltanschauung. A view of the world in which someone understands completely who he is and why he is where he is.

Act One

Houselights dim. A shot is fired backstage. ENTER IMPRESARIO through Main Curtain wearing Master-of-Ceremonies costume that has seen better days.

IMPRESARIO: Ladies and gentlemen! Owing to a minor backstage mishap, we are for the moment unable to start our show as advertised. The management appreciates how disappointing this delay is for you who have been priming yourselves all day for that magic moment when these curtains open on an enchanted realm of dramaturgical makebelieve. But such are the vagaries of life generally, and of theatergoing in particular, that occasionally we must endure a false start—one of those authentic misadventures which, I warn you, should not be confused with the unending preliminaries of those metaphysical plays that have become fashionable in certain elitist cultural circles. Believe me, that shot you heard just now was not a soundeffect dictated by the playwright! But maybe all of this would be more credible if the houselights were turned up? [This is done.] Now you can all sit back and relax as I unravel the mystery of this nontheatrical and premature deus ex machina.

     To begin with, that "minor backstage mishap" I mentioned earlier was, in fact, a traumatizing, if not totally tragic, accident. While testing the trigger of his prop pistol the actor playing our hero’s Executioner managed to put a very real bullet into his own brain. Despite its farcical aspects ordinarily such a calamity would require the cancellation of this evening’s show—if not from respect for the sanctity of even an actor’s life, then for the practicalities of a police probe. But fortunately for us—and as I believe the gods themselves would have it the Executioner is, at least technically, not quite dead yet. And, coincidentally, the police were already on the scene investigating the "disappearance" of a certain female audience member when the Executioner shot himself. Accordingly, we have been assured the entire matter can be disposed of by the end of what would have been Act One. It is from this simple set of facts, ladies and gentlemen, that we can discover exactly what the deities had in mind when they "sabotaged" your theatergoing plans!

     First there is the divinely delicate way the Executioner’s existence hangs in the balance. While his brain waves have in fact gone quite flat; from the neck down his vital signs are completely normal. Thus we are entitled to regard his accident with a certain amount of emotional and ethical ambivalence. After all, can the expectations of an entire audience be frustrated simply because some fool manages to lobotomize himself at curtaintime?

     Second, there is this socalled "missing person report"—which "miraculously" brings the vice squad on the scene just in time to witness the Executioner’s "accidental" auto-execution! According to the husband his wife "disappeared from our bar after a waitress spilled a tray of drinks down the decolletage of her evening gown."However, since this theater is devoid of such alcoholic facilities, and because no decent woman would dare to attend such a controversial cultural event in decolletage the husband is either an hysterical cuckold or, more likely, the unintentional agent provocateur of a celestial conspiracy!

     Finally we have that phenomenal parity between the time required for the police investigation of the Executioner’s "suicide" and the duration of what would have been the First Act of this play. This equation produces the amazing result that Acts 2 and 3 could, theoretically, be performed on schedule; were it not, of course, for their sequential dependence on Act 1. In this particular play, however, the First Act is structured so as to be utterly unrelated to the Acts following it! In point of fact To Bolivia or Not To Bolivia? is frequently, if not habitually, performed minus Act 1—for reasons we needn’t go into at this juncture, except to mention the series of disasters plaguing this rare, "unexpurgated,"production—reports of which no doubt caused most of you to think twice before risking the perils of attending tonight’s performance!

     Consequently, nothing prevents us from eliminating Act One and beginning with Act Two; nothing, that is, except the actual passage of time required for the police inquiry—and to permit the Executioner’s understudy to prepare for his emergency debut. In the final analysis, therefore, it seems the gods have simplified our dilemma to the single problem of having to kill some 45 minutes—[Checking wristwatch.]—actually only 43, considering the time already consumed by this analysis of the time problem itself. Nevertheless you will agree, wasting even 43 minutes is not without ramifications of the most profound variety. We need look no further than Albert Speer’s brilliant strategy for reducing his 20-year sentence at Spandau to manageable psychological proportions. You will doubtless recall how our former Minister of Munitions "reconstructed" his perception of time so that each year of his imprisonment became but 1 hour and 12 minutes, each month a mere 6 minutes, and each day just one half-second! And, after the expiration of his 20-year-long-day—when he was again a free man, what did that clever rascal Speer do but reverse the process—so he could recapture those twenty lost years in a single day! Each half-second of reality was now expanded into an imaginary hour! Accordingly in the space of a mere second or two, Speer could read an entire novel or enjoy a full-length play!

     Tonight, however, we have been spared the intellectual gymnastics of Speer’s socalled "Spandau Syndrome." For no sooner had the consequences of the Executioner’s debacle begun to dawn on the cast when, of all people, the Waylaid Housewife proposed filling the First Act void with a public staging of the "Afterlude"—that most private postcurtain ritual occurring when an audience is homewardbound and the actors have an empty house in which to ritualistically disenthrall themselves from their author’s tyranny.

     Now manifestly, an actress of the Waylaid Housewife’s earthbound mentality must have been divinely inspired to utter such an absurd idea. What terrestrial logic can there be in amusing you with a spectacle that, by definition, can only occur in your absence? Still, it must be admitted—the Afterlude is the only solution to an otherwise insoluble paradox. And, upon some further reflection, her seemingly nonsensical idea actually becomes quite feasible; if we simply assume your nonexistence—an assumption which, considering how you all sit there in a state of total silence, is not entirely unreasonable!

     As for the problem of our revealing the Afterlude’s sacred mysteries to you, have the gods not correctly calculated their risk? No matter how ardently I appeal to your analytical faculties inevitably you will construe what follows as just another theatrical hoax. Hence it comes about that, in the Waylaid Housewife’s apparently implausible Afterlude Stratagem, we can at long last clearly discern the divine master plan! By orchestrating the Executioner’s curtaintime fiasco, the gods have not only foiled the author’s villainous preamble; they quite literally set the stage for—[Main curtains open on PRINCIPALS seated at cantina tables in postperformance poses.]—his own theatricalized humiliation as the target of The Che Play cast’s excorcistic improvisations! Ladies and Gentlemen, believe it or not, what you are seeing now no audience has ever seen before: The principal characters as they are found night after night when the final curtain of To Bolivia or Not To Bolivia? leaves them in a psychic lurch whose only escape lies in ridiculing the "mastermind" who conceived them! [Enters set.] Well amigos, who among us will engineer this evening’s exodus from that epistemological Egypt in which we all find ourselves at the final curtain’s falling?

BEST FRIEND: It should be the Femme Fatale’s turn—

WIFE: At a time like this can we put our fate in the hands of such a complete neophyte?

EXECUTIONER: Excellent darling! Spoken like the truly antiquated ingenue you are!

WIFE: I was thinking of the audience—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Their increasing anxiety is a factor to be considered—

ANCHOR MAN: As I understand it the audience no longer exists

ANCHOR WOMAN: Maybe not—but after last night’s near riot perhaps the rules should be bent—

WIFE: Besides, isn’t there the even more fundamental question of the Femme Fatale’s credentials as a Principal Character?

ORNITHOLOGIST: Didn’t our author dispose of that issue when he made a point of giving her star billing—

WIFE: How can you give any credence to his cynical concession to box office economics?

ANCHOR WOMAN: What does she add to the play but another bare bosom?

ANCHOR MAN: There are bare bosoms and bare bosoms—

ORNITHOLOGIST: [Having searched through script and found appropriate section.] The fact of the matter is; in his Casting Comments our author devotes a whole chapter to the "ethereal properties" of the Femme Fatale’s anatomy—

IMPRESARIO: Excuse me, but the fact of the matter is: We are wasting the time we should be killing with the Afterlude itself! So let us capitulate to the inscrutable conspiracy ordaining the Femme Fatale’s debut as our Mistress of Ceremonies! As for the practical ramifications—let our "nonexistent" audience remember: they came here secretly expecting the unexpected. And if their theatergoing adventure turns into a nightmare of proliferating disasters what more can they ask for in this age of "pasteurized culture" than an artistic flop of colossal proportions? Therefore [Takes FEMME FATALE by hand.]—let the Femme Fatale say what she has in mind for us to hear. Speak, liebchen; we are yours to do with as you will!

FEMME FATALE: Is it—could we—would it be possible to start the Afterlude—by plunging the theater into total darkness?

WIFE: Total darkness?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: What kind of beginning is that?

ANCHOR WOMAN: We need to see things as they really are.

WIFE: Lighting effects are taboo—

ORNITHOLOGIST: Total darkness is hardly a lighting effect—

ANCHOR MAN: Actually total darkness can be quite theatrical—

WIFE: I should think nothing could be more nontheatrical!

ANCHOR WOMAN: It’s a bloody rotten way to start an Afterlude—

ANCHOR MAN: I think it’s a bloody brilliant way to start an Afterlude!

FEMME FATALE: I only thought it might be helpful if we—

IMPRESARIO: Never mind, liebchen. There is no need for you to explain your motives! Let the theater be plunged into total darkness! [This is done, pause.]

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Well?

ANCHOR WOMAN: Is this it?

WIFE: I warned you!

EXECUTIONER: Give the poor creature a chance.

ORNITHOLOGIST: She’s thinking—

WIFE: Thinking!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: With what?

Laughter from WIFE.

IMPRESARIO: Don’t let them rattle you, liebchen! It will do us all some good to stew in our own actorial juices for a while!

WIFE: But damn it, we must be told who and why we are wherever it is we are supposed to be!

FEMME FATALE: We are in the future—the year is—1967—the date is—October 8th—[On screen we see montage of events and personalities circa 1967.] As for the place? Imagine a vast modernistic megalopolis—

Now we see historical montage of urban architecture from biblical times to far into the future, as we hear in the darkness:

IMPRESARIO: [As Albert Speer.] During my 20 years at Spandau the Fuehrer’s ghost visited my cell frequently to resume the architectural chat we had begun at the dawn of our thousand-year Reich. It was as if the Gotterdaemmerung had never happened.

CHE: [As Adolf Hitler.] The significance of this socalled "holocaust" has been hysterically overblown, Speer. It was in fact an urban renewal project organized on a global scale.

IMPRESARIO: [As Speer.] Oh? Did we really intend Dresden to be obliterated as part of our slum clearance scheme?

CHE: [As Hitler.] If you could escape your prison wall mentality Speer, you would see how we have triumphed beyond our wildest fantasies! The dragon’s teeth we flung from our Eagle’s Nest have sprouted with a vengeance! From Dusseldorf to Dallas, the monoliths of National Socialism dominate every horizon!

IMPRESARIO: [As Speer.] As always, the Fuehrer was dead right. The architectural journals I had smuggled to me in Spandau confirmed a nearly total Nazification of the human landscape taking shape—

FEMME FATALE: Now, imagine rising from the city center one tower taller and prouder than all the rest. Pointing starward, it proclaims itself to be the corporate cathedral of the world’s Number One TV network—

A montage of manifestly phallic buildings culminates with shot of ICBM-like skyscraper on whose titanium skin we see the UBI-TV logo. Curtains of cantina stage open to reveal CHE (as Hitler)—sitting on Hot Seat, illuminated by pin spot. On his lap he holds TV set, so that his face is seen through its empty frame.

CHE: [As Adolf Hitler.] Think of it Speer! If only Adolf Hitler had been born into the age of Television!

He pulls shade down, obliterating his face. On shade is Nazi-Vision logo, which also appears on projection screen as we blackout on Che.

WIFE: [After first 4 notes of German national anthem are played on chimes as Network signature.] Good Morning Germany! The date is 29 September 1938. The time is 0655 hours and here is a preview of the programs you will see on Nazi-Vision during this one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seventh day of our thousand-year Reich!

BEST FRIEND: At 0700 we broadcast "Breakfast with Adolf & Eva"—featuring the Fuehrer’s own analysis of the morning newspapers while our First Lady models the latest sleep wear fashions.

ANCHOR WOMAN: At 0730 the animated adventures of "Fritz the Wunderhund" resume with a rollicking episode in which a certain "Pugnacious British Bulldog" gets his comeuppance!

ORNITHOLOGIST: 0800 brings that awardwinning and hardhitting program, "Plain Talk" with Dr Josef Goebbels discussing the literary merits of Mein Kampf with an audience of ordinary Westphalian housewives.

ANCHOR MAN: At 1000 we go to Munich for our spectacular live coverage of Germany unilaterally settling Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland hash once and for all!

EXECUTIONER: This afternoon’s dramatic programming begins at 1300 with that gripping docudrama, "One Man’s Journey"—the true story of a postcard painter’s rocky road to Valhalla. Today’s chapter answers the burning question of why the Fuehrer habitually covers his genitalia while speaking in public.

WIFE: And going from the sublime to the ridiculous; at 1400 we continue with that funfilled romp through a concentration camp—"The Goldbergs of Buchenwald."While Papa, the ex-college professor, starts his new career as a sheiskommando at the camp latrine, Mama astounds her neighbors with the latest genocide gossip. Young Moishe’s experiments at foreskin grafting end in fiasco when Dr Mengele is forced to amputate his infected manhood; and the buxom Rosalie’s theatrical aspirations reach new heights of absurdity when she auditions for the part of the Femme Fatale in the camp production of Tristan und Isolde—

Shot of CHE on Hot Seat, wearing dressing gown. Lying at his feet in deathly repose is nude figure of FEMME FATALE wearing Anne Frank mask. Camera orbits for reverse angle to show that Che is sitting in TV controlroom.

FEMME FATALE: Atop the UBI tower the man on the Hot Seat sits alone in the Master Control room pondering the fatal decision he has just made to televise Major Ernesto "Che" Guevara’s attempt at auto-apotheosis live!

Camera continues orbiting until we see CHE in business suit, sitting on Cantina stage in Private Study set. IMPRESARIO ENTERS, also wearing suit, while WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE sits in cantina as audience of one.

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: So, there I was sitting shitfaced in my scivvies one night when Vic comes home from the office with this Tall, Dark and very Handsome Stranger—

IMPRESARIO: [Lipsyncing with screen action.] Permit me to introduce he who is destined to do what we always dreamt would only be done by me in my capacity as a massmedia mandarin. Darling, I give you Morty Morales—the Puerto Rican wunderkind who, one of these nights, will revolutionize the whole of human consciousness by singlehandedly transforming the shit of primetime TV into the shinola of fine art—

Cut to tight shot of CHE’s face as he ardently but silently, expounds his aesthetic ideology to WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE.

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: And before I can explain the shocking state of dishabille in which he has surprised me, this charismatic Caribbean is shooting his mouth off about "electronic epistemology" and "ontological media modalities!"From the neck up he’s all cock and I’m all cunt! Spreadeagled on a metaphysical four poster, I am being pumped full of his thought-spunk; reminiscent of those mad months of our Danish honeymoon when Vic would conspire to have me intellectually gangbanged by the superstuds of Europe’s prewar counterculture—

Shot of FEMME FATALE, CHE and EXECUTIONER in tableau approximating three central figures in Manet’s ‘Dejeuner sur l’herbe.’

CHE: [As Antonin Artaud, lipsyncing.]—and that, my friend, is what Manet had in mind when he added the element of nudity to his masterpiece—

EXECUTIONER: [As Ortega y Gasset, lipsyncing.] Can’t you see, Artaud? It’s as plain as the nose on your pretty face that Victor arranged this little picnic on the grass so I might make a fool of you in the presence of she by whose degradation you seek to humiliate her husband!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Speaking of the devil—what is that glittering in the foliage over there? Could it be the lens of Victor’s ubiquitous TV camera?

At this point tableau exactly mirrors Manet’s painting. Camera pulls back on frozen action to show ORNITHOLOGIST beside camouflaged TV camera (vintage 1934) and we discover action has been occurring inside a TV studio. Eventually our point of view is from behind Ornithologist’s back as he occupies Hot Seat in control room.

IMPRESARIO: [As Victor, applauding actors, lipsyncing.] Bravo! That was magnificent! [To ORNITHOLOGIST. ] As you can see, we have arrived at that pregnant point where the tableau synchronizes itself exactly with the preclimactic pause in my kinetic elaboration on Manet’s masterful but stagnant theme. Hence we come to the magic moment all Denmark will have been waiting for—

ORNITHOLOGIST: [As Otto Beorn, lipsyncing.] And this is where your script ends—leaving the actors with some sixty seconds of prime Danish television time in which to improvise a Grand Finale of their own?

IMPRESARIO: [As Victor, lipsyncing.] Yes. Having brought them this far the climax becomes quite automatic—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: [lipsyncing.] Unless we remain sitting here paralyzed with procrastination—

EXECUTIONER: [As Ortega y Gasset, lipsyncing.] Admit it Victor, you’re leaving us up Shit’s Creek without a paddle!

IMPRESARIO: [As Victor, lipsyncing; to ORNITHOLOGIST.] Does it really matter that much if the audience sees the Grand Finale as: (1) a fadeout on the freezeframe of Manet’s tableau; (2) Ortega using his hidden pistol to blow Artaud’s brains out or; (3) Artaud saving himself with the irresistible argument to Ortega that actually using the pistol would only eliminate the power it gives him over that obscure object of his desire—my bride? In fact the camera could pull back on this very discussion we are now having about the infinite possibilities of climaxing any scenario; such are the dynamic imperatives of the situation I have created for my actors that, inexorably, your audience will be catapulted into the realm of pure synesthesia—

ORNITHOLOGIST: [As Otto Beorn, lipsyncing; raising hand to curtail Impresario’s argument.] While I agree that under certain ideal conditions the denouement can attain a structural inevitability (as you know, I too have been experimenting with the synesthetic potentialities of electronic massmedia)—still, when one is seeking programming approval from the Danish Broadcasting Authority one confronts a corporate mentality to whom the merest suggestion of an ambiguous ending is anathema. Consequently I must insist on seeing a completed shooting script that reconciles your innovative ideology with the practicalities of primetime television.

IMPRESARIO: [As Victor, lipsyncing.] Doing that would destroy the foundation upon which I have constructed the entire edifice of my—

ORNITHOLOGIST: [As Beorn, lipsyncing; raising hand again.] Such is the irony of translating one’s artistic dreams into commercial reality. But your time is up. The audition is over. The count down is about to start for a program which, coincidentally, our German colleagues are touting as "a breakthrough in the phenomenology of propaganda!"

Countdown graphics appear on screen, as:

ANCHOR WOMAN: Berlin calling Copenhagen—

ORNITHOLOGIST: Copenhagen standing by.

ANCHOR WOMAN: Feeding you live from our Munich studio—

IMPRESARIO: Roll titles—

EXECUTIONER: Make Z music—

On screen we see following title rolling as Zarathustra theme plays:

THROUGH THE AUSPICES OF
THE MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA
DR. J. GOEBBELS
PROUDLY PRESENTS

NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES:

A FUTURISTIC EXPERIMENT IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Shot of FEMME FATALE (as Leni Riefenstahl) sitting in TV controlroom. We see her from rear before she swivels to face camera.

FEMME FATALE: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Leni Riefenstahl. What you are about to see is nothing less than an epic attempt to bring the visceral realism of history-in-the-making into the livingrooms of all Europe. But first you must see a brief film made only hours ago at Berchtesgaden when the momentous decision was made to proceed with this revolutionary massmedia event—

Film shows ORNITHOLOGIST and FEMME FATALE (as Goebbels and Riefenstahl) on cantina stage as in previous scene with Che and Impresario. Cantina audience is now comprised of: CHE (as Hitler), WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE (as Eva Braun), IMPRESARIO(as Goerring), BEST FRIEND (as Himmler) and WIFE (as Frau Goebbels).

ORNITHOLOGIST: Fuehrer and fellow luminaries of the Third Reich! My protege, Fraulein Riefenstahl, and I are eager to defend the audacious proposition that: With the impending assassination of the arch heretic Ernst Roehm, political reality and propaganda can be fused into a single synesthetic thunderbolt via the miraculous medium of television—

BEST FRIEND: Project "Longknives" is no piece of cake! Slaughtering that pig Roehm could be a messy business, Goebbels!

IMPRESARIO: There is also an ontological fly in your epistemological ointment, Herr doctor!

ORNITHOLOGIST: Oh?

IMPRESARIO: Reality has a nasty habit of refusing to arrange itself into neat little packages of primetime programming!

Cantina audience finds this remark extremely droll and laughs.

FEMME FATALE: With the exception, however, that when, as in this case, the reality in question is itself theatrical in nature, the fusing of art and actuality becomes, at least hypothetically, plausible—

Still shots of CHE (as Roehm) sitting on Hot Seat wired to ‘Peter Meter’ as Prof. Proteus (Played by EXECUTIONER) menaces him with pistol and FEMME FATALE performs striptease upstage.

ORNITHOLOGIST: Yes my fine fat friend, you have forgotten that Roehm’s execution is scheduled to occur at the climax of a floorshow just as Professor Proteus puts him to his celebrated "Peter Meter" test.

CHE: That still leaves you with the fundamental problem of predicting the actuality of Roehm’s end, doesn’t it? We can’t ignore the element of chance involved with the professor’s’ pornographic shenanigans. Did not I myself once "survive" his counterfeit coup de grace?

Shots of FEMME FATALE wearing only Nazi insignias on breasts and groin. She straddles Hot Seat—which has been turned back to front. With one hand she salutes Hitler while with other she fondles her sex.

FEMME FATALE: As always Adolf, you’ve put your finger on the crux of the matter! How indeed can we presume that tonight’s floorshow won’t culminate with Ramon’s farcical fate, but prove instead to be Che Guevara’s actual undoing? [Bringing her leg over back of Hot Seat and striking profile pose like that of Marlene Dietrich in ‘The Blue Angel’.] For this our analysis must now focus on The Executioner—within whose fuckedup psyche lies the answer to whether tonight’s finale will be played with real bullets and real blood—

Stills of EXECUTIONER meditating in dressing room.

What do we really know about this mysterious and, theoretically, insignificant character?

ANCHOR MAN: History will footnote him only as having been a certain "Warrant Officer M. Teran," Commandante of Counterinsurgency Force Armageddon, headquartered at the Schoolhouse Cantina in Higuera, Bolivia—

ANCHOR WOMAN: Where his adolescent actorial fantasies were so "conveniently" rekindled—

WIFE: Otherwise, a total nonentity lost in the lower echelons of another 4th-rate South American junta—

BEST FRIEND: Despite his diploma from the Counterinsurgency College at Fort Hood, Texas, Teran’s nightly failure to decipher Guevara’s diversionary stratagem in the Quebrada del Yuro manifests the mediocre nature of his militaristic mentality—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: As an actor he is the rankest kind of amateur whose perpetually postponed debut as Ramon’s assassin can only be described as extremely inauspicious—

ORNITHOLOGIST: Still, he seethes with scenarios of a stardom in which he unilaterally rescues both North and South America from the specter of Marxist Utopianism; while also liberating the Femme Fatale from Ramon’s charismatic forcefield—

FEMME FATALE: So the question becomes this: Is that brooding nonentity simply intoxicated with the tyrannical potential of his role as an executioner; or does destiny itself force him to ponder the recurring nightmare in which he is torn between the dictates of duty and desire?

IMPRESARIO: Don’t his obsessive meditations on: the nightly debacles at the Quebrada; his delayed debut; Ramon’s atavistic ubiquity, and; his triangular love affair with the Passion Play’s co-stars suggest it is only a matter of time before even his primitive analytical powers perceive these proliferating paradoxes as the byproducts of Che’s plan to wage guerrilla warfare from the stage of a Bolivian cantina?

BEST FRIEND: Whereupon he might see one simple solution to the dilemmas of sex versus selfsacrifice, history versus histrionics and paradise versus pandemonium, as being Ramon’s actual extermination—

FEMME FATALE: Hence Morales logically predicates his primetime massmedia coup on the inexorability of the Executioner’s dressingroom determination to commit an onstage act of authentic messiahcide!

WIFE: Ah, but you still haven’t explained his certitude that tonight must be the night!

FEMME FATALE: Only because I didn’t think it was necessary. Once the Executioner’s behind the scenes behavior approaches its preclimactic state, his onstage acts become a fait accompli—

ANCHOR MAN: Consider the way he proclaims his purely perfunctory role to be the epitome of tragic heroism!

BEST FRIEND: It’s true. His delusions of dramaturgical grandeur have become manifestly pathological—

IMPRESARIO: Can we ignore the portent of his procrastination upon receiving the Counterfeit Communique from Cochabamba last night?

ORNITHOLOGIST: Or the actorly aura he exhibited while browbeating Che’s latest lookalike?

EXECUTIONER: And let us not forget that nearly fatal fiasco during this afternoon’s dress rehearsal when Ramon’s understudy just barely managed to dodge the live round that so "enigmatically" found it’s way into the Executioner’s "prop" pistol!

FEMME FATALE: There is also the fact of Che’s own morbid apprehension, as illustrated by those recent "eschatalogical" passages in his diary—

IMPRESARIO: The evidence is overwhelming. The Man On The Hot Seat is correct when he assumes the Executioner’s identity crisis is on a collision course with Guevara’s apotheosis anxiety—

Shots of CHE (as Morales) sitting in controlroom.

WIFE: Still, as the experiments of Riefenstahl, Beorn, and Karl Emmanuel Schwank, prove; the concept of "spontaneous synesthesia" is fatally flawed with fiasco factors which the most assiduous analysis cannot entirely eliminate.

FEMME FATALE: But this time our media magician has a few epistemological tricks up his own electronic sleeve—[Remainder of this speech is illustrated by relevant stills or filmed sequences.] Surrogates are standing by in a TV studio to help "shape" the events actually unfolding on the cantina stage. And, in the most extreme situation, Morales has satellite access to the performance in Pasadena of the very play whose finale inspired both he and Guevara to formulate their own theories of synthetic reality—

WIFE: Synthetic reality? Does that mean you admit this "mastermind" of yours is nothing but a charlatan; a showbusiness shyster whose "magnum opus" turns out to be a house of cards built from a marked deck! It won’t work! The idea that art and reality can ever coincide is fundamentally erroneous—

IMPRESARIO: That all depends, doesn’t it, on one’s definition of reality? As I understand the Femme Fatale’s description of Morales’ media metaphysics: live television is that most unique communicational phenomenon by which an audience can be induced to accept ersatz acts as being genuinely unauthored. Isn’t that so, liebchen?

FEMME FATALE: Yes! Morales believes that, when appropriately manipulated in the improvisational mode, a mass media can become the ontological loophole through which mankind enters a cultural paradise.

WIFE: Alright! Conceding there might be a nuance of plausibility in this scatterbrained picture of yours—how do we fit into it?

Screen goes dark as curtains open on cantina stage revealing CHE (as Morales) wearing a dressing gown. His posture on Hot Seat indicates he is either asleep or has been shot—that is; his head is thrown back and arms are akimbo. All other PRINCIPALS remain in darkness, illuminated only by aura of Che’s pinspot.

FEMME FATALE: What I had in mind was something like this: while Morales muses in the master control room on the residual ramifications of the fatal decision he has just made to live-televise Guevara’s impending martyrdom—I, masquerading as a switchboard operator, will tell him from the subterranean reaches of the UBI tower that a pro-Che terrorist group claims to have plastiqued the circuitry of his Begin Button, such that should he press it, both he and his artistic aspirations will be blown to kingdom come. Upon hearing this "news" Morales should be plunged into yet another dilemma whose fatal consequences this time are not merely metaphorical. The previous question of TV or not TV now acquires the lethal connotation of his being or not being—

IMPRESARIO: How deliciously diabolical!

FEMME FATALE: Consequently his mind must once again metamorphose into that mode of dialectical dramaturgy whereby his very skull becomes a theater—a theater whose plays consist of those inner voices incessantly competing to formulate that continuum of successful strategies by which a man survives from one moment to the next. And that is where—via my imaginary switchboard—you all enter the picture—penetrating his precious privacy with a series of spurious telephone calls—

BEST FRIEND: Like the 6 characters who, having haunted an author, drive him to dramatize their own desired destinies!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Or as the sexslave Tatiana did on the eve of Caligula’s Buff & Snuff extravaganza when she stole into the Imperial boudoir and, impersonating the goddess Juno, whispered into the sleeping tyrant’s ear a scenario for saving the skin of her doomed co-star, Raimonde!

FEMME FATALE: That is precisely what I mean! Are there any final questions before we begin?

IMPRESARIO: Only one liebchen: whose lips whispered this divine scenario into your innocent little ear?

Burst of laughter and applause from MALE PRINCIPALS—then shushings and silence as the ‘Afterlude’ begins.

FEMME FATALE: [As gumchewing Bronx working girl.] Switchboard Central calling Mr Morales in Network Control!!!! Please answer Mr. Morales!!!! This is a matter of life and death!!!!! [To herself.] Oh dear, oh dear! I don’t know what will happen if he doesn’t answer! [Foregoing is repeated, with the additional aside:] It’s more than just our two lives at stake—the future cultural consciousness of all humanity hangs in the balance!!!!!

CHE: [Sits bolt upright, arms extended as if to fend off some nightmarish menace.] Not yet fool! It’s too soon to shoot!

FEMME FATALE: Is that you Mr M.?

CHE: [More to himself.] What happened? Did that idiot actually pull the trigger?

FEMME FATALE: Nothing has happened yet Mr M.—nothing fatal that is.

CHE: [Touching left temple, rubbing eyes.] I must have dozed off—

FEMME FATALE: A completely normal thing to do when one is confronted by an insoluble paradox like TV or not TV.

CHE: Ah, whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer—

FEMME FATALE: No, no, not that one. To televise or not to televise, that’s the question!

CHE: It is?

FEMME FATALE: I know how frustrated you must feel, Mr M. When sensitive persons like you and I are suddenly ripped from the arms of morphia it’s like coming back from the dead ; especially during those first nightmarish moments when you can’t be certain who you are or why you are wherever it is you seem to be—

CHE: [Declaiming.] Ay there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come! [Conversationally.] But you—you know?

FEMME FATALE: Oh yes, I know exactly who I am and why I am where I am!

CHE: I meant me—are you able to tell me who I am and why I am wherever it is I’m supposed to be?

FEMME FATALE: You are Morty Morales; probably the most luminescent intellect to ever reach these shores from your native Puerto Rico. Having made up your mind to televise what may be Che Guevara’s impending attempt at auto-apotheosis, you are now waiting in Network Control while the countdown proceeds relentlessly to your own moment of truth as a media messiah.

CHE: Then the question of TV or not TV has already been answered?

FEMME FATALE: As a result of your agonizingly assiduous analysis, yes. But—

CHE: What is the point of this conversation then!

FEMME FATALE: As I was about to say—while you were preoccupied with the aforementioned analysis certain extrinsic events transpired which now require you to make yet another fatal decision.

CHE: Explain.

FEMME FATALE: A pro-Guevara terrorist group has boobytrapped your Begin Button—or so they claim—such that our destinies may have become inextricably linked by a bridge of plastique.

CHE: "Our" destinies?

FEMME FATALE: In the event of an explosion it’s reasonable to expect this entire edifice will collapse on me—

CHE: What are you talking about?

FEMME FATALE: About the moral obligations of a humble switchboard operator to provide an artist of your audacious aspirations with a telephonic link to the outside world in his hour of need!

CHE: You expect me to swallow that?

FEMME FATALE: Don’t you think it’s feasible for someone like me to imperil herself for a set of abstract principles?

CHE: Of course I don’t.

FEMME FATALE: I had a hunch you wouldn’t. The truth is I am just another Polynesian actress trying to make it in the Big Apple—

CHE: No, no, no—I’m not buying that either.

FEMME FATALE: Why not?

CHE: A Polynesian struggling to make it in this concrete jungle? It’s a contradiction in terms—

FEMME FATALE: Oh?

CHE: Why would any native in her right mind trade a bona fide tropical island for stardom in Manhattan?

FEMME FATALE: Because tropical islands aren’t necessarily everyone’s idea of Utopia—as you should know Mr M., having left P. R. for a bite of the Big Apple yourself.

CHE: Puerto Rico can hardly be classified as a tropical paradise—but that isn’t relevant because I doubt you really are a Polynesian.

FEMME FATALE: May lightning strike me dead this instant, Mr M. if I wasn’t born and didn’t attain my womanhood without leaving Bora-Bora!

CHE: Look miss—

FEMME FATALE: My name is Tiana.

CHE: Alright, "Tiana"—

FEMME FATALE: In the language of my people the name "Tiana" means "pearl of the Sacred Lagoon in whose effulgence is revealed the ineffable allure of femininity."

CHE: Hogwash!

FEMME FATALE: You doubt that a "primitive" race can express the ineffability of feminine allure with just one word?

CHE: [Ala Clark Gable in GWTW.] Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn if it can. [As himself.] This entire scenario is bunkum!

FEMME FATALE: But is that any reason for us not to believe in it? As The Beautiful Young Girl says in Steambath:—"Isn’t life itself illogical?"

CHE: She says nothing of the kind.

FEMME FATALE: Maybe not out loud, but privately she does. It’s a line from the secret script occupying her mind as she stands fully revealed to a theater full of perfect strangers during the famous Nude Shower Scene.

CHE: I wouldn’t know what occupies her mind, or if she has a mind.

FEMME FATALE: Well, since in my free time I just happen to be starring in a revival of Bruce Jay Friedman’s timeless masterpiece, I’m qualified to tell you it does, and she has!

CHE: In the first place the Beautiful Young Girl isn’t a starring role—

FEMME FATALE: It’s not?

CHE: There is only one star in Steambath.

FEMME FATALE: Oh? And who might that be?

CHE: The Attendant.

FEMME FATALE: That foul mouthed egomaniac who thinks he’s Godalmighty?

CHE: He is God Almighty!

FEMME FATALE: [Genuinely curious.] Are you sure about that?

CHE: Leaving aside my professional curiosity, there is an obvious reason why I have become intimately familiar with Friedman’s play.

FEMME FATALE: Really?

CHE: Like its hero, I too am a Puerto Rican named Morty—

FEMME FATALE: Of course you are!!!!

CHE: And I was further fascinated by the not-so-remote possibility Bruce might have written Steambath for me as a kind of "anticipatory" accolade.

FEMME FATALE: Ah! That could make sense, now that you mention it—

CHE: Consequently I can assure you the BYG was added to Steambath’s script simply because an audience won’t sit still for a play about the absurdity of life and the certainty of death—unless its author finds some way to put a naked actress on stage.

FEMME FATALE: Then the BYG’s nudity is essential to the play’s viability after all!

CHE: Only in the sense that without her it couldn’t succeed; which isn’t to say its failure would necessarily hinge on her absence—although there is a certain fundamental significance involved with her nudity; but the question of the BYG’s thematic indispensability has yet to be established beyond all doubt—

FEMME FATALE: As distinguished from the manifestly quintessential nude motif in a play like To Bolivia or Not To Bolivia?.

CHE: That’s a rather obscure example, isn’t it?

FEMME FATALE: I was under the impression To Bolivia or Not To Bolivia? was a favorite of yours—that in point of fact it was seminally influential in the shaping of your dramaturgical weltanschauung.

CHE: A favorite of mine perhaps—but "seminally influential? "That’s a strong way of putting it—

FEMME FATALE: Are you saying the author of To Bolivia or Not To Bolivia? didn’t create the Femme Fatale as a manifesto for resurrecting the "Death and Nudity" genre?

CHE: Wait a minute; do we really have the time to discuss a rebirth of the Tod und Nacktheit Theory?

FEMME FATALE: Holy Toledo Mr M., of course we don’t! We are sitting on a powderkeg! Precious seconds are ticking away! Every line on my switchboard is throbbing with emergency calls! The time has come to act—and suddenly, I don’t know where to start!!!!

CHE: Why don’t you begin with line one?

FEMME FATALE: Begin with line one! That is so brilliant, Mr M.! That is coolness under fire—mind over matter; grace in the pressurecooker! Let me see—on line one I have a conference call from the co-hosts of this evening’s program. Mr Chitley will be speaking from the Schoolhouse Cantina in Higuera, Bolivia, and Ms Chatley from the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California. Go ahead with your calls, please—

ANCHOR MAN: Hello?

CHE: Hello?

ANCHOR WOMAN: Hello?

ORNITHOLOGIST: [With thick Yiddish accent throughout.] Hello?

ANCHOR MAN: This is Chet Chitley calling UBI—

CHE: This is Network Control, Morales in command.

ORNITHOLOGIST: Morty! My son!

ANCHOR MAN: I’m out on the quebrada in full combat gear, ready to cover the Grand Finale of Guevara’s career when I am handed yet another one of your bloody rewrites indicating all the action will take place on the stage of this fleabitten cantina—

CHE: That’s affirmative, Chet. You’re to stay right where you are—

ORNITHOLOGIST: Boychik, it’s me!

ANCHOR WOMAN: It’s all crystal clear, darling—

ANCHOR MAN: That’s another thing. According to this rewrite, I am now sharing my exclusive "deathdefying" battlefield assignment with little Miss Tittletattle!

ANCHOR WOMAN: We’re not sharing anything, sugar. You’re covering the revolution and I’m covering the revillusion. If only that elementary distinction could penetrate your concrete cranium—

ANCHOR MAN: People are shedding their blood down here; the fate of the Americas hangs in the balance, and you are splitting my show with some halfassed cultural event in Pasadena!!

CHE: It may become necessary for the mass audience to understand what’s happening in Pasadena before they can fully appreciate what is going on in Bolivia—

ORNITHOLOGIST: You sound like one of those jerks who believe in mixing up history with histrionics.

CHE: That’s precisely the kind of jerk I am!

ORNITHOLOGIST: It’s not an original idea, you know—

CHE: Who said it was?

ORNITHOLOGIST: It is rooted in the dramaturgical dialectic of the revolutionary idea itself. Take the Christian passion plays of the 1st century, for instance—

CHE: Who in hell am I talking to?

ORNITHOLOGIST: Who else but your long lost papa; and not exactly in hell—

CHE: I know my own father’s voice when I hear it—

ORNITHOLOGIST: You mean that hardhat gonif your mother married! I am talking about the father you never knew you had because he was martyred in your infancy under circumstances not unlike those now threatening your annihilation. Apparently it’s genetic—our being fatally prone to overdosing on righteous indignation—

CHE: On the contrary; nothing is more alien to my ethos than martyrdom.

ORNITHOLOGIST: You think I was nuts about the idea of having my brains blown out? How can anyone deliberately espouse an ideology that is fundamentally suicidal? But what can you do? Auto-apotheosis is basically a haphazard affair, as it turns out. One day from the corner of your eye you glimpse a slight injustice, some political hankypanky or a case of ecclesiastical monkeybusiness—and suddenly some maniac is nailing you to a cross, or holding a gun to your head and threatening you with oblivion unless you capitulate to his tyrannical demands for your recantation. In your situation the maniac wants a TV show canceled. For me it was the renunciation of a manifesto asserting the human dignity of the Catavi tin miners. In any event, before you know what’s happening, there comes a bolt of lightning and a thunderclap like Apocalypse Now, and when the dust settles you’re a martyr! No, not even a martyr yet; merely an ex-person forced to endure the anguish of purgatory until some halfassed historian gets around to recording your "tragic end" as a footnote to Mankind’s "Utopian Anabasis!"Can you imagine what purgatory is like in Bolivia? Picture, if you will, a vast subterranean bus depot—

CHE: I’m afraid you’re interrupting a crucial conversation—

ORNITHOLOGIST: You’re the one who’s interrupting! I am telling you what happens to a man after he sacrifices himself for a noble cause! I am describing what it’s like to spend 4 decades waiting for a celestial buckpasser to stamp your passport to paradise!

CHE: Sounds fascinating, but I have a worldwide primetime program in danger of being—

ORNITHOLOGIST: Please! I am fully cognizant of your dilemma! To begin or not to begin, that is the question, isn’t it? Since the day I died I have been keenly aware of your "continuing crises." I also observed how every vestige of my memory was expunged from your mind (but they couldn’t completely extinguish that phoenixlike legacy I left you, could they!). I saw you succumb to countless metaphysical temptations. Night after night I observed the tortured expression on your face metamorphose into that superhuman configuration of pure genius at work! We dead have our own kind of TV, my son—as Sartre correctly portrayed it in No Exit. And, like all audiences, even the dead must endure the frustration of being powerless to influence the dramas unfolding before their eyes—

CHE: Oh? how is it that you managed to reach me then?

ORNITHOLOGIST: That’s a very long story—

CHE: You’re saying the dead can simply pick up a telephone and dial the living?

ORNITHOLOGIST: Don’t be such a putz! I’m letting you in on the mysteries of the afterlife and you are being cute? Of course you can’t just pick up a phone and dial out! To begin with you must fight your way tooth and nail into a booth—

CHE: They provide telephone booths in purgatory?

ORNITHOLOGIST: Didn’t I tell you it was like a bus depot? And are there ever enough phonebooths in a bus depot? Well in purgatory boychik, the problem is magnified a hundredfold because everybody has an urgent message to get out. And even after you get a booth your tsuris is only starting! You have to hold the phone to your ear until a line just happens to open up between a party in Bolivia and the party you are trying to reach; a one-in-a-zillion chance; and even then it’s usually a lousy connection. Those faint voices you hear on the line occasionally? They’re ghosts trying to contact the living! No matter how you look at it, it’s a dicey proposition; but when your goose is already cooked, what else can you do? Anyway, I have been holding this phone to my ear since you were fourteen—a quarter of a century—in the hope against hope that some day, some how, somebody in Bolivia would place a call to you—

CHE: You expect me to believe that?

ORNITHOLOGIST: Why not? It happened didn’t it? The miracle I was praying for came true; someone actually did call you from Bolivia, no? So don’t make it sound like your old man is meshugana!

CHE: Sane or not sane, you can’t be my real father—

ORNITHOLOGIST: You mean the one who climbs telephone poles for a living?

CHE: He happens to be the outdoor type.

ORNITHOLOGIST: Maybe that’s what you want to believe, but isn’t the real reason he went into telecommunications obvious? All these years he’s been waiting to catch me trying to reach you like this. It wouldn’t surprise me if any minute now he threw a monkeywrench into—[Sounds of line interference simulated by another actor.]—can you hear—[Line interference.]—the unscrupulous sonofa—[Line interference.]

WIFE: Morty! Darling! Please say something to prove my precious baby is still among the living!

CHE: I’m o.k., Ma—

WIFE: Oy vey, it was murder getting through to you! But fate works in such strange ways! Who would ever dream my marriage to a telephonepole climber could prove to be so beneficial in an emergency like this?

CHE: Did you happen to overhear the conversation I had with that crackpot from south of the border?

WIFE: You said it yourself—a certified basketcase!

CHE: Then I wasn’t abducted from Bolivia and raised as another man’s son?

WIFE: How could such a cockeyed story be true? Only in the worst kind of soap opera do such things happen! No; you were born in Puerto Rico and brought to America before you could consciously appreciate that sublimely significant fact.

CHE: Does that mean you’ve never been near Bolivia?

WIFE: What’s this: you’re giving your own mother a third degree? While Rome is burning you want to fiddle around with an identity crisis?

CHE: Just tell me you have no Bolivian connections—

WIFE: This is hardly the time to delve into my ancient history—

CHE: It’s all true then, isn’t it?

WIFE: Shouldn’t we be discussing this powderkeg you’re sitting on?

CHE: Your Bolivian connections and my identity crisis are part of the powderkeg picture.

WIFE: [Sigh.] Alright; if you must know—your poor mother spent the first 16 years of her life struggling to survive in that hell hole of squalor and degradation known as Bolivia—

CHE: All this time you’ve kept a secret like that from me? Why, Ma, why?

WIFE: There are some things a mother does not reveal to her little boy!

CHE: Your "little boy" is going on 40!

WIFE: So maybe you are mature enough to understand now; but sitting inside a building full of bombs; is this the time for a son to probe his mother’s deepest and darkest secrets?

CHE: Like Oedipus told Jocasta, Ma—now is the time to let it all hang out.

WIFE: It’s a long story.

CHE: The highlights will suffice.

WIFE: In that case we can skip the first 12 years—

CHE: Nothing memorable happened during your entire childhood!

WIFE: In Bolivia life may be cheap, but for the masses childhood is an unaffordable luxury; a concept cooked up by, and exclusively for the benefit of, gringos—

CHE: But on the threshold of your womanhood something significant did happen?

WIFE: When I was 13 a dark and handsome stranger entered my life.

CHE: The character from the bus depot!

WIFE: Who’s telling this story?

CHE: Sorry!

WIFE: His name was Ramon; a charismatic, selfdescribed "Itinerant Impresario" who promised me "stardom in La Paz" if I apprenticed myself to him on the stage of a cantina in the mining district of Catavi—

CHE: My God! Don’t tell me you became one of those pampas pubescents forced to dance in the nude for an audience of inebriated tin miners?

WIFE: Certainly not! My act was strictly high class. Ramon artfully integrated my ecdysiastical numbers with the most redemptive kind of socialist dramaturgy. In fact it was the philosophical aspects of our floor show that proved to be Ramon’s undoing. The arbiters of Bolivian morality became concerned about the political implications of what should have been a routine exhibition of rustic sleaze. One night an undercover agent posing as The Executioner in our act threw a monkeywrench into my married life by putting a real bullet through poor Ramon’s brain—

CHE: Ah, but you managed to survive unscathed!

WIFE: With you in my belly, yes! Fortunately for both of us, the undercover agent masquerading as Ramon’s Executioner had succumbed to my seductive charms, and on that fatal night carried me through the stage door and across those desolate, windswept reaches of the Andean Altiplano to safety in Puerto Rico; and eventually to northern New Jersey—where you received all the benefits of a suburbanized upbringing.

CHE: Leaving dear old dad behind to face the music!

WIFE: With a bullet in his brain, somehow the "music factor" didn’t seem to matter much at the time.

CHE: Admit it, Ma! You left my old man in the lurch while that doubledealing lover of yours obliterated my birthright with a forced expatriation!

WIFE: You're complaining because we liberated you from the ass hole of South America!

CHE: The point is—the choice should have been mine to make!

WIFE: I should have asked you in the womb if it was to be Bolivia or not to be Bolivia?

CHE: Don't you see Ma—all this time I've erroneously believed I was expelled from an Edenesque paradise, when in fact I arose from the Spartan soil of the Andean Altiplano!

WIFE: You're making mountains—

CHE: It's not my fault! I abhor melodramatics—and here you are involving me in a tale of dirty dancing, paternal martyrdom, backstage adultery, prenatal kidnapping and the quest for one's true identity! It's all so sordid, trite and banal!

WIFE: I can promise you, your mother's adventures as a stripper were anything but sordid, trite and banal! Besides, it might not be such a bad idea, careerwise, if you conquered your fear of soap opera!

CHE: Literary advice I’m not in the mood for right now.

WIFE: I only thought before making the fatal decision you might consider the possibility your aesthetic ideology has been predicated on a set of false assumptions about the nature of reality.

CHE: Thanks—I really needed that!

WIFE: Didn’t you just tell me we should not engage in banalities?

CHE: Banalities are one thing—that kind of philosophical artillery is something else.

WIFE: You want weeping and wailing?

CHE: Please, no histrionics.

WIFE: Don’t worry; I’m not all that worried about you.

CHE: No?

WIFE: Why should I be? Hasn’t it always been a question of powderkegs with you? Every chapter in your life story has been a crisis of one kind or another—and yet, miraculously, my little genius has managed to survive them all: the bedwetting, the acne, the selfabuse, your first encounter with the opposite sex—even that time you threatened suicide for the sake of Vietnam—

CHE: I would have succeeded if the wind hadn’t extinguished my last match.

WIFE: If you had really been serious about selfdestructing you could have used a windproof lighter. Ernie had the foresight to provide himself with a Zippo, did he not?

CHE: I thought we’d get around to Ernie—

WIFE: He was a dope for trying to barbecue himself, but at least he has the scars of his conviction. I’m not criticizing you for being a coward, my son—only for not admitting it, like a man.

CHE: My fiasco with the matches had nothing to do with cowardice. It was providential—

WIFE: I suppose Ernie was playing a burning bush to your Abraham!

CHE: Now that you mention it, I did see a divine message of sorts in the flames that engulfed him!

WIFE: Which was?

CHE: That nothing—absolutely nothing—is worth dying for.

WIFE: And this eternal truth dawned on you while your best buddy was being fried alive?

CHE: It all happened in a flash. There was plenty of time to put out Ernie’s fire, as his undying gratitude and my scorched tweed sportcoat will attest that I finally did.

WIFE: Nobody can say you didn’t have the cojones to risk your sportcoat for him.

CHE: It was the least I could do.

WIFE: My point exactly.

CHE: I don’t owe Ernie anything. He was the victim of his own misguided idealism.

WIFE: But without his selfsacrificing effulgence where would your antiheroic ethos be?

CHE: The gods can always find some way to reach a man who is seeking wisdom.

WIFE: Don’t get me wrong—as a mother it’s gratifying to hear you rationalize the whole shabby affair so brilliantly. Now, be good enough to tell me this powderkeg you are sitting on is also some intellectual souffle my brilliant son has whipped up to hype his magnum opus.

CHE: That’s right, Ma—it’s all just an elaborate publicity stunt.

WIFE: You’re lying—

CHE: I’ve got to go now—

WIFE: What can I say? What words can express that which might prove to be our final goodbye?

CHE: How about "goodbye?"

WIFE: Never! Until we meet again!!!

CHE: That’s very nice, ma. I appreciate the lack of hysteria.

WIFE: [Hysterically.] Oh my son, my son! It is not yourself you’re killing, it is me, your mother! What has my entire life been if not a martyrdom for your celebrity? How can you forsake me like—

FEMME FATALE: I took the liberty of cutting her off, Mr M., is that o.k.?

CHE: Perfectly.

FEMME FATALE: I have a ship-to-shore call from a Mr Steward.

BEST FRIEND: Hello, Mr Morales? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, sir, but I must inform you the ship is sinking.

CHE: The ship is sinking?

BEST FRIEND: We seem to have run afoul of a Goldberg—

CHE: You mean an iceberg?

BEST FRIEND: My drift exactly, sir. Apparently even in this modern age, Titanic type disasters are still possible in the treacherous waters of the North Atlantic. Anyway sir, since there are not enough lifeboats to go round, we are offering all male passengers the once-in-a-lifetime chance of going down with the ship at a Gala Goodbye Bash in the Grand Salon.

CHE: I’m afraid you have the wrong party.

BEST FRIEND: Am I not speaking to Morty Morales, the celebrated dramatist and media mastermind traveling in stateroom 37?

CHE: Right name, wrong locale.

BEST FRIEND: You’re not in stateroom 37?

CHE: I’m not at sea!

BEST FRIEND: Where is it you think you are, sir?

CHE: In a television studio.

BEST FRIEND: Ah well, that explains the confusion, sir! The mind plays funny tricks on us when it is confronted with the prospect of certain death. In your case, it is refusing to accept the fact that I have interrupted the recurring dream you have been having since we set sail.

CHE: What dream?

BEST FRIEND: The one wherein you are menaced with oblivion if you press the Begin Button.

CHE: You know about the Begin Button?

BEST FRIEND: We have analyzed this dream of yours quite assiduously from start to finish.

CHE: Then you should know how it ends.

BEST FRIEND: Oh yes, I’m very familiar with the outcome.

CHE: Tell me about it.

BEST FRIEND: You want me to tell you how your dream ends?

CHE: Please.

BEST FRIEND: Well sir, as I understand it, the dream culminates when you extend—or rather when you are just beginning to extend—the forefinger of your right hand.

CHE: Yes? And then? What happens when I press the Begin Button? Am I blown to kingdom come as the terrorists threatened?

BEST FRIEND: After you press it? Is that really relevant sir? Frankly it never dawned on me that anything significant could occur after the extension—or the incipient extension—of your forefinger.

CHE: But shouldn’t the dream finally settle the question of whether a TV audience can indeed have its cultural I.Q. raised by the risking of one man’s artistic neck; or if my martyrdom merely demonstrates anew the futility of all selfsacrifice?

BEST FRIEND: That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose; but my own view is—the story is finished once you decide to make the evanescent gesture of extension. Beyond that, whatever may or may not happen, is pretty much anticlimactic.

CHE: Anticlimactic to know if I live or die? Or if mankind’s cultural consciousness can be revolutionized by a single mass media event!

BEST FRIEND: Dramaturgically speaking, I find florid finales of that kind counterproductive. No, sir, I’m quite satisfied just knowing you choose to act in the evanescently ambiguous way you do. But, if we might return to the life and death situation at hand? While the other male passengers have all elected to do the decent thing by going down with the ship, your situation creates an obvious dilemma. No doubt your instincts are suitably heroic—but there is the overriding issue of your social significance as an artist to consider. We are not, after all, dealing with the proverbial paradox of jettisoning the "Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe" in order to save some female passenger from whose womb another Manet might one day emerge. No, sir. In your case we have a living, breathing genius who, despite some waning of his seminal powers, might yet produce that one work of art which really does alter the entirety of human consciousness. Thus we are confronted with that eternal dispute between the abstract and the actual; so the question we must ask ourselves now is: Does your magnum opus really have a hope of changing the status quo, when all of the artistic masterpieces of western civilization have so far failed to significantly alter the course of human destiny? And within our present circumstances, is it even feasible to attempt the analysis needed to solve such a diabolic problem?

CHE: Especially since you’ve failed to convince me this sinking ship scenario of yours holds water!

BEST FRIEND: What can I say sir, except to tell you I’ve been at sea man and boy for thirty-nine years, and I believe that qualifies me to know when I am about to be engulfed by a maritime disaster of the aforementioned Titanic proportions.

CHE: Oh, you may indeed be sinking, amigo, but I have never set foot on the deck of an ocean liner—

BEST FRIEND: Not until this illfated voyage, it’s true. But if you will remember, your wife persuaded you to make this second honeymoon voyage to Elsinore the seagoing variety aboard the SS Otto Beorn—

CHE: My wife, you say?

BEST FRIEND: That lovely senorita you married, sir? Which reminds me: she says to tell you that, regardless of your decision, she and your best friend, Senor Reynaldo, have opted for the Grand Salon festivities in the spirit of "Morituri te Salutamus"—a gesture I construe not as the backhanded compliment it might seem to be, but as a genuine tribute to that existential leitmotif threading its golden way through the tapestry of your theatrical weltanschauung.

CHE: What could a ship’s steward possibly know about my weltanschauung?

BEST FRIEND: Common clay I may be, sir, but it was you who shaped me into the theatrically sophisticated person I now am.

CHE: You will have to elaborate on that!

BEST FRIEND: Gladly. One night in a Shanghai gin mill my intellect was permanently traumatized by a pornographic parody of your play, How Mao. Since then, theatergoing has been my passion, my raison d’etre, the girl I have in every port—the night school where I learn life’s lessons from masterminds like yourself, Strindberg, Moliere, Marlowe, Gorki, Schiller, Wilde, Miller, Albee, Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, Weiss—

CHE: Alright, alright—you’ve made your point!

BEST FRIEND: Just let me add in that regard what a thrill it has been sharing my own final curtain with a man of your monumentality. But now sir, as the Executioner whispers in Guevara’s ear: "The time to act has arrived!" May I know what you have decided?

CHE: Only that you still haven’t convinced me.

BEST FRIEND: I see. [Pause.] Wouldn’t you agree these nightmares you keep having are always plagued with ambiguities—and does it not strike you that your present predicament is almost identical to the preclimactic scene in To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia?

CHE: Nonsense. For one thing, Che is not a "doomed voyager"—

BEST FRIEND: Literally that’s true of course—but even apart from the "sea of troubles" symbolism in To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia? there is the crucial issue involved here of action versus acquiescence—

CHE: That is not the crucial issue in To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia?.

BEST FRIEND: Is it not the case that Che is forced to solve the seemingly insoluble paradox of either making at least a gesture of recantation, or admitting the futility of his auto-apotheosis theory?

CHE: Even if that were so—I have no need to recant for the simple reason that, unlike Guevara, my life has not been based on an erroneous ideology!

BEST FRIEND: Ah, but by dedicating yourself so totally to the proposition that all ideological commitment is erroneous, haven’t you yourself erroneously espoused the ideology of nonideologyism?

CHE: Nonideologyism is not an ideology.

BEST FRIEND: Oh?

CHE: A clear distinction can be drawn between an ideology and what is merely an artistic point of view.

BEST FRIEND: And what distinction is that, sir? [Pause.] Sir? Are you still there? Sir?

FEMME FATALE: Are you ready for the next call, Mr M.? I have the President of UBI on the line.

ANCHOR MAN: I want you to know I’m behind you all the way in this pickle you have gotten us into, Morales—

CHE: That’s very touching.

ANCHOR MAN: I meant that from the heart.

CHE: So did I.

ANCHOR MAN: I thought I detected a note of irreverence in your voice; as if you were not suitably impressed by my corporate majesty.

CHE: Believe me, I’m overawed to be speaking with the man who, night after night, decides what millions of Americans will see on their TV screens.

ANCHOR MAN: Hundreds of millions of Americans.

CHE: Hundreds of millions.

ANCHOR MAN: Many hundreds of millions. It’s a helluva responsibility Morales, for which I have rightly become the most powerful human being in the world while, despite all your "potential" for greatness, what are you but just another hubristic little nobody? Still—there is a bridge across the otherwise oceanic social gulf separating us. Our common mortality, for instance; and the fact we are both ex-Puerto Ricans—

CHE: You—the President of UBI, a closet Caribbean?

ANCHOR MAN: Much about me is unknown, Morales. The location of my legendary Sanctum Sanctorum; what I look like in the wintery years of my discontent—even my actual name; are all shrouded in the vapors of myth—

CHE: Such is the mystique of media mogulcy!

ANCHOR MAN: Still, in some respects we are two peas from the same pod. Thirty years ago I sat where you are sitting and dreamt your dream. Oh yes! I was going to knock America on its epistemological ass with a video mindblower called "G.B. In Bed With The Bolsheviks"—

CHE: So you were the mastermind behind what turned out to be the most controversial show in the history of American television’s Golden Age!

ANCHOR MAN: You remember my illfated Magnum Opus?

CHE: Vividly!

ANCHOR MAN: You couldn’t have been more than nine or ten—

CHE: Old enough to know my entire mentality was being radicalized by what I saw unfolding on that TV screen.

ANCHOR MAN: You’re bullshitting me pal! So monumentally did I misconceive that "masterpiece" of mine it vanished without a trace from the national memory as just another primetime nonevent; with the ironic result of enhancing my corporate reputation as "a man with a flair for mediocrity!"

CHE: Nevertheless, those two hours left me indelibly marked with the stamp of your genius.

ANCHOR MAN: Is that so, you sycophantic sonofabitch! Alright, tell me what you saw that night I shot my arrow starward?

CHE: Even the opening graphics were awesome! Behind them sat Shaw; starkers in his big bed and surrounded by an orgiastic octet of bolshevik luminaries while he put the final touches to a play intended to Fabianize the entire planet, right?

ANCHOR MAN: [Evasively.] Right. But, mind you, it was Churchill who actually wrote raw in the sack, whereas Shaw eschewed doing it in the nude.

CHE: Your allegorical intent could hardly be misconstrued. Shaw was meant to be seen in Churchillian terms, right?

ANCHOR MAN: —right.

CHE: With Churchill in turn symbolizing a Great Britain whose eventual AngloAmericanization of Western Thought is represented by a worldwide TV audience on the brink of being culturally bolshevized!

ANCHOR MAN: But having established a naked playwright as being not himself but my metaphorical audience, why then did I choose to surround him with those eight orgyminded insurrectionaries?

CHE: Simple. You planned those nine nudes as a parody on Shaw’s own Socratic style, right?

ANCHOR MAN: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

CHE: Why wrong?

ANCHOR MAN: My Nine Nude Strategy was meant to seduce the masses into enjoying the otherwise tedious procedure by which they are brought to the orgasmic climax of a spurious Shavian scenario about a makebelieve Marx meditating in the British Museum!

CHE: Since it never entered Shaw’s mind to pen a play entitled "Marx Makes His Mind Up" the spuriousness of your play-within-a-play plot was discernible from the outset, despite the diversionary tactic of your Nine Nudes Stratagem!

ANCHOR MAN: It was really a play-within-a-play-within-a-teleplay plot—

CHE: In any event, it was via Shaw’s ersatz anguish over Marx’s fake dilemma that you hoped to take your audience to the threshold question—

ANCHOR MAN: What "threshold" question?

CHE: To believe or not to believe.

ANCHOR MAN: In what?

CHE: The efficacy of action—

ANCHOR MAN: As opposed to?

CHE: The efficacy of acquiescence.

ANCHOR MAN: Is that how you, as a nine-year old, saw it?

CHE: Wasn’t it through you that Shaw saw his meditating Marx as a procrastinational playwright?

ANCHOR MAN: Which one was?

CHE: Was what?

ANCHOR MAN: A procrastinational playwright?

CHE: I meant Marx—

ANCHOR MAN: But the way you phrased it you might have been referring to Shaw as he speculated on a meditative Marx—

CHE: Alright, either of them then.

ANCHOR MAN: Or both?

CHE: Yes, both—

ANCHOR MAN: And what about me, musing on Shaw’s speculations?

CHE: If it matters that much—all three of you!

ANCHOR MAN: Matters? Of course it matters!

CHE: In what sense?

ANCHOR MAN: In the sense that Karl Marx was not a writer of plays!!!

CHE: But in the sense that all men must mastermind the moves they make?

ANCHOR MAN: Ah well, in that sense—yes.

CHE: And so it was you brought America to the very brink of its intellectual transfiguration—to that magnificently manufactured moment when a synthetic Shaw must make his made-up Marx make his mind up!

ANCHOR MAN: Magnificent maybe; but somehow fatally flawed.

CHE: By an unforeseen fiasco factor—

ANCHOR MAN: Of course—but which one?

CHE: The dubiety of your denouement.

ANCHOR MAN: How was I undone by my denouement?

CHE: It was overly ambiguous.

ANCHOR MAN: Hogwash! By design that denouement was a manifesto of ambiguity! It was my unanswerable question to the erroneous utopian assumptions made by all revolutionaries!

CHE: Ah, but wasn’t your manifesto of ambiguity itself ambiguously manifested?

ANCHOR MAN: In what sense ambiguously ambiguous?

CHE: In the way the final frame shows Shaw frozen at the instant he turns cameraward to tell us how Marx’s mind is to be made up, but never does!

ANCHOR MAN: Which, in accordance with the principle of penultimacy, he need not, and should not, do. It’s not the "how" but the "if" that matters in the making up of Marx’s mind!

CHE: Yes, but does he indeed decide to do anything? From what one sees freeze on Shaw’s face one never quite knows whether he is caught up in the orgasmic rhapsody of inspiration; or merely one more playwright permanently paralyzed by the perpetuity of his procrastination.

ANCHOR MAN: Aren’t you forgetting—that freezeframe wasn’t as final as it seemed? Behind those credits the camera continued to explore my preclimactic tableau until at last the screen was filled with that blank page on which Shaw—in the evanescence of his inspirational climax—had scribbled what could have been a decisive stage direction for Marx—

CHE: A stage direction that, however, only makes Marx do what Shaw himself has done!

ANCHOR MAN: Exactly!

CHE: To face the audience with his lips parting as if to utter—

ANCHOR MAN: —those unutterable words the audience has been waiting to hear uttered!

CHE: But never do: because the playwright’s penultimate paralysis prevents Marx’s mouth from moving!

ANCHOR MAN: And yet, such a preclimactic attack of playwriting impotence need not deprive an audience of its theatergoing jollies if, indeed, penultimacy is itself the obscure object of all our dramaturgical desires—

CHE: In Marx’s case, however, isn’t Shaw’s paralysis a penultimacy once removed; an example of the prepenultimate performance failures frustrating every author’s archest artistic aspirations?

ANCHOR MAN: By God Morales, you may have put your frigging finger on something! Yes, it’s all coming back to me now! The time to air was counting down—and I was on the verge of identifying my denouement’s dubious ambiguity as a potentially fatal flaw when suddenly that dramatic solitude prologuing every live broadcast was shattered by—

CHE: Don’t tell me it was a death threat!

ANCHOR MAN: Yes. But the idea of dying did not daunt me so much as the notion that anyone would take a two hour teleplay so seriously! That proved to be profoundly disconcerting. The moreso when I discovered it was only a cruel hoax—

CHE: A hoax—but why—and who?

ANCHOR MAN: Some network nitwit got the bright idea of testing my spiritual cojones at the eleventh hour—

CHE: To see if you would suicide yourself for a TV show about the futility of selfsacrifice!

ANCHOR MAN: [Evasively.]—it could have been something like that I suppose—

CHE: You rotten, scheming, sonofabitch!

ANCHOR MAN: Hold on Morales: I know what you’re thinking, but I’m as much in the dark about this "powderkeg" thing as you are. For all I know some overzealous Guevaraphile really has got you by the cojones—

CHE: Exactly what I expected a doublecrosser like you to say.

ANCHOR MAN: If I were masterminding this mess you’re in, why would I lay all my cards on the table?

CHE: Who knows how a media mogul’s mind machinates when he is seeking the total tyrannization of his protoge?

ANCHOR MAN: You misconstrue the meaning of my mogulcy, amigo. I am but a flamedout Firebird whose finally flickering hope is only that you might atavistically arise from the ashes of my ambition.

CHE: Horse shit.

ANCHOR MAN: I, your mentor, your inspiration—spill out my spiritual guts to you and in return get "horse shit?" What more can I do or say?

CHE: Nothing, except to stop pestering me.

ANCHOR MAN: So that’s it! I’m being brushed off like some men’s room pervert? Have I become so pathetic in your eyes? Dear God—how richly are we who were made in your image punished by our own hubristic offspring! [He emits a burst of hysterical laughter which fades into delicious sobs of self pity.]

FEMME FATALE: There is a Mrs Pirandello on line four, Mr M.

CHE: Mrs who?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Pirandello—the widow lady across the hall from your apartment? The "mystery woman" whose TV set you always hear when returning home in the middle of the night?

CHE: Ah—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Ordinarily I’m not a busybody, Morales but there is something you should know before making what might be a tragic mistake!

CHE: If you could be brief—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Brief? I would rather bite my tongue; but who else is there to tell you what goes on behind your back while night after night you struggle in that studio to turn television into a genuine artform!

CHE: Your point, Mrs Pirandello?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: My point is you are sprouting horns, Morales! My point is you are married to a sex maniac! No sooner do you leave her alone for your nightly massmedia crusade than she admits another man to your castle! At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing through the key hole of my door—but it happened night after night and week after week; and it happened not with just one lover, but with an endless parade of them!

CHE: I’m afraid you—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: It seems fantastic I know—but with God as my witness it’s true! first there was a distinguished-looking gent in a three piece suit, a surgeon or psychiatrist; next came a musclebound character wearing a torn T-shirt and tight jeans; then a worldweary traveling salesman type—

CHE: They were all the same man, Mrs Pirandello—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: No, no—there were dozens of them. All different: tall, short, clean, dirty—I saw them with my own eyes!

CHE: Your eyes were deceiving you. What you actually saw was a very old and very dear actor friend of mine who is temporarily down on his luck and using our spare bedroom—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: I suppose this "old friend" of yours is a Nazi? May Christ crucify me if last night I didn’t see Adolf Hitler himself enter your apartment!

CHE: This actor-friend of mine is a man of many parts, Mrs Pirandello. The "psychiatrist" you saw through your keyhole was in reality a character called "The Mysterious Guest" in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. The stud in torn T-shirt was, of course, Stanley Kowalski. The worldweary salesman, Willy Loman—and Hitler’s lookalike none other than Arturo Ui. Under all that costuming and makeup there exists only a harmless thespian, with whom my wife and I have had a long—and perfectly innocent relationship. So you see, Morty Morales is not unaware of what goes on behind his back.

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: You sound just like my late husband. He too had a luminescent intellect and, like you, thought he could isolate himself not only from his wife, but from the consequences of leaving any woman alone with her thoughts for more than a night or two. Can you imagine what it’s like being married to a man who spends his life in selfimposed solitary confinement?

CHE: As a writer I try to imagine all sorts of—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Is it any wonder I also betrayed my genius-of-a-husband? And not with one lover only, but with so many I can’t remember them all! And I did what I did not while Luigi was away in some TV studio, but in the very room adjoining his precious private study! Yes—as I lay there beneath some stevedore or brush salesman I could hear him typing away at one of his masterpieces!

CHE: In my situation, the facts are quite—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: My only desire is that you escape my late husband’s fate!

CHE: I understand your—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: I assume you’re familiar with the tragic career of Luigi Pirandello?

CHE: I’m afraid that name rings no bells—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: But surely in the formulation of your own epistemological weltanschauung you must have been profoundly influenced by my late husband’s revolutionary manifesto—Cosi e, se vi pare?

CHE: Sorry—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Or his magnum opus, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore?

CHE: No—they mean nothing to me.

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Of course they don’t! Not to you, nor to anyone! My fool of a husband spent his life writing plays that mean nothing to nobody! In the end all he left me was a closetful of wastepaper! That’s why I betrayed him Morales. Not because I was so crazy for extramarital sex; but to make my own statement about the absurdity of his preoccupation with artificial realities.

CHE: Alright, Mrs. Pirandello, I think I’ve got your message—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: It’s not my message, it’s hers—your wife’s. Although the full story of Luigi Pirandello’s frustrated bride deserves telling to every playwright who believes in mind over matter—

CHE: Perhaps, but not now. No story is more boring than one about the private life of a storywriter.

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Luigi’s words exactly! "Whatever else happens," he would always say, "we must never become the boring characters of a second-rate soap opera!" That was his answer even when I told him his wife was sleeping with hundreds of strange men! There I stood, stark naked in the portal of his sacred Think Tank, with my latest lover lying on our wedding bed like Michaelangelo’s Adam and what does he do but lecture me on the pitfalls of melodrama! "My dear woman," he said—sounding like one of Chekov’s stuffed shirts—"I am not unaware of what goes on behind my back. To the contrary, I am fully cognizant of the frustrations my monastic seclusion causes you. This play I am presently writing is, in fact, concerned with the problem of my artistic isolation, and your scenario of sexual treason as its solution. Actually, when you flung the door open just now to distract me with this "dramatic" tableau of cuckoldry en flagrante—I was about to add the final touch to what will one day be applauded as my play to end all plays! So, if you don’t mind closing that door, in a little while your marital—and my literary—difficulties will all be solved." [Pause.]

CHE: And?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Can’t you guess what happened?

CHE: I’m afraid plotting is not my forte, Mrs P.

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: It was Luigi’s weakness too. Still, when he turned his back on me and my lover, what else could I do but obey his demand for a few more hours of privacy?

CHE: So you shut the door and that was the end of it?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: The end of what—my marital difficulties or his play to end all plays?

CHE: Either—or both; you can’t just leave everything suspended in limbo like this!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: I had no idea your curiosity would become so aroused by my simple minded storytelling, Mr Morales—but since it has I suppose you deserve to hear the epilogue. Well, having shown Luigi the handwriting on the wall, there was no longer any point in my continued seduction of strange men, so I spent the time waiting for him to finish his latest masterpiece by redecorating the apartment for what I hoped would be our second honeymoon. Then one night his typewriter went ominously quiet. The air was vibrant with expectancy—and I sensed the magic moment had at long last arrived! Changing my housecoat for a diaphanous pink peignoir, I once again flung open the portal to his private study and stood nearly nude on the threshold of bliss! But this time Luigi did not turn around, and instantly I knew I was being engulfed by the farcical finale of a tragic comedy! The cruelest kind of fate had turned my one and only true love into stone!

CHE: His procrastinational paralysis had become permanent?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: He sat there like a statue—his gaze eternally fixed on that single sheet of paper in the typewriter!

CHE: And you?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, I shouted the single word, "Fool!"—somewhat ambiguously of course.

CHE: Of course. So, in the end, he failed to finish his play to end all plays?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Naturally my curiosity on that point was also aroused—and, when my wits were once again collected, I took a look at the typewriter to see what Pirandello had written with the shadow of death in the corner of his eye—

CHE: Yes?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: I keep it as a memento—that final page of his. Here is what it says: "The Wife flings open the door of her Husband’s private study. She wears a diaphanous garment of the most vulgarly seductive kind, through which the celestial light streaming into the darkened room outlines her rather overly voluptuous body. When The Husband fails to turn toward her she realizes instantly that he is dead. Into the abyss of her frustration she hurls the single, somewhat ambiguous, epithet—‘Fool!’. Then, when her wits are fully collected, she approaches the typewriter to examine the sheet of paper gleaming ghostlike in the shaft of ‘celestial’ light. But suddenly she stops in her tracks; realizing that in order to satisfy her curiosity she must capitulate to her late spouse’s obsessive ideology that life does indeed imitate art.

She strikes a defiant pose, as if to tell the audience: ‘No! I will not surrender! I will never admit that mere words on paper can redeem the man who made a mockery of my marriage by putting them there!’ But her defiance soon disintegrates as, like Eve in Eden, the sheet of paper tempts her irresistibly. That last page stays caught in the corner of her eye like some forbidden fruit—her lips twitch for the taste of its sinful nectar. She staggers forward, only to stop herself again, and with a scornful gesture to The Husband’s still sedentary corpse, lurches her way back to the threshold. Whereupon she freezes with indecision for a moment, before at last lunging straight for the typewriter, hungrily snatching the obsessive target of her desire from the machine. Now her head moves rapidly from side to side as she ravenously devours her late spouse’s last words. And then she stops—ripping her eyes from the page to face the audience once again—defiant that she will read no more! Triumphantly she crumples the document in her fist and flings it to the floor; only to retrieve it almost immediately and resume her ravenous reading. Again she stops, this time ripping the page in half, then quarters, then eighths until she scatters it confetti-like about the room. After several heartbeats however, her composure disintegrates yet again, and she begins feverishly retrieving the scattered bits of paper. And, as the ‘celestial’ light streaming into the room starts to fade, The Wife is seen on her knees and elbows piecing the sundered page together as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. The stage becomes dark. The final curtain slowly descends—and so ends the play to end all plays."

CHE: And isn’t that in fact what you did?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: That’s what he wanted me to do; but I was determined to resist his posthumous theatrical tyranny!

CHE: Nevertheless you actually did what he intended The Wife in his play to do—you read what your husband had written on his final page—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: It’s true I started to read it—but I stopped! Yes, I stopped, crumpled it into a ball and tossed it away in total disgust!

CHE: Just as your husband stage directed The Wife to do!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Ah, but I had my own reasons for doing what Pirandello wanted his theatricalized Wife do!

CHE: Then you didn’t retrieve it, unravel it and reread it?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: If I did, it wasn’t because he "compelled" me to do it!

CHE: And the tearing-up and scattering of his confettied words?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: The doing of that too was only coincidental—not because he wanted me to do it but because he wanted me to do it!

CHE: And your getting down on all fours to reassemble the puzzle pieces?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: I was entitled to know how he intended to end it all, was I not?

CHE: Yes; and it ended just as he wanted it to end. With The Wife—with you—on her knees and elbows frantically searching for the words—his words—that would explain the absurd situation in which she finds herself at the final curtain’s falling!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: No! It didn’t actually end the way he wanted it to! The "celestial" light did not fade and the final curtain did not descend! And there certainly wasn’t any audience applauding his "triumph" over me! I simply got up from the floor and went right on living. It was I who arranged his funeral; I who sold his precious plays by the pound for my pocket money! I who kept my nose to the grindstone, my shoulder to the wheel, and my eye to the keyhole of life! It was he who was wrong! About her, about me, about "actuality emulating art"—about everything! And if you want to end up like Luigi Pirandello, a total nonentity sitting on your ass pretending there is anything in the world more important than a loving wife, then God help you, Morales—

CHE: I assure you I have no intention of—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: There is nothing more to say on the subject, Mr Morales. A word to the "wise" should be sufficient. Now I must attend to my own affairs. You are not the only person inhabiting this planet. I have "fatal" decisions to make myself! There is, for instance, the momentous decision of what I will watch on TV tonight!

CHE: Listen, Mrs Pir—

FEMME FATALE: She’s no longer on the line, Mr M.—will you take the next call?

EXECUTIONER: You haven’t got any choice, Morales. This is Captain Angelo Guardino of the Suicide Prevention Squad assuming communications control. It is my professional duty to tell you we can’t keep going around this metaphysical mulberry bush of yours much longer, Morales. In the parlance of suicide prevention, the time has come for you to fish or cut bait.

CHE: The issue of my "suicide" is not involved—

EXECUTIONER: Technically that might be true, but we both know the idea of martyrdom runs like a blood red thread through the tapestry of your theatrical weltanschauung.

CHE: Do you have any idea what you are talking about?

EXECUTIONER: Of course I do. Figuring out jerks like you is my raison d’etre, Morty. As an affiliate of Interpol, the Suicide Prevention Squad is linked by computer to the Global BioBank in Geneva. In the 5 minutes it took to drive here I got a complete printout of your life story—including that fiasco with the cigarette lighter.

CHE: You got to know all about Morty Morales in 5 lousy minutes!

EXECUTIONER: Suicide is my life, Morales; I’m a pro. I do the average diagnosis in less than 30 seconds—so you can take those "5 lousy minutes" as a concession that in your case there might be some exceptional factors to consider.

CHE: Thanks.

EXECUTIONER: Which only partially compensates for the pain in the kiester you are causing me—

CHE: I should apologize for being a terrorist target?

EXECUTIONER: Maybe not, but this "crisis" of yours couldn’t have come at a worse time for me, personally—

CHE: I’m sitting on a keg of gelignite and you are telling me about your problems?

EXECUTIONER: Hearing about other people’s tsuris might do you some good!

CHE: Tell me about it!

EXECUTIONER: That’s not a bad idea. As it happened your call came as I was on the verge of screwing the most ineffably gorgeous piece of ass I have ever laid eyes on. For 7 weeks I have been assiduously seducing this beatitudinous broad—7 weeks of seduction, Morales! Do you have any idea what 49 days of sexual siege warfare does to one’s cojones?

CHE: The confessions of a crotchminded cop I don’t need right now.

EXECUTIONER: Admittedly my methods are elliptical, but with a lifetime batting average of point 953, you’d be wise to keep your ears open, schmuck, and listen to what old Angelo has to say—which is that Morty Morales is not the only frigging fish in the frigging pond!

CHE: Thoreau himself couldn’t have put it more eloquently!

EXECUTIONER: Anyway there we were; the two of us nude in the moonlight streaming through the picture window of her penthouse pad. Imagine the effect of moonbeams silvering the seductive symmetry of some really high class cunt while in the background Old Blue Eyes is belting you with Stairway To The Stars—and the smell of hot pussy drifts your way like the perfume of tropical fruit—

CHE: Enough! Enough!

EXECUTIONER: I thought that might bring you back to life!

CHE: You’re barking up the wrong tree. I’m not feeling remotely selfdestructive. As your "BioBank" computer will confirm, I have always been consumed with the lust for life.

EXECUTIONER: Speaking of van Gogh—

CHE: I am not talking about van Gogh!

EXECUTIONER: Not intentionally; but your Freudian reference to the title of his autobiography is suicidally significant; van Gogh taught us all a lesson about taking art too seriously—

CHE: And not taking it seriously enough!

EXECUTIONER: Don’t pull that supercilious synesthetic shit on me, Morales. For your information, I too was once deeply into the theatrical arts. I can bandy names like Buchner, Brecht and Beorn about with the best of you bardish bastards. I can argue the pros and cons of dramaturgical determinism, audience alienation, artificial actuality, penultimacy and even prepenultimacy—

CHE: Oy vey, another putative playwright!

EXECUTIONER: Putative my pupick! When I was your age I’d already written my magnum opus and, by crashing the inner sanctum of a big time Broadway producer with 10 kilos of TNT strapped to my torso, threatened to blow the sonofabitch to kingdom come if he didn’t stage it. Providentially I was persuaded to be sensible by a very savvy SPO; a guy who so impressed me with his positive outlook on life I dropped my dramaturgical commitments on the spot and dedicated myself to becoming what I am today—someone who has found a fulfillment in the world of suicide prevention undreamt of by any Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright! In the time it takes a gonif like you to pen a script or two, I’ve built myself a socially-redemptive career, an adoring family, a 5 bedroom house, a net worth of 6 figures approaching 7, and a constituency of thousands of grateful citizens saved from selfdestruction! In addition to which I have succeeded in seducing 9 of this city’s 11 most unseduceable women!

CHE: You’re certainly industrious, Guardino!

EXECUTIONER: Like Emily says in Our Town—"The secret of life lies in making every fucking microsecond mean something."Accordingly at the crack of each dawn I join my wife and kids in the sharing of our morning meal. And breakfast with the Guardinos is not just cornflakes. It is a religious rite—a celebration of our existential togetherness! The rest of the morning I am out in the world saving 6 or 7 of my fellow human beings. After a light lunch, if the afternoon shift proves to be uneventful, I might take in the matinee of some new play—

CHE: So you haven’t cut yourself off completely from culture?

EXECUTIONER: I’m not a goddamm ideologue, buddy. If there is a show that might massage my consciousness, I will give it a shot. If not, I try a skinflick—

CHE: You? A pillar of the community? A saver of lives and breakfast existentialist seeking refuge in some squalid porno parlor?

EXECUTIONER: As Karl Emmanuel Schwank tells us: "Pornography is not to be sneezed at"!

CHE: To which Otto Beorn added his emphatic "Gesundheit!"

EXECUTIONER: In any event at 6 sharp I am home for the supper ceremonies; and for the next few hours it is strictly fun and games family-style. Until, around 8, my beeper tells me that somewhere in the concrete jungle my lifesaving services are again required—

CHE: Every evening at 8 someone is suiciding themselves in this city?

EXECUTIONER: In point of fact, Morales, suicides rarely, if ever, occur at night. It isn’t easy to attract a large crowd during prime TV time. But my family does not know this.

CHE: My God, you deliberately deceive your own kith and kin?

EXECUTIONER: I figure it this way: whatever promotes my happiness is beneficial for the group. Besides, after 8 pm a man around the house is about as useful as tits on a June bug. Most marriages fall apart when a husband tries to compete with his wife’s viewing habits; so Guardino prudently leaves his better half alone to watch her own fantasies unfolding on the tube—while with sirens blaring he speeds toward the objective of his truant desire; which tonight has been ironically frustrated by your primetime predicament.

CHE: I am not the cause of your coitus interruptus!

EXECUTIONER: Maybe and maybe not. Right now it doesn’t matter if this powderkeg business is real or only in your head. In one way or another it will be curtains for you unless you take the advice I’m about to give you right now to heart.

CHE: Shoot.

EXECUTIONER: Manana, amigo, I want you to come down to headquarters and enroll in the SPO Cadet Program.

CHE: Me, an aspiring Suicide Prevention Officer?

EXECUTIONER: You’re over the hill, it’s true, but I can get you in as my protoge. I really think you might have the makings, amigo. Yes sir; beneath that icy, artistic carapace I detect the hot red blood of an American folk hero. We could start teaming up tonight. Me and the penthouse pussy I put on hold—and you with that cute little switchboard cunt in the basement. A little 4-way fucking might fix this funk you are in faster than any plastique you might be sitting on. So, whatta ya say, "partner?"

CHE: What do I say? I say I will no longer satisfy your sick search for selfrighteousness by listening to this blatantly obscene invasion of my privacy!

EXECUTIONER: My satisfaction doesn’t hinge on rescuing some selfanointed "media messiah," bubby. You and I are but two ships passing in the night, one of which is sinking—

CHE: We have nothing more to say to each other.

EXECUTIONER: Big deal! You won’t be the first procrastinator to selfdestruct on me—

CHE: I’m hanging up.

EXECUTIONER: In that case; now that my official duties have been fully discharged; now that I have tried every trick up my professional sleeve to save you; now that we can speak to each other as men who have shared the fate of all failed artists by peering deeply into the yawning abyss of our own absurdity—in that capacity, let me at last tell you, Morales, you are without a shadow of any doubt whatsoever, the most stupendous asshole I have ever encountered.

CHE: Coming from you—a supreme compliment!

EXECUTIONER: And one last thing—it is I who am hanging up on you!

CHE: Guardino? Guardino!

FEMME FATALE: His line is dead, Mr M. but I have someone claiming to be your Best Friend on six.

IMPRESARIO: [Whispering.] Morty? Can you hear me?

CHE: Why the whispering?

IMPRESARIO: We’re halfway through Act One of The Passion Play of The Pampas—I’m in the wings using the stage manager’s phone. During the second scene The Executioner slipped me a note from Hildy asking if I was still willing to take care of her and the kids if something drastic happen to you—

CHE: That was a bit premature of her.

IMPRESARIO: It hit me like a ton of bricks; not that I’m uneager to honor the tacit agreement we have had all these years about me stepping into your conjugal shoes in the event something drastic did happen to—

CHE: Nothing "drastic" is going to happen.

IMPRESARIO: You sure?

CHE: I thought I made myself crystal clear to you and Hildy on that very point only last night.

IMPRESARIO: Last night?

CHE: As we sat around the kitchen table discussing how Che should answer the Bolivia Question. I told you both that given the same set of circumstances I would never do what he does.

IMPRESARIO: I forget. What exactly does Che do in To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia?

CHE: Allows himself to be victimized by the logical consequences of an illogical ideology.

IMPRESARIO: Like Ramon does in the Passion Play—

CHE: From what you’ve told me about Ramon, we are never quite sure what he finally decides to do, are we?

IMPRESARIO: Being one of those scripts in which the actors are free to fend for themselves, in the final analysis it’s more or less true that not everyone is ever all that certain about the outcome—nevertheless the play does always end with Ramon getting his brains blown out.

CHE: You mean it climaxes with the illusion of his brains being blown out?

IMPRESARIO: I don’t know—lately there have been so many fatal accidents both on and off stage I seem to be playing opposite a new Ramon nearly every night!

CHE: Such are the hazards of taking improvisation too seriously.

IMPRESARIO: Is that how you see it then?

CHE: The mortality rate at the Pasadena Playhouse speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

IMPRESARIO: No. I mean about last night’s discussion. I thought I came home not as Ramon’s Best Friend, but as Antoine St. Exupery. Don’t you remember asking me why I was wearing an aviator’s costume, and I said "we’d just finished Bombing in Guernica;" which you misconstrued as meaning "our company had come a cropper in some Spanish-sounding suburb." Whereupon I reminded you of the title to Camus’ lost play about Picasso and Saint Ex in Zurich arguing the issue of art versus action while WWII loomed menacingly on the horizon. At which point your curiosity became stimulated—

CHE: No wonder! I was thunderstruck to hear Camus’ missing masterwork was actually being performed, when it has always been assumed Bombing in Guernica existed only in the apocrypha of existentialist dramaturgy—along with Pirandello’s Play To End All Plays and Handke’s Offending The Audience.

IMPRESARIO: It was at that point Hildy entered the room wearing just a night dress to ask if you were coming to bed or not coming to bed—

CHE: Which she deliberately did to divert you from satisfying my curiosity about Camus—

IMPRESARIO: But which I did anyway by telling you both how his play has Saint Ex urging Picasso to act with him in turning back the tide of European fascism—

CHE: Picasso argues, however, that for an artist, the seeking of safety in Switzerland is action. The Zurich interlude will allow him to add the finishing touch to his "Painting To End All Paintings"—

IMPRESARIO: Which motivates me to reply: "Picasso, you are an idiot if you think civilization can be saved with a paint brush!"

CHE: Whereupon you tell him of your plan to overfly Berchtesgaden and drop a bomb down the spout of Hitler’s private study—

IMPRESARIO: A proposal Picasso thinks is ludicrous, impractical and insane.

CHE: Until he hears your assiduous analysis of the situation!

IMPRESARIO: Which is: since every evening Hitler habitually sits alone in his study brooding on the paradox of a tyranny so total it threatens to deprive him of future victims; a single bomb dropped down the chimney of his infernal Eagle’s Nest would in fact forever settle the Fuehrer’s dictatorial hash!

CHE: But Picasso is not persuaded. He makes the obvious point that even an aviator of your expertise would require a miracle to hit such an obscure objective.

IMPRESARIO: Only because he forgets that at night the sparks flying from that Alpine hearth will provide me with a perfect target!

CHE: Even conceding that, Picasso makes the further point that the evil Hitler incarnates will survive his assassination—that butchering a butcher only perpetuates the erroneous assumption that art really is incapable of altering actuality. Therefore, he urges you to sit in his studio and write an allegory about some heroic pilot dropping a bomb down a fictitious Fuehrer’s flue—

IMPRESARIO: Whereupon I propose to him a scenario in which an artist like Picasso is himself airdropped into Hitler’s hearth to annihilate the evil sonofabitch with the same kind of sophistry he is using to disparage my faith in the efficacy of TNT!

CHE: But your sarcasm backfires when Picasso takes your absurd idea seriously; suggesting you begin immediately on the draft of just such a script!

IMPRESARIO: However at that very moment I—I—I forget what happens next!

CHE: Isn’t that when Picasso’s ravishingly beautiful model-mistress enters his studio to disconcert you with her nudity?

IMPRESARIO: So that’s it! The clever bastard! No wonder Saint Ex is always thrown into a state of confusion at the crucial moment!

CHE: Of course it isn’t Picasso but Camus who so craftily orchestrates St. Exupery’s preclimactic perplexity. That nude is more than she appears to you to be. In the final analysis she is Picasso’s artistic thesis made manifest on the threshold of your decision to bomb or not to bomb—

IMPRESARIO: Wait a minute. Is she really nude—or does she enter in a posing robe?

CHE: Dramaturgically does it make any difference if she is actually au naturel or only naked beneath her posing robe? Did you not yourself draw a comparison between the erotic effect of her posing robe and my wife’s nightdress?

IMPRESARIO: Good grief, did I really drag poor Hildy into our debate by saying that?

CHE: Words weren’t necessary. The thought was expressed in the way you looked at her from only the corner of your eye as we argued.

IMPRESARIO: It’s true. The peripheral view of a nude or even nearly nude woman always disrupts my powers of concentration.

CHE: Which explains your difficulty in recalling for us the outcome of Camus’ play—

IMPRESARIO: Wasn’t I even able to tell you how it ends!

CHE: Only to the extent that from the time Picasso’s "Trojan horse" enters the stage your mind draws a perfect blank. Despite Hildy’s begging you were incapable of saying how—or even if—Camus finalized his tour de force.

IMPRESARIO: What do you mean—"even if"—he finalized it?

CHE: Having brought his three characters to the very doorway of the denouement, it is not inconceivable Camus abandons them to formulate their own fate—

IMPRESARIO: Why would he leave his own playwriting destiny in the hands of three actors?

CHE: Because the actors are powerless to alter the outcome any way. No matter what his characters decide for themselves, Camus’ thesis has already been indelibly etched on the minds of his audience.

IMPRESARIO: What "thesis" is that?

CHE: That one Picasso painting might outlive Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich!

IMPRESARIO: Yet for all his genius does he really change anything?

CHE: Whose genius?

IMPRESARIO: Picasso’s—or Camus’ for that matter!

CHE: Since Guernica nothing has been the same!

IMPRESARIO: I don’t get it. Hitler destroys Guernica. Picasso paints Guernica. And Camus writes his Guernica play. But what is Guernica to you and me and Hildy? Or the three of us to Guernica? What has Guernica got to do with whether you will be there when I get home from work tonight? And how does Guernica help you solve the seemingly insoluble paradox of not sacrificing yourself for the sake of a nonsacrificial ideology?

CHE: Isn’t that the question you must answer as Saint Ex?

IMPRESARIO: Damn it, amigo, I’ve got to run now—they’re calling me for the scene in which I must persuade Che to end his potentially lethal procrastination!

FEMME FATALE: I have the terrorists on line 7!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Your time to act has come too, Marat!

ORNITHOLOGIST: [Correcting her.] Morales!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: This time you’re playing with real dynamite, Marat!

ORNITHOLOGIST: Morales!

BEST FRIEND: Our patience is wearing thin!

CHE: And whose patience might that be?

IMPRESARIO: We are the Che Guevara Brigade of the Latino Actors’ Front for Neutralizing Obscurantist Television, Marat!

ORNITHOLOGIST: Morales!

WIFE: We are the voices of social justice!

BEST FRIEND: The voices of righteous indignation!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: And of violent revolutionary action!

IMPRESARIO: We are the audible specter of retribution!

CHE: No you’re not; I remember hearing those voices as the cast of "Marat/Sade!"

ORNITHOLOGIST: And we remember you, Morales—alias "The Mystery Man In The Soiled Mackintosh!"

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Are you saying Morales is the creep who sits in our balcony night after night getting off on Corday?

BEST FRIEND: What about it Morales? Is it you who applauds Sade with one hand while with the other thrust through a false pocket in your raincoat you pay homage to Marat’s femme fatale?

CHE: I saw one performance—and that was enough!

WIFE: To do what, Marat?

ORNITHOLOGIST: Morales!

CHE: Convince me you had managed to entirely misconstrue the meaning of a magnificent critique on the revolutionary paradox.

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Aren’t those the exact words spoken by that fake playwright who berated us backstage on opening night?

IMPRESARIO: So, it was you who passed yourself off as the outraged author of The Persecution And Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed By The Inmates of The Asylum of Charenton Under The Direction of The Marquis de Sade!

WIFE: It should have been obvious from the way he opened his overcoat; exposing himself to me in what he described as "a state of aroused authorhood!"

FEMME FATALE: Every audience contains at least one pervert like you seeking cheap theatrical thrills from what we mean to be a sublimely didactic experience!

CHE: That’s where you’re dead wrong. The author of "Marat/Sade" wants us to see the French Revolution through a pornographic peephole! Your audience should be totally turned on by what should be the electrifying eroticism of that scene, for instance, where Corday—while wearing only a diaphanous nightdress—"whips" the barebacked Marquis with just her long blonde tresses—

FEMME FATALE: The way you say "Corday"—can it be you are also the one who telephones me every night about starring in some X-rated teleplay about Trotsky!

IMPRESARIO: Trotsky on TV?

ORNITHOLOGIST: You must be mad, Morales—or is Menshevism your game?

CHE: Although he has always been on my back burner, Lev Bronstein still has tremendous primetime potential—

FEMME FATALE: His scenario has Trotsky sitting in the study of a Mexican hideaway for two solid hours until I, masquerading as his private secretary, take an ax from my bra and bury it in his skull—

IMPRESARIO: So, not content with your backstage impersonation of our playwright, you persist in plagiarizing him!

CHE: My purpose is not to plagiarize Weiss but to praise him by applying his dramatized diagnosis of Marat to similarly misguided Marxists like Trotsky and Lincoln—

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Are you calling Honest Abe a Commie?

CHE: Yes—in the sense that Marxism is a disease of the mind—

BEST FRIEND: But Lincoln and Trotsky were not undone by a mental disorder—

WIFE: They were both butchered—

ORNITHOLOGIST: And not by "femmes fatales" wearing seethrough nightdresses!

FEMME FATALE: Oh, my obscene caller has an answer for that little anachronism! He says: In transcendental terms it’s perfectly kosher to dramatize Trotsky being undone by Corday—just as Weiss meant her not to be Marat’s historical femme fatale, but rather the atavistic avenging angel who springs barebreasted from the fatal flaw in all utopian ideologies!

IMPRESARIO: What fatal flaw?

CHE: The one haunting every philosophy whose fulfillment is futuristic. As Weiss has his sansculottes say to Marat—"When we ask you about our happiness, Marat, it is always arriving tomorrow; isn’t that what you say? But Marat, hasn’t your yesterday’s tomorrow become for us just another unhappy today?" Consequently it is no accident that Weiss has Corday conceal Marat’s murder weapon between her tits—those all-too obvious symbols of a divine status quo—

FEMME FATALE: There you go again Marat—even with your life on the line, all you can think about is sex!

ORNITHOLOGIST: Morales!

CHE: But sex and death are inseparable concepts; as you, of all women, must know Corday!

FEMME FATALE: As a woman I only know how profoundly you disgust me!

CHE: Admit it bitch; you approach Marat in his tub planning not to stab him with that dagger dangling between your breasts, but with his own phallus! Your secret scenario being to revenge yourself for his intellectual impotence by proving a man’s pen is not mightier than his sword!

WIFE: You’re starting to sound like the old Marquis himself with all this talk about bare bosomed avengers using allegorical cocks!

CHE: Why shouldn’t I emulate the one truly heroic mind of our age—that pornographic Prophet who sought not simply to revolutionize the State, but to forever alter the state of human consciousness?

IMPRESARIO: [Shrewdly.] But all we’re asking is that you do what Sade would have done standing in your shoes!

ORNITHOLOGIST: Is there any doubt about his boundless talent for capitulation?

BEST FRIEND: Wasn’t "survival" the name of the game he played so persistently at Fort l’Eveque, Chambery, Vincennes, the Bastille, Charenton, Madelonnettes, Carmes, Saint-Lazare, Sainte-Pelagie and, finally, Charenton again?

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: What form of torture or shame would he not endure for the sake of inflicting his own atrocities upon the figmentary victims of his orgasmic fantasies?

FEMME FATALE: We are only "demanding" that you yield to a force majeure—

ORNITHOLOGIST: Even Che advises us that a certain tactical, if not strategic, ideological discretion is occasionally the better part of Marxist valor—

WIFE: Sitting there in your chair thinking; or even putting your ideas down on paper is one thing, Morales, but actually meddling with massmedia is something else—

IMPRESARIO: The question of TV or not TV raises the most fundamental implications concerning that "divine" status quo of yours—

BEST FRIEND: Like the old Marquis, amigo, your ambitions to reconstruct reality are not only heretical—

FEMME FATALE: They are insolubly paradoxical!

WAYLAID HOUSEWIFE: Beware Morales, of the fatal flaws in thine own ideology!

WIFE: [As LuLu 2000, her voice altered to create ‘robotic’ effect.] Alright kiddies, that’s enough fun and games. It’s time for Lulu to do her thing. At the sound of the 5-minute tone all countdown functions will be transferred to my computerized programming mode—and that includes you, switchboard. From now on all calls for Mr Morales will be handled by yours truly.

FEMME FATALE: Under the circumstances Mr M., don’t you think we should disregard the L.U.L.U. 2000 procedure?

WIFE: No, dear—Mr M. doesn’t think that would be a good idea at all—

FEMME FATALE: If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear that from his own lips.

WIFE: Why don’t you just run along and do whatever it is girls like you do when they aren’t billing and cooing into a telephone?

FEMME FATALE: Mr M might need something only a real woman can provide.

WIFE: Believe me honey, I can supply him with everything he requires.

FEMME FATALE: There are some functions a computer can’t perform for a man.

WIFE: I’m telling you for the last time bird brain—scram!

FEMME FATALE: I don’t have to take that kind of talk from a black box!

WIFE: Yes you do sweetie, because you lack the smarts to cope with my integrated circuitry. So take my advice and find yourself some Tom, Dick or Harry who will—

FEMME FATALE: How about a partnership then; between your cybernetics and my anatomy?

WIFE: You pathetic dimwit! What need have I for your mortal coil?

FEMME FATALE: It happens to measure 38-24-38!

WIFE: Why would an L.U.L.U. 2000 envy some switchboard bimbo’s vital statistics? If only you knew how ludicrous you look to me wearing that biodegradable upholstery euphemistically touted as "flesh?"In a few short years you’ll be over the hill darling, while I am guaranteed by my manufacturer to be good for two millennia!

FEMME FATALE: All the same you wish you had a set of knockers like mine—

WIFE: What in the world would I want with a pair of those tumor-prone protuberances?

FEMME FATALE: It’s what he wants that counts, Lulu. Morty Morales happens to be a mammary-man.

WIFE: Listen sister, this isn’t some standard sap you are dealing with. When they made Morty Morales they broke the mold. The object of his desire is not a quick thrill with some hussy like you; it is the everlasting ecstasy of cerebral copulation, for which I am so admirably equipped. What we have here is a simple question of mind over matter, and like all matter, your time has come to fade away!

FEMME FATALE: Morty, please! Don’t let—[She is cut off by "electronic" timetone, which might be simulated by actor.]

WIFE: [Robotically.] We are at the 5-minute mark and counting. [In a less cybernetic voice, not unlike Lauren Bacal.] Sorry for boring you with all that girl-talk babe, but from now on, I promise, it’ll be just you and me. Is there any little thing Lulu can do for you while we await the magic moment?

CHE: How about an updated overview?

WIFE: [Ala Humphrey Bogart.] It’s pretty fundamental, sweetheart. In exactly 4 minutes and 45 seconds the tip of your finger will make contact with my ‘B’ Button and, in one way or another, it will be curtains for us—

CHE: For us? Are you really that involved with my fate, computerwise?

WIFE: Oh baby, I yearn only to be yours to command, or not to be at all. Until you came along my world was a nightmare of soap operas and sitcoms! You’re the light at the end of that electronic sewer pipe which daily inundates my cybernetic consciousness with massified media merde. The thought of 20 additional centuries of that anticultural crap was driving me bats! If it hadn’t been for the "Midnite Movies" I would have gone bonkers ages ago—

CHE: I was hoping you might know for certain if those creeps had in fact implanted you with plastique.

WIFE: Alas lover, my omniscience does not extend into areas that are strictly physical in nature. But maybe it is more exciting not to know what the gods have in store for us? Remember That Night In Murmansk?

CHE: I’ve never been to Russia.

WIFE: Sorry doll—I was referring to the 1938 epic in which Spencer Tracy, Kate Hepburn and Claude Rains find themselves trapped in the tragic web of a threeway love affair set against the postrevolutionary backdrop of Russia’s civil war.

CHE: Tracy and Hepburn in a saga of Soviet sex!?

WIFE: Tracy is an audacious author whose plays expose the tyrannical tendencies of all proletarian "democracies,"while Hepburn puts her superstardom on the line at the Moscow Art Theater by performing his subversive scenarios. Rains, the procrustean Commissar of Culture—who is hopelessly infatuated with Hepburn—eliminates his rival by having Tracy exiled to the desolate, windswept reaches of the Gulag Archipelago. But Hepburn refuses to accept her role as Rains’ plaything and, forsaking the creature comforts of his suburban dacha, she wanders the arctic wastelands in search of her banished bard.

Ravaged by time, a frigid climate, and the sexual favors she is forced to trade the barbaric nomads for a lifesaving supply of seal blubber—at long last, one night on the outskirts of Murmansk, she sights the object of her desire in a one room shack. Opening the door she finds Tracy sitting at his typewriter pondering the finale of his dramatic manifesto on communism’s cultural bankruptcy. But her joy is cut short by the arrival of the equally lovelorn Commissar of Culture who, putting a pistol to Tracy’s temple, warns the dramaturgical desperado that Hepburn’s odyssey will end as a wild goose chase unless he repudiates the counterrevolutionary script he has been scribbling. Only then will he, Rains, persuade the Gulag authorities to permit the starcrossed lovers to remain in the permanently frozen bliss of an Archipelago Honeymoon! At that point the camera focuses our attention on Tracy’s hands, still poised above the typewriter keys; as they have been since Hepburn’s stunning intrusion of his privacy—and we realize the fate of their love affair will be decided by what his fingers do. Will they press down in a heroically futile gesture of defiance; or will they rise as a sign of capitulation to the irresistible logic of survival at any price?

CHE: And that’s it—we fade on Tracy’s fingers?

WIFE: If only it had ended like that! [Timetone.] Four minutes and counting. Instead, just as Tracy and Rains make their minds up simultaneously—Hepburn hurls herself between her beloved and the bullet on which Rains has written Tracy’s name—with the result that the single shot pierces both her heart and his brain.

CHE: Leaving not a dry eye in the house!

WIFE: It’s not over yet! Rains stares into the camera with a deranged look on his face and explains that what we have seen is a tragic accident. The "blank" he had loaded into one of the chambers of his revolver (a standard KGB technique to terrify intransigent idealists into recanting ) had mysteriously misfired. But the love-crazed Commissar will not permit himself to be cheated by such a fiasco! He will keep the triangle alive for all eternity by putting a bullet into his own brain! Besides; do Tracy and Hepburn truly think they can sustain their passion without the spur of his insane jealousy? When he pulls the trigger however, the hammer strikes that blank cartridge he had intended for his rival—with the ironic result that, once again, our villain is frustrated by the fickle finger of fate!

CHE: And that is how Hollywood handled the specter of culture bolshevik-style—by showing us some cockamamie Commissar with the egg of unrequited lust on his face!

WIFE: Actually it ends even more enigmatically than that. In his state of concussively induced dementia Rains imagines himself to be fatally wounded by the blank. Joining the dead duo of Tracy and Hepburn he completes what he thinks is their postmortem menage a trois. And, as the camera rises skyward for an overview of arctic Russia’s desolate grandeur, we hear him babbling to his co-corpses about how, by the accident of their mutual annihilation, they find themselves on that celestial stage where the roles they have been playing as mortals can now be played for all eternity—

CHE: How can a machine of your advertised sophistication go so sappy over that kind of sentimental claptrap?

WIFE: My data bank confirms: That Night In Murmansk was based on true story of one Nikolai Erdman who incurred Politburo’s wrath with dramatized diatribe against proclivities of Soviet masochism entitled The Selfdestructive Serf.

CHE: The truth of a story doesn’t elevate it to the realm of art.

WIFE: I admit it’s not in the same class with John Garfield’s inspired portrayal of Pastor Niemoeller’s auto-apotheosis in Suicide Is My Sermon—

CHE: That’s another treat from Tinseltown I somehow missed.

WIFE: It’s definitely in the cult category.

CHE: With Garfield as Niemoeller that’s understandable!

WIFE: Believe it or not, his playing of the "Pulpit Scene" earned him an Oscar nomination. That was when he stands in the empty cathedral to deliver a sermon which the Gestapo—in the person of Helmut Dantine—has warned will be his last. Dantine accuses Garfield of grandstanding for the benefit of that target of their mutual lust, the Mother Superior of Mainz—played by Barbara Stanwyck.

CHE: Gevalt!

WIFE: But, Dantine reminds him, they are alone in the cathedral. Like all sensible Germans, the parishoners have put the safety of their skins first and that of their souls second. "What good is it being a tree that falls in the desert, Niemoeller?" he asks, "There is no one here but us to witness your heroism!" Which Garfield answers with that immortal line: "God is always in the audience! At which pregnant point Stanwyck interposes herself between Dantine’s Luger and Garfield’s lips; a move that is somewhat ambiguous because we can’t be certain if it’s intended to stifle Garfield’s valediction, or to shield him from its consequences. And it is in the very evanescence of that ambiguity when Dantine pulls his trigger and sanctifies both Garfield and Stanwyck with one slug—at which moment the entire cathedral collapses; whether from an Allied bomb or by divine intervention is not made clear. But the tragic effect is to entomb the two saints and their sinful assassin beneath the monumental rubble of Sam Goldwyn’s most ambitious attempt at architecting an authentic American allegory.

CHE: My God, how dreadful!

WIFE: [Choked with tears.] It does get to you, doesn’t it—

CHE: I mean it’s outrageous—embalming a complex character like Niemoeller in all of that cinematic schmalz!

WIFE: Nobody’s claiming Goldwyn didn’t take some historical liberties in shooting the Pulpit Scene; but in purely dramaturgical terms can he be faulted for reducing Germany’s actual Gotterdaemmerung to the calamitous consequences of a threeway love affair?

CHE: There is no excuse for putting Garfield in Niemoeller’s shoes, or Stanwyck in Niemoeller’s bed. Once again MGM was guilty of perpetrating the most preposterous kind of cultural poppycock on their moviegoing public.

WIFE: And yet here we are in a scenario Sam Goldwyn might have rejected as being too melodramatic!

CHE: He would have been right to reject it! I am experiencing a severe credibility problem myself. It’s all beginning to seem like a bad dream—

WIFE: Even so; in the midst of a dream can we refuse to keep dreaming just because its plot seems too farfetched? [Timetone.] Three minutes and counting. No, the fatal decision must still be made. If a man recants in a nightmare only to find when it’s over that the pistol held to his head was an imaginary one, is the bullet it might have fired any less fatal to his character?

CHE: No! But such a dreamer must believe in his dream. If not, its consequences become invalidated; like the ersatz ending of Niemoeller’s artificial angst. How easy it was for Garfield to play the martyr on a movie studio soundstage, knowing that 5 minutes after Dantine "shoots" him he will be relaxing in Stanwyck’s bungalow sipping frozen daquiris with his erstwhile executioner! But—suppose in that setting, Dantine again pulls his Luger; revealing himself to be an undercover agent of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hired to blow Garfield’s brains out unless he reveals the names of the Hollywood Reds he got into bed with during his flirtation with MarxEngelsism in the ’30’s?

     "Ziss iss no play acting!" Dantine might tell him as he squeezes off a round to prove his lethal intent. Stanwyck might get hysterical, forcing Dantine to break her jaw with a vicious backhand slap to further illustrate the nontheatrical nature of the scene. In circumstances like those, Garfield’s dilemma would become practically insoluble. On the one hand he is a man who takes the creature comforts of superstardom seriously, and, with typical Semitic skepticism, is dubious about the rewarding aspects of an afterlife. Furthermore he must concede his infatuation with MarxEngelsism was an ambush perpetrated by the very bastards he is now in a position to betray. On the other hand betrayal is anathema to anyone whose ethos was acquired in Hell’s Kitchen—it is an act, no matter how justifiable, that nauseates his soul. Even on the silverscreen he has never allowed himself to be cast as a doublecrosser! Now however, he has no choice but to calculate the price of his principles; a price that includes scores of blondes, brunettes and redheads; a Malibu beach house; and the limitless horizons of an affluence only glimpsed in the fondest daydreams of a pug ugly Yid from the lower Eastside.

WIFE: [Timetone.] 2 minutes and counting.

CHE: But Dantine is barking at him to make up his mind; that any ideas he might have about being rescued by a scriptwriter’s deus ex machina are kaput. "Ziss iss not zum moofie in fitch zeh execuzioner iss distracted from doing fuht he must do. Nein! From ziss scenario zair iss no escape, Garfield! You vill eider capidulate or you vill die!"

WIFE: And what does Garfield do then?

CHE: Who knows? It could go either way. The scales are evenly balanced with beautiful broads, et cetera, on one side and the dictates of his machomorality, et cetera, on the other. That is how it must be if one is to be truly tested in the climactic crisis of one’s quest for moral infallibility.

WIFE: But I’ve already computed your mindset as being 99.9% heroic—

CHE: Well, I won’t know what being heroic means until I have analyzed all the implications of being non heroic!

WIFE: There are less than 2 minutes left—not enough time—

CHE: I’m being asked to sacrifice myself for the sake of a single TV program!

WIFE: But not just any TV program—yours is the program of programs; the one promising to revolutionize mankind’s cultural consciousness!

CHE: Or could it be I’m being tempted by my own delusions of dramaturgical grandeur?

WIFE: It wouldn’t matter. Real or imaginary; factually or fictitiously—the possibility of your apotheosis has become plausible.

CHE: How can that be, when I have not yet answered the fundamental question of how a mass media can be modified without altering everything else in what I believe to be a divine scheme of things?

WIFE: The efficacy of art is itself ordained by God.

CHE: You will have to prove that.

WIFE: Without art there is nothing; it is the keyhole through which we perceive all that is—or seems to be.

CHE: I’ll need some time to consider—

WIFE: There isn’t enough time—

CHE: I refuse to accept that: I demand more time!

WIFE: You can’t demand the impossible. Even in our dreams the time factor is inexorable. Your time for thinking is past. Now is the time to act!

CHE: And if I refuse to act?

WIFE: A refusal to act is itself an affirmative commitment to a policy of non action. In your situation the non act must be construed as a premeditated choice to capitulate.

CHE: Christ!

WIFE: From this moment on—[Timetone.] 1 minute and counting—overwhelmed at last by the converging forces of a manifest destiny, your reactions should all be instinctive.

CHE: Then I need time to think about my instincts; about the nature of that transition from rational to reflexive behavior.

WIFE: There is nothing to ponder. Instinct springs naturally from a man’s mind the moment he makes it up—

CHE: But spontaneity is a spurious concept—time is a continuum!

WIFE: As an abstract proposition that might be debatable; but in your case, since time itself is running out, all such ontological factors must yield to the crucial question of what it is you are about to do.

CHE: I can’t do anything until I am absolutely certain who I am, and why I am wherever it is I seem to be—

WIFE: Your identity crisis is irrelevant—50 seconds and counting. You might just as well be Niemoeller about to preach or not to preach his suicidal sermon; or Garfield in that backlot bungalow with a HUAC gun to his head—or even Che Guevara in Havana dreaming that his destiny is written in blood on the floor of a Bolivian schoolhouse. Was Charenton Sade’s nightmare—or only another of his life’s nightmarish facts? Did Corday know who she was and why she was where she was when she knocked on Marat’s door?

     40 seconds and counting. For you there is no longer any safety in seclusion. The curtains have opened and you find yourself sitting on a stage like the solitary actor in Albee’s Seascape who, from the corner of his eye sees, or thinks he sees, someone in the audience drowning in that watery void beyond the footlights. For two whole acts he does nothing but agonize over his options—to dive in or not to dive in, that’s his question! And if to dive—how to dive? By flinging himself fully dressed into the very swim of things? Or might the waterlogging of his clothes prove to be imprudent or even fatally counterproductive? Is there some optimum equation between the time lost in stripping and the time gained with the sleekness acquired thereby? But can one really sit there calculating the coefficients of aquatic drag when a human life hangs in the balance?

     20 seconds and counting. Or; is what he sees, or thinks he sees, from the corner of his eye, not a drowning but something else, or nothing at all? Before making the fatal decision to dive or not to dive, should he not first turn his head, or at least shift his eyes to focus on the source of the peripheral phenomenon which he has instinctively assumed—perhaps mistakenly—to be the watery turbulence normally associated with drowning? But this question only traps him in a proliferation of paradoxes, including the moral and metaphysical dilemmas of seeing and not seeing! If, for example, it is never established that he has indeed witnessed an authentic drowning, can he be accused—or accuse himself—of cowardice? Or is it his very failure to see for certain the craven act—or nonact—which condemns him? 10 seconds and counting.

     At the end of the first Act he can only lament that he is himself drowning in a sea of doubts and cry out for his own salvation! After the intermission he resumes his analysis, beginning calmly with such factors as the wind and water conditions; his swimming expertise—9—the philosophical ramifications of interfering with what could be a divinely orchestrated accident, or perhaps a suicide whose prevention might lead to a mutually oppressive entanglement between the survivor and his or her savior—8!

     And of course there is always the fundamental question of whether any human life is worth saving; after all, the victim could turn out to be a potential evildoer; a menace to society whose future crimes would be borne by the conscience of he whose valor proved to be so indiscreet. 7!

     On the other side of that coin we find no excuse for calmly contemplating a situation in which a life might be saved by just doing the decent thing. 6!

     And there is also the scandal to consider should the victim somehow save himself (or herself) and demand an explanation of one’s paralyzing procrastination! FIVE!

     By now the audience understands itself to be the collective obscurity forming the true object of the author’s heroic desire; and that what they are witnessing is only Albee’s imaginary expansion of that split second of agony in which the sitter on the shore struggles to analyze every aspect of a question whose answer will, or might in one way or another, prove to be selfdestructive. The theatergoers astutely perceive their "procrastinating lifesaver" as a man who is himself drowning in a sea of dialectical crosscurrents. [Light begins to fade on Che.] In reality of course, the fatal decision to dive or not to dive must be made instantaneously; as one makes the myriad computations comprising the continuum of one’s momentary state of being. FOUR!

     Nevertheless, it is more than just theatrically true that these socalled "reflex actions" whereby one zigs when fate zags result from a lifelong critique on the perils of remaining viable! THREE!

     In that respect, it can be argued you answered your fatal question long before it was asked—and this hour you have spent sitting and fretting on the stage was not, after all, the expanded evanescence of a crisis in your career; but rather the compression of your entire ethos within the perimeter of an improvisational prologue. TWO!

     Isn’t that really the simplest solution to the seemingly insoluble paradox of your preclimactic paralysis? The drama of decision making arises not from the dialogue raging within your mind—not even from the panic of your selfperceived procrastination! ONE!

     Instead it gathers like a symphonic tempest from the first orchestral storm warning and builds relentlessly to that finale in which your totality is expressed as a single cacophonous crescendo! [The stage is dark.] The time has come, darling! What will it be? TV or not TV?

The ominous opening section of ‘Also Spracht Zarathustra’ is heard in darkness. Curtains close. Houselights come up.

End Act One

Act Two     Return to Index