ACT THREE
Houselights dim. Curtains open on dark main stage where 4 INTERROGATORS are sitting at separate cantina tables. They are all dressed in black and their presence at this point is not necessarily significant. Following ‘commercial’ is shown on screen—Costumed as Jesuit priest, CHE is seen seated behind desk or table in center of an elegantly decorated canonical library. Camera comes in slowly on him as:
ANNOUNCER[Voice over.]: Does the concept of original sin occasionally get you down? Are you ever depressed by the inescapableness of your mortality? Do the paradoxical implications of "social justice" drive you to despair? Can you cope with the multitudinous moral and metaphysical crises of daily life? Has the paralysis of procrastination imperiled your future as a viable organism? [CHE takes pistol from desk drawer, holds it to his temple.] If so, remember: When you get the urge to "end it all," reach for CogitoErgoSum—the world’s first 100% effective antisuicide elixir!
FEMME FATALE ENTERS (or "materializes") as CogitoErgoSum’s angelic trademark with wings and wearing diaphanous veils. In one hand she holds vial of elixir; in the other a magic wand in the form of jewel encrusted crucifix. Setting vial on desk she taps it with wand, causing top to flip off, whereupon she extracts wafer from vial and puts it into CHE’s mouth as:
ANNOUNCER[Voice over.]: CogitoErgoSum! The quick-dissolving Eucharistic lifesaver with the taste of tropical passion fruit!
As Camera comes in on vial we see in blurred background that CHE and FEMME FATALE have become locked in the embrace of a passionate kiss.
ANNOUNCER[Voice over.]: Remember: when the question is to be or not to be, the answer is always CogitoErgoSum—the only pharmaceutical panacea endorsed by The Vatican Council On Mental Hygienics!
Cut to Logo of Chitley/Chatley Show with "To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia?" superimposed thereon. First 3 notes of "Z" music are heard, then:
ANNOUNCER[Voice over.]: And now without further interruption, the dramatic finale of To Bolivia Or Not To Oblivia? (sic)!
INTERROGATORS switch on table lamps, by whose light they peruse dossiers.
INTERROGATOR 1: Are we ready then? Alright, let’s begin—
Curtains open on Cantina stage, where CHE sits on Hot Seat in stark schoolroom set, brilliantly illuminated by spotlights.
INTERROGATOR 1: You—up there; can you hear me?
CHE: Yes.
INTERROGATOR 1: Can you see me?
CHE: No.
INTERROGATOR 1: Why is that?
CHE: I am blinded by that spotlight.
INTERROGATOR 1: Any idea why you are sitting in a spotlight?
CHE: It is standard interrogation procedure.
INTERROGATOR 1: You’re familiar with standard interrogation procedures?
CHE: Of course.
INTERROGATOR 1: What is that "of course" supposed to mean?
CHE: Only that when I am interrogated, the same procedures are always followed.
INTERROGATOR 1: So, because certain procedures were used in the past you assume they will be followed again?
CHE: Yes.
INTERROGATOR 2: But have you taken into account the fact it is standard procedure to deviate from standard interrogation procedure in order to disconcert a suspect who, like you, might be acquainted with standard interrogation procedure?
CHE: I am aware that deviation from standard interrogation procedure is itself standard interrogation procedure.
INTERROGATOR 2: Yet you remain convinced we will adhere to the same standard interrogation procedure followed by some other interrogators?
CHE: I have no reason to believe you will not proceed as you have always proceeded in the past.
INTERROGATOR 2: Is he saying he’s undergone this particular interrogation previously?
INTERROGATOR 1: How can that be when this particular interrogation has yet to begin?
INTERROGATOR 2: Nevertheless, is that what you are saying?
CHE: All of the questions you ask me will be the same ones I am asked every night.
INTERROGATOR 1: But we haven’t asked you any questions yet! And before we consider using the arsenal of countermeasures at our disposal I ask you for the last time if you persist in thinking that what is about to happen here tonight has already happened?
CHE: —yes.
INTERROGATOR 4: You say "yes," but only after hesitating: does that brief pause perhaps signify your failure to anticipate my last question?
CHE: No. You always ask me that same question; and I am always compelled to hesitate slightly before answering it.
INTERROGATOR 4: Compelled by what?
CHE: My own need for telling the truth—
INTERROGATOR 1: You telling the truth! That’s a laugh!
CHE: It is a difficult question to answer with a simple yes or no. For a moment I considered saying that: night after night everything is always the same up to a certain point —beyond which I have no clear recollection.
INTERROGATOR 2: Well—why didn’t you?
CHE: Because of my uncertainty as to whether anything actually does exist beyond that certain point.
INTERROGATOR 2: And—what point is that?
INTERROGATOR 1: Wait a minute! This is getting totally out of hand! It’s time we stopped chasing ourselves around this metaphysical mulberry bush and launch a full frontal attack on the truth! I am warning you for the last time! Unless you tell us forthwith who you are and why you are where you are—the reason why you are known as The Man On The Hot Seat will soon become painfully apparent!!!
CHE: As you know, I always find it very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with such a complex question—
INTERROGATOR 1: [Pounding table.] No! No! No! NO!!!! I don’t know anything of the kind! I asked you a simple 2 part question and I want a simple 2 part answer!!!!
INTERROGATOR 2: Maybe we could start with the easiest part first—the "where"?
CHE: Even that is somewhat overly comprehensive—
INTERROGATOR 2: Well, let me put it to you this way: Will you at least admit you are sitting on a chair?
CHE: Once again, a simplistic response to that might create the wrong impression—
INTERROGATOR 1: You see! He refuses to concede even such a manifestly obvious fact to be true!!!
INTERROGATOR 2: Are you refusing to confirm what we can observe with our own eyes?
CHE: The problem I am having is this: While I seem to be sitting on an object that fulfills all the functions of a chair, since I cannot in fact see what is actually supporting me it would be imprudent to speculate on the—
INTERROGATOR 1: Damn it man, you’re sitting on a plain wooden chair! A chair about whose existence there can be absolutely no ifs, ands or buts!!!
CHE: Let me put it this way: I have no reason not to believe I am sitting on a plain, wooden chair—
INTERROGATOR 2: [Quickly.] I think we can live with that, can’t we?
INTERROGATOR 4: It’s a start—
INTERROGATOR 2: We do seem to have moved a small, but nevertheless significant, distance from square one—
INTERROGATOR 1: But in what bloody direction are we heading?
INTERROGATOR 2: Let’s not lose our momentum! Now, this chair you’re sitting on; it has legs, has it not?
CHE: Presumably it has—
INTERROGATOR 3: Again, since you have no reason to doubt it hasn’t, your answer is yes?
CHE: Yes.
INTERROGATOR 3: And these legs—at one end they are attached to the seat of the chair; you will concede that?
CHE: Conceded.
INTERROGATOR 3: And at their other end? They rest on a solid plane of some sort—a floor for instance?
CHE: Possibly—
INTERROGATOR 2: Only possibly?
INTERROGATOR 3: Can’t you feel the floor beneath your feet?
CHE: As I seem to be wearing slippers, it—
INTERROGATOR 3: Through the soles of your slippers then!
CHE: Once again, nothing persuades me I am not sitting on a chair which is itself standing upon a floor—or a floorlike plane.
INTERROGATOR 2: Well, having established that, it only remains for you to tell us where this floor—or floorlike surface—is located; starting with the smallest architectural unit, and proceeding outward until we arrive at a certain geographic location—some place on the map where our minds can at last meet.
CHE: Conceding the chair and the plane on which it rests is one thing—architectural and geographic concessions are something else—
INTERROGATOR 4: Before our patience is completely exhausted, would The Man On The Hot Seat please explain why he finds it so excruciatingly difficult to put the chair he is obviously sitting on in any kind of spatial perspective?
CHE: Because the chair seems to exist as an essential element in each of three separate scenarios—none of which share the same time-space coordinates.
INTERROGATOR 4: Can’t you see he’s leading us into another of his ontological ambushes! I say we shoot 250 volts of truth serum into him!!!
INTERROGATOR 1: No. Nothing he says is without some significance, so let him tell us about these "scenarios" of his! Go ahead, we’re all ears.
CHE: In the first one I am lying in bed—
INTERROGATOR 2: Then you aren’t sitting on a chair after all!
CHE: I am in bed dreaming I am sitting on this chair. I am undergoing the final stages of a recurring nightmare in which I am the subject of an interrogation—
INTERROGATOR 3: This interrogation?
CHE: Yes—
INTERROGATOR 3: And since it is a recurring nightmare that explains why you think you know exactly what will transpire in the course of your being interrogated by us?
CHE: Yes—up to a certain point.
INTERROGATOR 4: That being the point at which the nightmare terminates prematurely?
CHE: Perhaps—
INTERROGATOR 2: You aren’t sure how your own nightmare ends?
INTERROGATOR 3: Or even if it ends?
CHE: Not necessarily. When I awake it is always with the impression not that this interrogation has in fact terminated; but rather of its having reached that point where its termination is all but a certainty.
INTERROGATOR 4: But, if in a conscious state you are fully aware of having arrived at the penultimate moment, doesn’t the question of your nightmare’s culmination become academic?
CHE: Possibly—except that, as an isolated event the penultimate moment acquires an unendurable ambiguity, unless one totally comprehends the circumstances leading to it. Only by assiduously analyzing our nocturnal escapades can we hope to end the torment of those dreams whose incessant repetition emanates from the ambiguity of their ending. Consequently, upon awakening, I am immediately compelled to recapitulate the sequence of events which, night after night, brings me to the brink of climax, only to leave my curiosity unfulfilled.
INTERROGATOR 4: So, the second scenario consists of your attempt to consciously reconstruct the first scenario?
CHE: Yes. And this I also do while sitting in what seems to be the same chair; only this time in the brilliantly illuminated and somewhat idealized—almost theatrical—setting of the room beneath the room in which the nightmare scenario occurs. Consistent with the "theatrical" ambience of this normally monastic setting where, in the past I have habitually secluded myself for meditational purposes, the process of reconstructing the dream acquires a decidedly dramaturgical format—starting with a kind of prologue wherein a nonexistent audience is informed that when the curtains open for Act One I will be discovered on stage as a sedentary figure who, in the solitude of his Private Library, hopes to reenact with a cast of imaginary characters, the nightly torture of an interrogation whose premature end forces him to spend all of his waking hour pondering the nature of his nocturnal persecution.
Act One then, is a more or less chronological synopsis of my nightmare from its onset to the point where it is almost about to climax; at which time the curtains close; leaving the audience in a state of suspense simulating my own anxiety upon awakening each dawn. Act Two, of course, begins—or should begin—with a scene wherein the cast of imaginary characters critique the roles they have played in Act One that lead to what will be the moment we have all been waiting for: the actual restaging of the interrogation from its beginning to its end. However, during this "intermission" the Private Library set is mistakenly—or mysteriously—dismantled and, in its place I find myself seated on what seems to be the dais of a one room schoolhouse; a setting not unlike that used for the Grand Finale of those iconoclastic floorshows staged in the subterranean cabarets of Berlin—or the pornographic "passion plays" performed in the cantinas of the Andean Altiplano.
Thus, in the third and last scenario, although I am still sitting in what seems like the same chair, I am no longer controlling a cast of imaginary characters, but am myself only an actor. An actor, moreover, who is about to become victimized by the mysterious mastermind who devised that dose of dramaturgical medicine known as the Tod und Nacktheit Test—whereby someone sitting on a "Hot Seat" wired to a "Peter Meter" is tempted by a baggypantsed "professor" with the prospect of his auto-apotheosis, while being simultaneously seduced and upstaged by the ecdysiastical antics of the professor’s fatally attractive female assistant. As such, the nightmare itself becomes only a subtext an actor creates to explain the otherwise inexplicable scenario in which he finds himself night after night.
INTERROGATOR 2: So in this final scenario we, the interrogators, play the role normally played by the imaginary actors planted in the audience to heckle The Man On The Hot Seat who is about to have his ideological mettle measured by the Death and Nudity Test?
CHE: Yes—
INTERROGATOR 3: And the "preclimactic" moment begins to unfold when The Professor, or Impresario, enters with his piece of chalk, his pistol, and his pulchritudinous protege?
CHE: Yes.
INTERROGATOR 4: But doesn’t that scenario itself suggest a fourth scenario? One in which you are undergoing a genuine interrogation while sitting on a stage?
CHE: Such a scenario doesn’t make sense.
INTERROGATOR 4: Oh? Why not?
CHE: Because actual interrogations are never conducted in the presence of an audience.
INTERROGATOR 4: With that spotlight blinding you what makes you so sure there is an audience sitting in the void behind us?
CHE: An actor needn’t see his audience to know it’s there.
INTERROGATOR 4: Alright—let us suppose there is an audience watching all this; and let us further suppose that as interrogators we are faced with the novel problem of interrogating an actor—an actor whose deeds of subversion occur during his performance of an "interrogation scene?" Doesn’t all that add up to a scenario in which you are actually being interrogated on stage and in front of an audience?
INTERROGATOR 1: [To INTERROGATOR 4.] Aren’t you giving away what was supposed to be our interrogational ace-in-the-hole?
CHE: It doesn’t matter amigo; the scenario he is talking about is always invalidated by what happens next—
IMPRESARIO is catapulted on stage to obscure Che by involuntarily stealing his spotlight.
IMPRESARIO: [Obviously unprepared for his ‘entrance’ buttoning fly or finishing a backstage snack.] Ladies and gentlemen; owing to a minor backstage mishap—[Distracted by CHE’s prompt.] Eh? [Brief pause while CHE whispers in his ear.] Ladies and gentlemen; owing to the requirements of primetime programming at this point we must abandon the Interrogation Scene and cut directly to the moment you have all been waiting for! Although this abbreviated script obviates to some extent the author’s intent of attenuating your climactic expectations ad infinitum, it has the practical effect of preventing your patience from ending before his play does!
By now cantina stage curtains may have been drawn on Che by IMPRESARIO. In any case, INTERROGATORS have turned off their table lamps and ‘stolen’ from main stage.
IMPRESARIO: So without further ado we are about to unleash the full fury of that whirlwind you previously seeded with your theatergoing desires! [A manifestly clumsy effect of thunder made with tin sheeting is heard.] Already the storm clouds have gathered as ominously as they did at Golgotha; or in El Greco’s View of Toledo! The approaching thunder knells like the implacable heart of doom itself! And now, when the curtains open, at long last you will see revealed in full frontality by each flash of our author’s literary lightningbolts the mysteries of: The Elsinore Enigma! [Thunder.] Ramon’s Recurring Resurrections! [Thunder.] Death and Nudity! [Thunder.] The true identity of the Man On The Hot Seat! [Thunder.] Penultimacy and Prepenultimacy! [Thunder.] Fullfrontalism! [Thunder.] Karl Marx’s Paradox on Earth! [Thunder.] Acts of dramaturgical derringdo! [Thunder.] And last, but not least, in a final burst of metaphysical pyrotechnics—the Incredible! [Thunder.] Impossible! [Thunder.] Sensational! [Thunder.] Epistemological Vanishing Act!!!!!
Cantina stage curtains open to reveal CHE on Hot Seat in either: (1) The brilliantly lit private library set; (2) A replica of same executed on canvas flats, or (3) The schoolroom set unaltered but for the fact that (as in all three settings) Che is flanked by 2 manikins wearing on one hand (stage right) a tuxedo, and on the other (stage left) a set of combat fatigues. WIFE ENTERS via portal wearing formal evening attire.
WIFE: Still sitting there like a statue, are you!
IMPRESARIO: [Acting as narrator throughout scene.] Ramon doesn’t seem to react to his wife’s sudden arrival. He certainly doesn’t manifest the "shattering" effect she should have on his effort to reconstruct the nightmare which haunts him. He remains sitting there as if her invasion of his privacy is itself part of the "scenario" he is reconstructing; a scenario which, since it unfolds upon the stage of his mind, does not require him to physically communicate with the other characters. In real life, of course, such a gross indiscretion would be greeted by the violent turning of his head in her direction and a look of murderous hostility distorting his saintly features into the mask of a raving maniac—that private face of public men seen only by their wives.
WIFE: Does that "look" mean you don’t intend dressing for the play?
IMPRESARIO: This remark appears to indicate Che has indeed reacted as he normally does to his wife’s "transgressions;" or as Ramon does in the dream when his wife "violates the sanctity of his study." But that line of hers also resonates with a deeper significance related to the delicate balance of their domestic status quo. By asking him if he intends to dress for the play, does she refer to the play she is demanding to be taken to by him—or to the scenario he is forcing her to participate in? A scenario which, coincidentally, bears a striking similarity to the plot of the play whose performance tonight provides the impetus for her theatergoing ultimatum!
WIFE: I don’t give a damn what you think!
IMPRESARIO: This is probably her response to the murderous look in his eyes, or possibly he has said something about "her devastating impact on his thought processes." In any event he construes her speech not as the theatergoing hysterics of a frustrated housewife, but rather as an attack on that meditative motif which has always dominated his persona. Since he is what he thinks, his wife’s caustic accusation can only be construed as nothing less than a revolutionary manifesto—a declaration of sexual insurgency along the lines first articulated by Ibsen’s Doll’s House heroine. And, even beyond the humiliation of being cast in the role of that arch cuckold Torvald Helmer, Ernest must consider the ideological implications of his role as a "matrimonial feudalist." Is he, for instance, playing Batista to her Castro in a conjugalized game of National Liberation?
WIFE: If nothing else, the fresh air would be beneficial—
IMPRESARIO: In this remark there is the sound of reconciliation; but also the treachery of a woman bent on eventual triumph. Her emphasis on the seemingly innocuous benefits of "fresh air" is obviously a 2-pronged attack on Ernest’s pulmonary infirmities and his nocturnal fantasies of rejuvenation in the ozone-rich atmosphere of the Andean Altiplano; much in the way Ashenbach’s wife scolds him incessantly for his "geriatric infatuation" with the atavistic possibilities of a vacation in Venice. But, more likely, her "fresh air" remark was intended to mean that Ramon’s mind is in need of being ventilated by the hurricane of ideas unleashed in the play she is so anxious for him to see—
WIFE: Theatergoing (is/isn’t) a question of having cojones—[This line is spoken while IMPRESARIO is still speaking, with ‘is/isn’t’ portion deliberately ambiguous.]
IMPRESARIO: This reference to "cojones" always disconcerts Che because of the enigmatic way such an explosive topic is introduced. He is never certain whether The Wife says theatergoing "is" or, "isn’t"—"a question of having cojones." Moreover, if it is the latter case—if his cojones are not involved; there are at least two ways of construing what she says. First: She is acting in accordance with that precept of guerrilla warfare described by Celine in his novel about France’s 1940 gender crisis, Castration On The Instalment Plan, whereby the scrotumlike balloon of an enemy’s selfinflated machismo is best attacked not with a blitzkrieg but by a series of "pinprick sorties." Thus, having repeatedly threatened him manhood with her theatergoing taunts, Ramon’s wife now disengages herself from any further acts of emasculation and, from a "safe" distance, enjoys the spectacle of his machismo depressurizing through the surgical incisions made by her razor sharp wit.
Second: Like all women, she intuitively perceives the prurient nature of theatergoing as being based on the ambivalent sexuality of the audience—that state of mass identity crisis wherein the usual separations of sex are blurred in the orgiastic vortex of an author’s ideas. Consequently Ernest is entitled to perceive his wife’s invitation as one meant to entice him into sharing with her the forbidden thrill of a trans sexual metamorphosis within the rubric of a "legitimate" theatrical experience—while maintaining the myth of his manliness. If, on the other hand, she is saying cojones are involved with making the theatergoing decision, another set of explanations arises.
Then again, perhaps the term "cojones" is not used by her in its anatomical sense at all, but rather metaphorically; to denote the kind of intellectual macho required even of housewives when they contemplate exposing themselves to the perilous effects and aftereffects of being dramaturgically defiled. Or, like Karl Emmanuel Schwank, could she be saying something about the seminal nature of all art with a deliberately provocative statement concerning the gargantuan genitalia of such godlike dramatists as Buchner, Brecht and Beorn—thereby bringing into question not only her husband’s ideological virility, but the sperm count of all his role models; from Don Quixote to Mao Tse-tung?
WIFE: It is now-or-never-time, Ramon!
IMPRESARIO: About this ultimatum there can be no doubt. She is telling Che if he does not dress himself for the play in 5 minutes she will leave in the waiting limousine with Arturo for an evening of infidelity that will climax in his best friend’s bed.
Attempting to exit WIFE encounters BEST FRIEND ENTERING through portal. They become engaged in a mimed discussion concerning the ultimatum deadline.
IMPRESARIO: Curiously, it is not the specter of his wife in his best friend’s bed that most concerns Ernest at this point—but rather the prospect of her sitting in the audience with another man while the author of To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia? has his way with them both!
BEST FRIEND: 5 minutes is hardly enough time for putting on one of these damned monkeysuits, let alone for expecting Ramon to decide the fate of this delicately balanced "arrangement" we three have been enjoying for the 25 years of your marriage!
IMPRESARIO: So—while Arturo tries improvising a rescue operation doomed to shorten the very deadline he seeks to extend, Che uses the time wasted by this scene for a selfanalysis of what Ramon’s wife persistently describes as Ernest’s—
WIFE: —pathological fear of theatergoing in general, and of attending this "procrastination" play in particular!
IMPRESARIO: He begins by asking himself why, indeed, is Ernest so fanatically opposed to his wife’s apparently innocent proposition? Is his obstinacy perhaps related to some profound flaw arising from the dialectics of Che’s commitment to the efficacy of art as a weapon of guerrilla warfare? If in fact the mass mind can be agitated by dramaturgical propaganda, might not his own mindset be manipulated by this "work of art" that so excites his wife with its—
WIFE: —therapeutic consequences of rerevolutionizing Ramon’s revolutionary mind set!
IMPRESARIO: Can it be that with this absurdly naive prognosis Guevara’s wife has put her finger on the dilemma paralyzing Ramon? If seeing a play has the potential of altering Che’s ideas about the practicalities of Ramon’s attempt to author his own apotheosis; does the efficacy of agitprop itself obviate the need for all other revolutionary action? Might not the injustices of the status quo be ended—or at least become endurable—by simply utopianizing our perception of life as it is already constituted? Doesn’t the popularity of Marat/Sade, and perennial classics like Amleth, Oedipus Rex, Hedda Gabler and The Passion Play of The Pampas, arise from the absurd spectacle of witnessing some fool demonstrate the obvious eroneousness of an ideology whose objective of paradise on earth requires one to selfdestruct!
WIFE: Fool! Now you have less than one minute to persuade him to do what was only just possible to do in 5!!!
EXIT WIFE triumphantly through portal. BEST FRIEND advances toward Che while taking leather cigar case from inner pocket.
IMPRESARIO: [Also approaching CHE, or already in position to intercept BEST FRIEND.] So begins the scene Ernest privately entitles "The Best Friend Scene."
As BEST FRIEND takes cigar from case and inserts it between CHE’s lips, IMPRESARIO takes cigar from unguarded case, moving thereafter to proscenium arch, against which he leans to light up and watch BEST FRIEND light CHE’s cigar and one he has selected for himself. All three spend several moments enjoying their smokes before:
IMPRESARIO: As you can see, even in this "expedited" version, the Best Friend Episode begins rather languidly with this throwback to the cigar smoking ceremony of the Incas—that savage breed of men to whom tobacco wasn’t a health hazard, but a religious substance imbued with miraculous properties. In point of fact, the entire Incan ethos was contained in these scrolls of nicotiana rustica—whose theology was literally inhaled via the chemical mystique of combustion—a harbinger of that Hebraic literary device known as the burning bush; and yet, as Jung points out, much more meaningful in the richness of its symbolism.
Consider, for instance, how the concept of messianic martyrdom is signified by the selfdestruction of that which, at least momentarily, provides us with a glimpse of paradise? And that arch stogie smoker Sigmund Freud, looking far beyond the obvious phallic implications, saw within these "botanical bibles" a cosmological encyclopedia where, from the seminality of its seed state through the eschatology of its ash, one accesses the mystery of one’s existence by simply sitting in a smoke-filled room.
But getting back to The Best Friend scene itself—whose languid unfolding does not surprise Ramon. He construes it in dramatic terms as "The Calm Before The Storm." What he does find disturbing is that this preclimactic pas de deux involves him with The Best Friend—a character Ramon considers minor, despite his lifesaving exploits in the Sierra Maestra and the way he has been inserted as a third party to Ramon’s marriage. Moreover, it is a scene whose improbabilities proliferate ominously; as if he and The Best Friend were somehow competing for supremacy in a scenario that, up to this point at least, sprang entirely from Ramon’s subconscious. For example; there is The Best Friend’s nonsensical argument about The Wife’s deadline being deliberately too brief for any man to meet; when obviously Che has the option of exiting in his dressing gown and changing costumes in the limousine during the 10 minute drive to the theater—an option he has on previous occasions actually exercised in order to placate his wife’s "housebound hysteria." Not only has The Best Friend witnessed this spectacle of The Great Man being exiled from his sanctum sanctorum in a state of dishabille, it was he himself who played the part of valet to Ernest’s "Backseat Dressingroom" pantomime—helping him into a "monkeysuit" as The Wife extolled the "civilizing" virtues of formal evening attire even—or especially—under a revolutionary socialist regime.
BEST FRIEND: I must admit; my time expanding tactic was only a charade—
IMPRESARIO: Obviously your intent was not to make more time but to waste what precious little you had! What we want to know is why—after all these years of discipleship—you choose to spoil the eve of Ernest’s apotheosis with such a dubious deception?
BEST FRIEND: That stalling stratagem should not be seen as an act of apostasy, amigo, but rather as my simpleminded way of solving the dilemma your exit from the stage creates for me—
IMPRESARIO: I can’t believe my ears! You, the chief beneficiary of Ernest’s tragic destiny, are complaining about some petty personal problems caused by his departure from the scene! What more can he give after you have his wife, his house, his ministerial portfolio—
BEST FRIEND: What does one say to he whose tragic destiny is about to make all of one’s fondest dreams come true?
IMPRESARIO: That’s better—
BEST FRIEND: All afternoon I’ve been analyzing my options for playing this scene with you—
IMPRESARIO: So, you treat this solemn occasion as if it were an acting exercise!
BEST FRIEND: At first I approached the problem in Ibsenesque terms; with the two of us enjoying these cigars in the ambience of understated opulence permeating your Havana hideaway; after which I would begin to explain (in the most analytical terms) why it was that, in those swashbuckling days of the Sierra Maestra, I heedlessly risked my life to save yours—while now, in the mellowness of middle age, I draw a fine line between death defying exuberance and the morbid fascination for ending it all—
IMPRESARIO: A man makes his mind up to sacrifice himself to save all humanity and you mock him for being "morbid?"
BEST FRIEND: On the other hand, a style less Scandinavian and more Socratic offered me the chance of more accurately expressing my disenchantment with the whole idea of dying for the downtrodden. In the final analysis it is absurd, isn’t it amigo, to think that the base metal of all mankind can be made immutably golden by an alchemical act of messianic selfdestruction?
IMPRESARIO: To which the answer could be made that power has so corrupted your perception of the proletariat that, like the arch infidel Erdman, you see the masses as being merely so much social shit from which Marxism mushrooms ever upward in a mindless triumph of fungoidal megalomania!
BEST FRIEND: —or perhaps by emulating comrade Kerensky’s castigation of his Communist colleagues for over-opiating on the practice of "proclamatory utopianization," I might persuade you that our own "paperwork paradise" is in reality a colossal fiasco—
IMPRESARIO: But isn’t it this failure to Edenize Cuba by fiat that fecundates Guevara’s infatuation with the apocalyptic possibilities of an onstage apotheosis?
BEST FRIEND: —then again, might not Eichmann’s argument to his Jewish jury that by engineering Hitler’s holocaust he was himself victimized by another man’s pornographic masterplan, provide me with a technique for ameliorating my seemingly treacherous behavior in the circumstances of our triple love affair?
IMPRESARIO: Oh, that’s a very pretty picture—you as The Man In The Glass Booth, drowning in a sea of selfmade pity!!!!
BEST FRIEND: Yet equally apropos is the example of Aristotle O challenging the ghost of the New Frontier Kid to a phallic showdown over visiting rights to that gynecological shrine a dead gunslinger’s widow is wont to keep forever sealed as her memento mori to a straightshooting spouse sanctified in his prime—
IMPRESARIO: Such a below-the-belt juxtaposing of grief and genitalia serves only to expose you in the fullest kind of frontality as the concupiscent cockatrice you have always pretended not to be!
BEST FRIEND: But in the final analysis, amigo, we must play this scene as Panza and Quixote played it in that masterpiece of moral mockery which, as a child, you mistook for a manifesto of philanthropic machismo. It was Cervantes—and not MarxEngels—was it not, who first made you think the evil lurking in windmills could be vanquished by some idealistic superman wearing a suit of intellectual armor? And, since that fatal day you first found yourself in that imaginary La Mancha, have we not both been destined to reenact the penultimate episode when Sancho’s survival instinct forces him to repudiate his squireship? Remember amigo, how the news of Dulcinea’s pornographic performance in The Passion Play of Pamplona inspires Quixote to concoct his most audacious misadventure: The Onstage Salvation Of His Sexually Enslaved Ladylove?
"Think of it, Panza!" he cries deliriously, "How astonished the audience will be when, instead of their recarnalized Christ, it is I who enter the stage to answer the crucial question of whether it is nobler to be eternally celibate or, at the outer edge of apotheosis, to mortify myself upon the flesh of a makebelieve Magdalene in an act of obscene auto-apostasy!" To which Panza, himself astonished by the specter of such an insane scenario, replies with his celebrated Eulogistic Valedictory; that left handed encomium spoken by Cervantes through the lips of his earthy antihero, which so cogently epitomizes the tragedy of Quixote’s comic quest for a chivalrous society.
And therein, amigo, lies the rub; for by the virtue of Panza’s brevity, that 12th part of an hour allotted for my farewell to you loomed like an unfillable eternity! 5 seconds—not minutes—were all I needed for saying what had to be said between us. Thus my scheme for seeming to stretch time when, in fact, I wanted only to shrink it until the moment arrived—as it has just now—for me to tell you this: All philosophies are fundamentally flawed, amigo! Yours was in its failure to foresee how, in accordance with the divine masterplan you sought to alter, you were doomed to selfdestruction. As for my mistake; maybe it is in hoping to outsurvive you—upon whom my reason for being has always been contingent! [Moving toward portal.] In any event amigo, as one infidel to another—vaya con dios!
EXIT BEST FRIEND via portal as FEMME FATALE ENTERS wearing striptease costume and carrying valise. Setting valise down she sits on CHE’s lap, her arm around his neck and her head nestled near his cheek.
FEMME FATALE: At long last beloved, we are alone! Soon the sound of the limousine pulling away will signal the start of all our dreams coming true! [A pause, after which she repeats previous line as cue for missing soundeffect.]
IMPRESARIO: This is where, for one reason or another, the "limousine sound effect" always fails to occur. Tonight it could be another backstage equipment failure. Or, perhaps in his anxiety to obey The Wife’s instruction that: "No matter what happens he must leave for the theater at the precise instant her ultimatum to Ramon expires, the chauffeur has overaccelerated and stalled the engine. Then again, The Wife herself may be having second thoughts about the finality of her ultimatum and told the chauffeur to disregard her previous instruction; forcing the chauffeur to consider whether her former order, requiring him to ignore all subsequent orders, now compels him to disregard the order purporting to rescind it? At this point, possibly The Best Friend intervenes as an expert on martial law to tell the chauffeur that "uncountermandable orders can be legally countermanded in at least two situations: (1) When the countermanding authority and the anticountermanding authority are identical, and; (2) When, after assiduously analyzing the situation in which one finds one’s self at the time the uncountermandable order is to be executed, one decides that obeying it would actually defeat its purpose."
In this regard The Best Friend need only remind the chauffeur of the dilemma faced by the antihero of the play he is driving them to see that night—wherein to confirm his suspicion that the fugitive insurrectionary sought by the Bolivian government is in reality masquerading as an actor, a certain Warrant Officer Teran must disregard a direct order to leave the cantina and proceed to a particular ravine for the capture of what always turns out to be an actor masquerading as the fugitive insurrectionary known as Ramon. Other possibilities abound, of course, but none of them interest Che and Tania. As "artistes" they naturally attribute their plight to the celestial vandalism plaguing all who aspire to transcend their evanescence. After all, isn’t the history of art filled with divinely ordained disasters? One need only recall Salieri’s repeated attempts to sabotage the premier of Mozart’s Promethean Symphony with that "heaven sent" claque of corrupt copyists, fake fiddlers, counterfeit conductors, and professional flatulators posing as members of that first night audience!
But for Che and The Femme Fatale there is not enough time to ponder the inscrutabilities of the mischief engulfing them. They must immediately construct a bridge to span the everwidening gap between the coming true of their dreams and the fiascoed soundeffect—
For some time now CHE and FEMME FATALE have in fact been engaged in an intimate (and for the most part inaudible) conversation.
IMPRESARIO: Fortunately for them, however, this debacle every actor dreads has not come as a complete surprise. In point of fact, rarely does an evening go by when, as this play approaches the threshold of its promised perfection, the universe itself doesn’t catch its breath and skip a cosmic heartbeat or two; with the result that our theatrical timetable is thrown somewhat out of kilter.
Accordingly (names of actors playing Che and Femme Fatale) have prepared themselves for the socalled "sound effect snafu" by rehearsing the socalled "Passion Play Pas de Deux"—an improvisational scene that, like Caruso’s adlibbing of Che Gelida Manina on the occasion of Mimi’s actual onstage attack of hypothermia, has become a permanent part of what was already an immortal masterwork.
Indeed, so popular has this "unrehearsed" act of "conversational copulation" become that, when the gods themselves don’t intervene, the Sound Effect Snafu is frequently faked to avoid a negative audience reaction! Yes; despite the excruciating attenuation of their climactic yearnings, it seems that playgoers find themselves enraptured by this spectacle of seemingly spontaneous verbal intercourse!
FEMME FATALE: [As CHE whispers into her ear.]—every word you speak penetrates the innermost recess of my being—
IMPRESARIO: Tonight, of course, this scene some critics have described as "The most sensational stage event since Caligula’s Snuff & Buff extravaganzas," must be somewhat abbreviated—
FEMME FATALE: —my God, what a thing for any man to say to any woman!!!!
IMPRESARIO: [Momentarily distracted by this outburst.]—therefore—to summarize: Each of them seeks from the innermost depths of the other that secret scenario by which they are about to fatally entwine their destinies. He asks her why she haunts all of his thoughts. She wants to know why he appears in all of her dreams. Together they drift down a dialectical Amazon, meandering through the tropical rain forest of their primeval psychology, seeking the very watershed of their souls; that unexplored territory lying at the darkest heart of our most secret selves—[From FEMME FATALE a burst of nervous laughter tinged with lascivity.] Yet for all their future sexual superstardom, Che and Tania explore one another now with the beguiling innocence of two children toying with the jigsaw puzzle of their newfound anatomical anachronisms—
FEMME FATALE: —my fondest fantasies are always of you—
IMPRESARIO: Quite shamelessly she describes her dreams as a Danish dairy farmer’s daughter—telling him how in the Arctic night it was always he who stole into her bed, hot blooded and freighted with jungle fragrances—
FEMME FATALE: —we would reenact Rousseau’s painting of The Frigid Fraulein Being Seduced By A South American Savage—
CHE makes gesture of disbelief.
IMPRESARIO: But Ramon refuses to believe the timid French customs official could have painted such a blatantly pornographic picture. Instead he traces the origin of her torrid trundling scenario to the notorious forgeries of objets d’erotique displayed in the fake art galleries of Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen. No doubt it was on some family shopping excursion to the capital city that the corner of her infantile eye was caught by the tantalizing tableau she describes—an incident leaving the mark of its anonymous perpetrator forever imprinted on her pristine libido—
FEMME FATALE: —aren’t one’s defenses against being artistically defiled always more or less vulnerable to peripheral penetration?
IMPRESARIO: Not content with this minor triumph Che forces his Swedish Governess to admit that in reality it was not he who played the role of her phantom bedfellow; but rather the celebrated Hispanic superstud "Ernesto"—that fictitious philanderer whose "savage sexuality" permeates that type of "Beauty Parlor Porn" known to Nordic women as "The Tropical Travelogue." She confesses her addiction to the softcore trash read by all Scandinavian schoolgirls between the fake covers of their gymnasium textbooks—
FEMME FATALE: —stories of blue-eyed blondes sold into white slavery by sinister South American tour guides; or haremized behind the scenes of some sleazy cantina to satisfy the depraved theatrical lust of a maniacal impresario who is frequently a fugitive from some Israeli hit squad—
IMPRESARIO: The extent of her prepubescent promiscuity is elaborated with a frankness so fullyfrontalized Ernest must question her claims to him of undying fidelity—
FEMME FATALE: —even after she has been defiled by hundreds of imaginary men, a woman can still come to her one true love as a spiritual virgin—
IMPRESARIO: The remainder of this scene is, of course, devoted to that dialogue described by Karl Emmanuel Schwank as "The most exciting theatrical tete-a-tete ever overheard concerning the intellectual nature of sex."
FEMME FATALE: [Facing audience, perhaps shielding eyes from lights.] If someday this scenario is publicly staged to celebrate our linguistic love affair, might not the vicarious participants in our ideological partnership proliferate over time toward becoming an infinite number of theatergoers? Or better yet—performed in primetime as a massmedia event—could the overhearing of this most intimate of conversations trigger a global revolution in the way humanity perceives itself?
IMPRESARIO: [Brief pause during which he moves toward portal.] It is after this brief pause—so pregnant with its preclimactic possibilities—that the sound effect the Femme Fatale has been waiting to hear is finally heard—[Sound of limousine pulling away on gravel drive.]—forcing Tania to free herself from Che’s embrace [Which FEMME FATALE now does.] —to announce that—
FEMME FATALE: [Declaiming.] The time has come to activate Operation Upstart!
IMPRESARIO: [Standing at portal.] Operation Upstart! The electrifying code word for Ernest’s masterplan to unilaterally dismantle the machinery of American civilization as we now know it—a masterplan starting with a supersonic seaplane flight to Lake Titicaca and the arrival of Che and his Swedish governess at the Schoolhouse Cantina just in time to appear on stage as Ramon and The Femme Fatale for the Grand Finale of The Passion Play of The Pampas!
ENTER EXECUTIONER via portal. FEMME FATALE, who has remained heroically posed downstage, now turns to telephone (or to where phone would be in private study set).
IMPRESARIO: Intending to advise the seaplane pilot waiting on the lagoon that their rendezvous will occur at the cove according to plan, the Swedish Governess turns toward the telephone—only to be surprised by his presence at the portal of Ernest’s "private study"—
EXIT IMPRESARIO via portal.
FEMME FATALE: What are you doing here? Has something gone wrong at the lagoon?
EXECUTIONER: [Removing leather helmet and goggles comprising part of his archaic pilot’s costume (under which he wears uniform of a modern Bolivian army officer).] Can’t you see what is happening? The charade is over—the masquerade is finished!
FEMME FATALE: Fool! What are you talking about?
EXECUTIONER: [Removing flight coveralls.] Isn’t it obvious? I’m not the seaplane pilot you took me for! In reality I am Warrant Officer Mario Teran of the Bolivian National Guard—[Offers her document.]—I have a communique from Cochabamba addressed to me personally and signed by Presidente Barrientos authorizing the immediate liquidation of one Major Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
FEMME FATALE: [Slapping document from his hand.] Idiot! I should have known better than to entrust The Executioner’s role to such a rank amateur! Can’t you see you are confusing the finale of The Passion Play with a scene that is really happening!
EXECUTIONER: No! You are the ones who are mistaken about what is real and what is not—[He has retrieved document, carefully refolded it and now returns it to an inside pocket.]
FEMME FATALE: Isn’t it a fact we haven’t left Cuba yet—that we are all still standing in Ernest’s private library? [Indicates set.]
EXECUTIONER: The only "fact" involved here is that, as always, you react to The Executioner’s surprise entrance by trying to paralyze him with procrastination. While in the past you have succeeded in convincing my understudy he was suffering from the delusions of an identity crisis caused by his acting anxieties—I have prepared myself backstage for your insidious stratagem! Tonight there has been a change in our "script"—[Draws pistol from leather holster.]—this pistol I am using is not a prop! [He fires a single shot which either shatters phone or, if schoolroom set is being used, activates an explosive squib planted in a blackboard or wall. To CHE, as he advances toward him with pistol extended:] I am sure you need no persuading that the end is near, amigo. Notice how steady my hand is? If you play your part by sitting perfectly still it will be quick and painless—[Puts pistol to CHE’s head.]—just a single shot through both temples and you will discover what lies on the other side of this mortality you find so irksome!
FEMME FATALE: You can’t do it just like that! [Snaps fingers in EXECUTIONER’s face.]
EXECUTIONER: Why not?
FEMME FATALE: If we are going to play the scene properly, it doesn’t make sense to climax it with a coup de grace before we have established who we are and why we are where we are!
EXECUTIONER: But we are not performing The Passion Play of The Pampas—tonight we are actually making history!
FEMME FATALE: History or histrionics—what does it matter when the situation we find ourselves in demands that we do what must be done in accordance with the dictates of good drama?
EXECUTIONER: Life is not lived according to a playwright’s idea of what an audience wants to see happen—
FEMME FATALE: If that’s the case why is it that night after night The Executioner struggles with the crucial question of whether we three actors are powerless to do other than what our characters do when their author frees them from his theatrical tyranny?
EXECUTIONER: But our situation is not the same as theirs! This isn’t some stage prop I am pointing at Guevara’s head!
FEMME FATALE: To an actor of Ernest’s intensity the pistol is always real, and the issue is always one of life and death. For Ramon this game of Russian roulette is never played with blanks!
EXECUTIONER: For him, maybe; but as an amateur I can never quite believe that actuality emulates art.
FEMME FATALE: Nevertheless you persist in reciting The Executioner’s lines! That little speech of yours just now was lifted straight from the script we have been rehearsing? Isn’t everything we’ve said and done to this point exactly what our characters say and do as they move The Passion Play ever closer to its climax?
EXECUTIONER: You’re forgetting—that shot I fired just now proves we are playing for keeps!
FEMME FATALE: Not necessarily. It proves only that one of your bullets was real; and even that effect could have been faked! Your target might have been rigged with a remotely controlled explosive device simulating the real thing! Isn’t The Executioner perpetually frustrated by the impossibility of convincing Ramon that the next time he squeezes his trigger the result will be fatal?
EXECUTIONER: As for that—I can only—you always seem to—
FEMME FATALE: Why can’t you admit we have no choice but to play this scene as it is performed in the cantina? [Pause.] Doesn’t this silence signify your surrender to that logic our characters are always powerless to resist?
EXECUTIONER: [Wearily.] And where does that leave us now? In the final analysis don’t we always arrive at that moment when, despite your seductive stratagem his determination to selfdestruct dooms our triple entanglement plans—
FEMME FATALE: [As striptease music filters in she moves with dancelike maneuvers toward EXECUTIONER.] Absurd or not, must we not fight that fate which, by ending our character’s threeway love affair, deprives our own offstage triangle of its raison d’etre?
EXECUTIONER: [Retreating a step from her seductive power.] It ’s much simpler than that, isn’t it?
FEMME FATALE: [Vamping him.] Is it?
EXECUTIONER: Like all leading ladies, you enjoy being forced by some dramatist to publicly debase yourself in an act of—
FEMME FATALE interrupts him by removing first of her outer garments, leaving it with him as she dances to mainstage curtain stage right.
FEMME FATALE: No more than you relish the sight of me doing what I like being made to do!!!!
EXECUTIONER: [Discarding garment whose fragrance enraptured him momentarily.] As The Executioner I am not permitted such luxuries! [Having moved close to CHE.] Instead, my eyes are kept occupied by the more amazing spectacle of this "martyr" tormenting himself with the problem of how he might yet survive his own apotheosis!
FEMME FATALE: [Toying with curtain between thighs.] Liar! How can any man resist the ecstasy of watching the object of his desire disrobe—if only from the corner of his eye?
EXECUTIONER: She’s talking to you, amigo—asking if your ordinarily laserlike gaze is so immune to peripheral distraction even her ecdysiastical incandescence leaves you cold? Or from behind the embrasures of your ivory tower will you play the voyeur and furtively observe her skinshow subverting your dream of a stainless steel society? Has she perhaps put her finger on the flaw in your fatal fixation? Is it possible she is right, amigo; that some way can be found for us to win this game we have been made to play with a stacked deck? [Throughout this speech CHE’s eyes remain fixed on audience while those of EXECUTIONER remain fixed on Che.] One sideways glance—one wayward look is all it takes for you to save us all, Guevara; and to hell with the rest of humanity! [Turning head toward FEMME FATALE but keeping eyes on CHE.] It’s no use! Like all condemned men, this fool still puts his faith in miracles! [To CHE.] What are you thinking? That it is I, The Executioner, who will falter—that I lack the cojones to commit such a cold blooded act? But, by definition amigo, if one lacks cojones, does he not become capable of killing only in cold blood? And, by conceding that I alone have the power to ameliorate your martyrdom, aren’t you imbuing me with a heroism surpassing your own? After all, if your destiny depends on my trigger finger, what becomes of that myth you seek to perpetuate concerning the suicidal nature of your sacrifice?
Moreover, doesn’t such a scenario ignore the categorical imperative operating on all executioners to exemplify the instinct for survival by always outliving their clientele? [CHE smiles.] You smile, but it is I who will survive to laugh at your legend! Oh, it’s true—your name will shine forever in that galaxy of utopianist superstars arrayed against the midnight sky of mankind’s mythic imagination; while mine is eternally linked with the heavyweights of history’s most infamous hitmen. But in the cold light of day amigo, does humanity identify itself with the corpse on the cross; or with those who nailed their "savior" to it?
No! Idiot that he ordinarily is, your average proletarian understands instinctively that his metaphysical machismo must be proven by ratifying, if not by emulating, the act of messiahcide destiny imposes on arch villains like me! [Brief pause as he scrutinizes CHE’s face.] Still that sanctimonious expression on your saintly face—still that lofty contempt for certain death? Or are you deluding yourself with yet another fantasy—perhaps the one in which the victim awakens to find his extermination has not been a nightmarish reality but only a realistic nightmare? Upon reflection however, can there be any comfort in such a desperate hypothesis when, even in our dreams, we must prudently defend ourselves against the possibility we are not dreaming?
Similarly we can dispose of the idea there is some safety associated with the theatrical setting you find yourself in by recalling that the character you are playing was himself murdered on a stage; not to mention that entire genre of Snuff & Buff plays whose actors and actresses are routinely neutralized in full view of audiences no less "civilized" than the one waiting to witness your undoing!
As for this fantasy of yours that you alone comprise the entire dramatis personae of an exercise in armchair problemsolving—it simply won’t hold enough water to keep a reasonable man afloat! To be dialectically valid the characters you invent must possess the will to do what you and I are about to do—actually kill and be killed. Or, like The Femme Fatale, to debase herself so that she might finally triumph over our "superior" ideologies! Like all playwrights your omnipotence is defective. having created a cast of characters, you yourself are held hostage to the working out of their multiple desires! [CHE opens lips and raises hand, as if to dispute this point.] There is nothing you can say amigo—and nothing you can do now but die or disgrace yourself. Every avenue of escape has been blocked. Your arsenal of dreams and delusions is exhausted! The time has come when finally we are free!!!! [Music stops, freezing FEMME FATALE who, until now, has been continuing her striptease.] If only to solve the problem of perpetuating a game that by its rules must now end for us all with your apotheosis! [Puts pistol to CHE’s temple.] Which is it to be: death or disgrace?
FEMME FATALE: No!! Not yet!! While there is time there must be some hope!!
EXECUTIONER: Time for what? To torment ourselves further with this farce?
FEMME FATALE: There must be some way out of this!! Think, damn you both, think!!!!!
EXECUTIONER: The deck has been fully dealt and we are all left with losing hands!
FEMME FATALE: If you really want me you’ll find a way to win—you who always carry an extra ace up your sleeve!
EXECUTIONER: [Produces ace of spades from sleeve, then makes it disappear.] We need more than party tricks now. Besides, the penalty for cheating the gods is unthinkably worse than our impending fate.
FEMME FATALE: Only if we are caught!
EXECUTIONER: But we will be caught—just as night after night the characters we play at the cantina are when they attempt to avoid the unavoidable with that cheap vanishing act of theirs—
FEMME FATALE: Tonight though, we are not acting, are we! Haven’t those real bullets you loaded into your pistol changed the rules we are playing by? If they are real, doesn’t our actual escape via the epistemological loophole become plausible?
Pause, during which EXECUTIONER removes pistol from CHE’s temple, aims it at onstage target and fires with destructive results.
EXECUTIONER: What do you think, amigo? Is there a grain of truth in what she says? Can we really duplicate that "miracle of miracles" whereby a trio of actors vanish from the stage in that split second before the final curtain cuts their characters’ lives short? [Fires shot into auditorium ‘hitting’ another squib-implanted target.] Or should we first ask ourselves why, in the last analysis, the Epistemological Vanishing Act always fails? Isn’t it because the audience suspects that, since the same scene will be staged again the following night, our obliteration should not be seen as the catastrophe we claim it to be—but as only one more episode in an endless series of similar episodes?
If, however, we can somehow convince them that tonight we are playing for keeps—[Aims at usher or audience member.]—that tonight their fondest theatergoing fears might in fact come true; that they are actually about to witness the ultimate obscenity of flesh and blood actors being sacrificed live on this artificial altar? [He fires, felling his human target. Music and FEMME FATALE’s dance resume as pistol is again pressed against CHE’s temple.] So, perhaps the stage is set for us to do the impossible! Or is it? Since there is still some time to spare, shouldn’t we use it to fully analyze our chances of pulling off such an unprecedented exploit? After all, with an audience watching every move they make is it really feasible for actors to evade their own fates by leaving those of their characters behind to face the music? Or does the trick consist of preventing those who watch us from actually seeing what we do? [As she will do hereafter, FEMME FATALE reacts with simulated sounds of a gathering orgasm, as all ecdysiasts do to convince their audience they too are aroused by the indecent acts they are ‘forced’ to perform.] But for that to happen the characters themselves must approach the climax of their play with subtexts seeming to somehow solve those problems the actors who deserted them were unable to solve. Thus my Executioner believes he can pull the trigger without thereby depriving himself of his only victim; and your Man On The Hot Seat thinks his martyrdom will survive the last look he takes at her Femme Fatale—who while standing on a stage stark naked hopes to maintain a vestige of her virginal mystique! Taken separately these three scenarios are, of course, manifestly unbelievable. Being by their nature expendable, the characters are resigned to their "sacrificial roles." Yet even they conspire to save themselves with stratagems by which their suicidal subtexts when orchestrated to occur simultaneously—achieve a combined efficacy exceeding the sum of their separate parts! ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Hence we arrive at the crux of the matter: The need for the actors and the characters they play to assiduously analyze all of those psycho-physiological factors comprising that "moment of moments" when all of the audience’s theatergoing expectations culminate contemporaneously with the climactic closing of the final curtain. ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
In this regard, of course, we are guided by the Tod und Nacktheit Theory of Otto Beorn as expounded by his arch apostle, Karl Emmanuel Schwank; according to whom, on the very threshold of his triumph, the theatergoer is himself defeated by her (sic) divided desires to witness our 3 characters separately solving their seemingly insoluble dilemmas. ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Thus: In To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia? the spectator must choose between watching: (1) The Executioner’s trigger finger; (2) The corners of The Man On The Hot Seat’s eyes, and; (3) The Femme Fatale finally revealed in the fullest kind of physical frontality. ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
As we all know from experience, our audience of tin miners always turns its attention first to The Femme Fatale, and only afterward—no matter how quickly—to you and me. And this they do, night after night, despite having overheard us discuss the very plot by which they will be deceived! ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Moreover, they are always told specifically—as I am telling this audience now—that our "Vanishing Act" can only occur with their cooperation; and behind a cloud of epistemological ambiguity! ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Nevertheless, in the expanded evanescence of their crescendoed curiosity, they always make the crucial mistake we count on them making. First blinded by the lightning bolt of her full frontal nudity and then deafened by my deathdealing thunderclap, the audience naturally but erroneously assumes you have not in fact capitulated to the peripheral temptation which for them always proves to be so fatally distracting. ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
The possibility that, having convinced Ramon his unseen act of selfapostasy constitutes a nonevent I blow his brains out anyway, never dawns on them. Such a subversive scenario is unthinkable to an audience intoxicated by the idea of being totally tyrannized by their own act of theatergoing—["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]—Just as the one about to lose his head asks only that the executioner’s axe be sharp—so a theatergoer asks only of his playwright for the final curtain to fall with a razored edge upon the outstretched neck of his, or her, unconsummated curiosity. ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Like lovers ignoring a split second discrepancy between the orgasms they seek to synchronize so perfectly, our onlookers will deceive themselves into believing all of their cravings for certitude have been cut cleanly to the quick—when in art and amour alike, a miss is as good as a mile! ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
For us to succeed then, our characters need only do what they are always made to do when the playwright abdicates his authorship and leaves his actors free to do what he alone would have them do. Only tonight it is Guevara himself, and not some alter ego, who must commit the act of selfapostasy or perish. ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
But is that really so ominous a choice as it seems? Why should Guevara not do that which as Ramon he never fails to do? Doesn’t Ramon agonize over the same dilemma now staring so starkly in Guevara’s eyes? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
And night after night is he not tortured on the rack of Guevara’s divergent desires for survival and selfdestruction? Why should the fact that tonight neither my pistol nor your apostasy are fake make any difference? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Or, in the face of certain death, does Guevara now draw that crucial distinction between art and actuality which, as Ramon, he can never quite discern? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Can it be said of The Great Che Guevara—"He wore his convictions like an actor wears a costume; changing them with every role and scene he plays?" But in either case amigo; in or out of costume—what chance is there for you or me when in the end it is always she who triumphs over author, actors and audience? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Lost and alone in the chaotic darkness of our ignorance we gather like moths in the halo of her luminescent ritual; only to find ourselves blinded by the too bright brilliance of what she shows us at the moment of truth! ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Or—as when answering the ultimate question of being or not being we must first ask ourselves what "being" is all about—is the full frontal nudity of The Femme Fatale a message whose meaning is more mysterious than even the Mystery of Mysteries she finally lays bare before us? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Ah, if only we could expand that ecstatic evanescence in which the truth of truths appears in its meatiest form! ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Or is it that evanescence itself the message of messages; that our being is but a continuum of momentary mystifications? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Does that explain why the theater enthralls us with a pace so petty it seems to stand time still? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
Is that what our play is all about amigo—to spend several hours analyzing that single slice of Che’s life when he sealed his own fate? ["Orgasmic" reaction from FEMME FATALE.]
But now the spring of our anticlock is so tightly wound we run the risk of freezing for all eternity in this moment of your indecision! [Music stops as FEMME FATALE, with back to audience, prepares to turn in a state of fullyfrontalized revelation.]
Yes amigo! We have arrived at the point when time’s own too tightly coiled fury flings us once again into the midst of Life’s mad Mardi Gras! We are at the pause of all pauses, the calm of calms before the storm of storms; when it is said a condemned man can hear the inner workings of the pistol pressed against his skull and imagine himself dodging the bullet on which fate has etched his name. And so amigo—the time has really come for us to—ACT!!!!
In blinding flash of light FEMME FATALE turns, fully revealing herself as loud gunshot is heard and CHE is flung back on his chair to assume pose we found him in at play’s start. The stage goes suddenly dark but for a pinspot on CHE. As main curtains slowly close we hear amplified voice of:
WIFE: [As LuLu 2000 in final throes of cybernetic orgasm.] Oh—oh—oh! Yes—YES!!! My beloved you have done what other men have only dreamed of doing! By this single act of cosmic sex you have more than remade mass man in your own image: your farflung seed has penetrated the minds of the gods! Oh, my Author of authors—my God of gods!—let us now sleep that sweet and dreamless sleep of wellspent lovers; for tomorrow we will awaken to find ourselves resurrected on the earth become paradise!!!
End of Play