The Great American Hitler Play
or
PRIVATE PARTS
by
Mordecai Goldberg

THE CAST
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS:

AUDITIONIST 1 (Herbert von Karajan)1
AUDITIONIST 2 (Peter Lorre)
AUDITIONIST 3 (Charlie Chaplin)
AUDITIONIST 4 (Bertolt Brecht)
AUDITIONIST 5 (Richard Burton)
AUDITIONIST 6 (Rainer Fassbinder)
AUDITIONIST 7 (Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher)
AUDITIONIST 8 (Marcello Mastroianni)
AUDITIONIST 9 (Ferdinand Celine)
AUDITIONIST 10 (Mrs Leona Helmsley)
AUDITIONIST 11 (Congresswoman Pat Schroeder)
AUDITIONIST 12 (Oskar Werner)
AUDITIONIST 13 (Evita Peron)

Most, if not all, of the following characters can, and probably should, be played by the principals indicated above:

Female Drama Critic•Playwright-of-the-Month •Blonde Bombshell•Jewish Impresario•Telegraph Boy•Stage Manager• Hollywood Reporter •Hollywood Editor•Black G.I.•Female Casting Director (L.R.)•Wehrmacht Officer•Film Studio Executive (B.S.)•Herr & Frau Maske•VIP Private Secretary (F.U.)•Herr Maske•General George Paton•Aryan Leading Man•SS Squad Leader•Stage Hands (Hans & Fritz)• Reporters/German & Allied Troops

THE SET
A theatrical dressing room just large enough to accommodate 13 actors. It is in an advanced state of decay when the play begins, and gradually disintegrates thereafter until it has all but entirely collapsed at the final curtain. A bank of 6 makeup tables with lighted mirrors on the wall right, with 4 on the opposite wall. A large steel door located in extreme downstage portion of wall left leads to "soundstage" of a "major motion picture studio." This door will slide either vertically or horizontally when it opens, and should evoke memories of the airtight closures used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The rear wall is made of bricks, in which there is a hole the size of a small window. Throughout the play this hole grows larger until nothing is left of the wall but a rubble pile. A toilet, sink, 2 wall-mounted telephones and an exit door are located on this rear wall. In center of stage there is a large coffee table, and sofa which has seen better days. If feasible there should be a circular stairway leading to a second storey wardrobe room.

PRODUCTION NOTES:
THE SCOREBOARD. Located above rear wall or suspended from flies, this elaborate contraption keeps the auditionists informed of time remaining before they exit for their individual auditions. It also provides stock market quotations, currency exchange rates, scores of athletic events, news and weather reports, etc. It is a fantastic blend of electromechanical gadgetry—creating the impression it has evolved through a series of state-of-the-art changes without relinquishing any of its outdated technology. Equally anachronistic; the digital countdown clock keeps variable time—adjusting itself to accommodate the scene each auditionist plays before exiting to the soundstage. These "3 minute" countdowns begin with a warning alarm—which is repeated at the 30-second mark. At the 10-second mark soundstage door begins to slide open.

THE SOUNDSTAGE DOOR. When this ponderous device opens, the sound of rushing air should be heard, indicating an hermetic seal has been broken. Thereafter it rumbles on its rollers with an amplified and ominous sound. From the exposed soundstage come the jeers, catcalls, and whistles, etc. of a small but very hostile audience.

THE "TEXT." The size of a telephone directory, this monumental source book of Hitleriana is brought on stage by only a few Auditionists, despite the fact they have all been advised it is a document whose indispensability is unquestioned for an audition of this magnitude. Throughout the play Auditionist 13 uses coffee table as a "desk" for studying the Text—and a considerable pile of additional reference material.

THE "STAGEFULL-OF-HITLERS" EFFECT. During the play’s early stages its actors are seen experimenting with various costume and makeup changes that in some cases differ extravagantly from historical fact. Gradually a concensus develops however, and as we approach the Finale those few actors remaining on stage all look so much like authentic Hitlers they can only be distinguished by numbered discs hanging from their necks. These large oval medallions are made from ivory and manifest an "antique" appearance consistent with their use in German theatrical audition practice dating from the 12th century.

AUDIENCE BRAINWASHING. Arriving at the theater, the audience should find itself entering the following scene:
Searchlight vans parked at the curb are not the advertising variety, but bear the camouflage and military markings of the German Wehrmacht. A machinegun nest and antiaircraft battery are situated within sandbagged emplacements flanking the theater’s facade. The theater itself manifests signs of war damage; in addition to which its façade has been plastered with official Third Reich proclamations and propaganda, juxtaposed with resistance posters which are vehemently antiNazi. These are in turn overwritten with graffiti pro and con Hitler—and the controversy surrounding this play. [Examples: ‘Dr. Goebbels Couldn’t Have Written A Better Play About Hitler!,’ ‘Goldberg Is A Fascist Pig.’] The marquee advertises tonight’s performance of Private Parts as a "SNEAK PREVIEW OF A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!."
     Representatives of print and electronic media are interviewing ordinary playgoers and celebrities about the controversy surrounding tonight’s show (which has in fact become lead story on evening news). In the theater lobby the "Private Parts" story is being watched on TV sets. Of particular interest is special hearing being held in local Federal Court on a suit to restrain the very production our audience is expecting to see.
     Demonstrators of various persuasions (American Nazis, KKK, Jewish Defense League, Hare Krishna, etc.) are creating disturbances in and outside the theater.
     Having seated itself, the audience settles down to read programs which, for the most part, have been printed in German. While so doing they are repeatedly distracted by a series of technical problems, including: houselights that flicker, squawks and squeals emanating from the P.A. system along with snatches of telephone conversations, radio programs, backstage activities, etc. The general impression being that, at least electrically, the precurtain procedures have gone decidedly haywire;
     By the start of the play then, our audience should have received a sufficient number of shocks to its sense of time and space its ontological complacency, while not wholly destroyed, is at least somewhat shaken.

ACT ONE
Scene 1

The houselights finally come down to stay. Curtains remain closed as following dialogue is broadcast via public address system:

FRITZ: Hans!!!

HANS: No need to shout, Fritz. I’m right behind you.

FRITZ: Have they come down yet?

HANS: Are we doing Sternheim’s "Bloomers" again? After last night’s fiascoed prologue I would have thought—

FRITZ: No, no, no; tonight’s fiasco has nothing to do with the repeated failure of some hausfrau’s underpants to descend on cue! I simply want you to take a gander at the auditorium and let me know if the lights have gone out!

HANS: I am looking.

FRITZ: [After pause.] Well, what’s the verdict?

HANS: It’s too dark to tell.

FRITZ: I’m warning you Hans! I’ve already got a bellyful impersonating a chief electrician without playing straightman to an aspiring Top Banana!

HANS: That’s not true, Fritz. Like you, my theatrical ambitions are limited to being the simpleminded stagehand I am—or was, until Stauffenberg’s arrest catapulted us into the stratospheric echelons of light and sound management.

FRITZ: That cunning bastard Stauffenberg—it wouldn’t surprise me if he engineered this whole affair—

HANS: Why would Stuffy want to get himself busted?

FRITZ: It could be his way of killing two birds with one stone. By vanishing from tonight’s scene he not only demonstrates his technological indispensability, but does so at the expense of we who have been not-so-discretely having our way with his wife.

HANS: Except that in such a scenario the stonethrower himself becomes an unintentional fatality. Surely Stuffy’s trip to Secret Police headquarters will turn out to be the familiar oneway variety.

FRITZ: According to my sources the Stauffenberg Affair was a Gestapo operation from start to finish.

HANS: Only to the extent that he was secretly working for the state cops against the security dicks.

FRITZ: Stuffy, an antiSS undercover agent! Since when?

HANS: Since he began wiring all of UTG’s walls for sound.

FRITZ: Christ Almighty! Are you saying this conversation is being monitored by some bureaucratic busybodies in Berlin?

HANS: It’s a possibility; but I don’t think Stuffy would’ve bugged his own bailiwick. No. I think we can safely assume this control booth is the only soundproof space in the entire studio.

FRITZ: I still don’t understand why the Gestapo would give a damn about what goes on behind the scenes of a halfassed artistic operation like Universal TransGlobal?

HANS: It could be this "Project Blockbuster" business. The curiosity of the intelligence community was bound to be aroused by all these rumors of UTG playing around with a political potato so hot even Hollywood refused to handle it. Let’s face facts; establishmentwise, "Nazism" is the dirtiest of dirty words—and even among the most emancipated massmedia mandarins, Adolf Hitler could not be more persona non grata. So, given Stauffenberg’s strategically situated electronic expertise it was only natural the fuzz would recruit him to provide them with an allpervasive eavesdropping capability.

FRITZ: Which also explains all the overtime he’s been logging lately. What I can’t grasp though, is why he advertised the fact he’d be working late to a notorious pair of wifestealers like us?

HANS: That’s easy. While we three mice were playing our game of after hours adultery the cat was away systematically invading his fellow workers’ privacy.

FRITZ: If that’s the case, we were actually doing him a favor!

HANS: Exactly. It took both of us slaving our balls off night after night to satisfy those sexual demands that would otherwise have occupied all of Stuffy’s spare time.

FRITZ: Jesus—you don’t think—he couldn’t have—

HANS: Bugged his own bedroom? Why not? Having first deceived us into doing his dirty work, we were twice tricked by unwittingly providing him with a nightly earful of what we erroneously assumed to be our own acts of sexual subversion.

FRITZ: Nevertheless it is we who can laugh last and, thanks to this acoustic sanctuary of his own making, do so without the fear of being overheard!

HANS: Ironically it was Stuffy’s selfsoundproofing that undid him, slammerwise—

FRITZ: How’s that?

HANS: As the only exception to the ubiquitous surveillance system he helped the Gestapo create, he became a fly in their counterespionage ointment whose elimination required the surgical skills of a Schutzstaffel Strike Force.

FRITZ: Could any plot by Mack Sennet be thicker or more farcical than the facts of such an actual scenario? Here we have Germany’s real life version of the Keystone Kops exploiting their arch enemies to triple cross the doubledealer who seduced his best friends into balling his wife on a basis that couldn’t be more perfidious! But speaking about the pitfalls of being incommunicado—can you tell me what, if anything, is keeping those human guinea pigs in the audience entertained?

HANS: It’s darker than sin out there—but by the look on the faces in the front row they seem content to just sit there deaf, dumb and blind.

FRITZ: It’s amazing what people will put up with in the name of theatergoing—

HANS: According to the hottest dramaturgical poop: It does an audience good to stew in its own cerebral juices for 10 or 20 minutes. As a nonevent, the prologue simulates that void from which a playwright must manufacture an ersatz reality surpassing that authentic situation in which the mass of humanity fails so miserably to improvise the kind of lives they pay to see lived upon a stage.

FRITZ: Leaving an audience temporarily paddleless up Shit’s Creek might make sense from a playwriting point of view, but why in God’s name are we stagehands being kept so completely in the dark?

HANS: As to that I’m as mystified as you Fritz—but I remain confident some masterplan will manifest itself to us any moment now.

FRITZ: What about those two blue lights on your soundeffect board—why have they begun blinking like that?

HANS: You see? No sooner said than done! How’s that for the power of blind faith?

FRITZ: Faithpower my ass; you know something I don’t!!!!!

HANS: Only that sooner or later a sign from above would be forthcoming—

FRITZ: Well, now that we have the damned thing, what the hell does it mean?

HANS: How should I know? Since showbiz went hi-tech it’s all been Greek to me.

FRITZ: It must be some sort of code. Yes, that’s it—those two blue lights are Top Management’s way of telling you to activate soundeffect circuit 2-B!

HANS: That’s one possibility. On the other hand, if Top Management has the capability of sending coded signals, why can’t they also activate the circuits those signals are meant to indicate?

FRITZ: Because if they ran the entire show the very need for a command chain would cease! It’s axiomatic that our complete cipherization deprives Top Management of its own raison d’etre!

HANS: In that case I’ll need some time to analyze my options—

FRITZ: What’s there to think about! This isn’t one of those plots in which a concentration camp commando is being set up as the fall guy for some atrocities his superiors are orchestrating by remote control—

HANS: As low man on the organizational totem pole I insist on a direct order as to this 2-B or not 2-B question.

FRITZ: Alright, goddammit—you’ve got it! In my official capacity as Chief Electrician Pro Tem, I hereby command you to throw that bloody switch! And, if heaven itself should come crashing down on this humble head of mine—let it be said I only did what anyone else standing in my shoes would have done!

HANS: And if someone is listening to this conversation, the same goes for me. And now—the moment of truth!

Scene 2

Sounds of a presatellite era transoceanic telephone call being processed. Squeals, echoes, etc. Finally remote sound of ringing at receiving end.

EDITOR: Hello?

OPERATOR: [With sexy German accent, ala Marlene Dietrich.] This is Berlin, Germany with a collect call from Herr Henry Wilson for anyone in the Editorial Department of The Hollywood Reporter. Will you accept the charges?

EDITOR: You bet I will, operator!

REPORTER: Sam?

EDITOR: Hank? What the hell are you doing in Berlin, when you should be at the [Insert name of theater in which play is being performed.]

REPORTER: That’s a long story, Sam.

EDITOR: Well, make it short sweetheart; we can’t hold the presses much longer. The entire town is holding its breath for your copy on a possible connection between Private Parts and Project Blockbuster.

REPORTER: Haven’t had time to jargonize the lead, but so far the basic facts seem to be that: "Along with hundreds of average American playgoers, this reporter was somehow magic-carpeted from (location of theater) to Berlin, Germany where, in a matter of minutes, our reactions as an audience of "human guinea pigs" to the Backstage Audition Scenario comprising the plot of Private Parts will be factored into UTG’s casting of the male lead in Project Blockbuster’"—

EDITOR: O.k., we’ll make that read: "UTG TRIX HICKS TO NIX OR NOT TO NIX STAR OF FUTURE FUEHRER FLICK." That is what you’re telling me isn’t it—those crazy krauts at UTG are taking a cockamamie play like Private Parts seriously in their bid to replace Tinseltown as the world’s capital of cultural chuzpah?

REPORTER: Like most Europeans, for all their sophistication, the Germans cling paradoxically to the superstition that—now and then—fiction can become fact.

EDITOR: I thought all that "kunst uber alles" baloney went out one of Rene Magritte’s windows with his portrait of a non-pipe?

REPORTER: In that connection, get an earful of this: according to one of the footnotes in tonight’s program Magritte has yet to paint his iconoclastic Ce n’est pas un pipe!

EDITOR: Holy smoke! How’s the audience holding up under that kind of epistemological blitzkrieg?

REPORTER: Too soon to say, Sam. They are still undergoing the wackiest exercise in theatrical lobotomization since the brainwashing preliminaries of To Bolivia Or Not To Bolivia?.

EDITOR: You mean the curtain has yet to go up!

REPORTER: Well, like everything else about this screwy play, that’s hard to say!

EDITOR: Alright—we’ll just have to sit on the story until something definite develops. In the meantime keep this line open at all costs. With a successful trace we might find out for certain where the hell you really are—[Sounds of clicking or other noise indicating disconnected line.] Hank? Hello? Operator? Shit! I’ve lost the poor sonofabitch! May God help him and all those who are sharing his fate!

Scene 3

F.U.: Before we say another word on the subject of Project Blockbuster, I want your assurance, B.S., that this conversation is strictly Top Secret.

B.S.: Absolutely, F.U.—isn’t that so, L.R.?

L.R.: Less than 12 hours ago our Chief Electrician went over these premises with the finelytoothed comb of his counterespionage expertise, B.S.

F.U.: I don’t mind telling you, G.D. is not at all happy about the leakage concerning our possible joint ventureship with UTG in this riskiest of risky enterprises—

B.S.: [Quick to change subject.] Speaking of G.D., shouldn’t he be here in person for these lastminute discussions?

F.U.: A not-so-funny thing happened to G.D. on his way to the theater just now: our limo was ambushed in the VIP parking lot by a delegation of angels with a collective case of financial wet feet. Right now the Old Boy is smoothing their ruffled feathers in that disreputable beer joint across from the studio’s main gate.

B.S.: [Again changing subject.] It doesn’t surprise me. Even after Global Productions survived its shoe string genesis and G.D.’s selfmade moguldom was an established fact of corporate life; when it came to wheeling and dealing, he shunned the celestial decor of his executive penthouse for the down-to-earth ambience of those dives where the commonest kind of cultural clay can always be found killing time between takes—

L.R.: His affinity for elbowrubbing with life’s bitplayers is the stuff from which showbiz legends are made.

B.S.: It’s so typical of him—leaving his producer in a lurch. I remember having to keep a cast of thousands cooling their heels in the Holy Land for 6 days while, in a fit of "divine inspiration," G.D. sat with a tentful of local yokels casting authentic concubines to replace the starlets we originally scripted for the orgy scenes in Sodom and Gomorrah—

L.R.: A ploy which, however, proved to be absolutely brilliant, bottomlinewise!

B.S.: It’s true! As G.D. predicted, all our overbudget problems were solved with a B.O. boffoized by the sheer scale of its superextravagance.

F.U.: Blockbuster’s bottomline is the least of my worries. It’s the P.R. implications that are scaring me shitless. A scandal of sky high proportions is already building over the mere speculation G.D. might be even remotely associated with these criminals calling themselves National Socialists.

L.R.: But from the beginning it was understood "Controversy" was to be Project Blockbuster’s middle name—

B.S.: I tell you, F.U., all this preproduction publicity we’re getting is better than free—it’s priceless!

F.U.: And I’m telling you B.S., there can be too much of such a seemingly good thing. Believe it or not, we’re still receiving hatemail generated by that ancient cause celebre, Noah’s Flood—not to mention less apocalyptic epics like The Black Death and Inquisition Spanish-style. I shudder to think about the administrative fire drill resulting from this apocalyptically explosive mixture of one-man-bandism and the Teutonic propensity for making Gotterdaemmerungsized mountains from ideological mole hills! In my opinion the fallout from this flop could prove fatal to what remains of G.D.’s reputation as a flawed but still fundamentally philanthropic impresario.

L.R.: Isn’t it also possible, when all of the emotional dust settles from this socalled "holocaust of holocausts" it will be seen by its survivors as the most moral of G.D.’s cautionary tales?

F.U.: Yes! And it’s precisely that prospect which terrifies me more than any other! The slightest whiff of sanctimony emanating from P.B. could establish a causal connection between G.D. and A.H. that would make UTG’s cinematic aspirations of cinematic grandeur D.O.A.!

L.R.: But doesn’t A.H. solve the linkage problem himself by insisting ad nauseum that he has been created in no one’s image but his own?

B.S.: Of course! That’s it! Disclaimerwise, by advocating the very concept of auto-apotheosis, A.H. provides G.D. with an unbeatable ace-in-the-hole!!

F.U.: That argument might cut some theoretical ice, but in practical terms how do we find an actor who not only deludes himself so grandiosely, but also persuades a worldwide audience that he alone is the master of his own fate? That, it seems to me, is the $64 question.

L.R.: The answer to which can be found on the title page of this manuscript!

F.U.: [Reading.] "Some Speculations On The Course Of History As Extrapolated From My Brief Encounter With An Adolescent Nonentity Known As Adolf H, by Mordecai G." And what am I supposed to make of this?

L.R.: Not much, F.U.—I meant for you to read that hastily written note at the foot of the page.

F.U.: This childlike scribbling?

L.R.: Apparently the words came too fast for their author’s pen—

F.U.: A flash of pure genius, eh? Well, let’s see what caused Herr Mordecai G so much excitement—[Reads with occasional difficulty deciphering handwritten text.] "The following brilliant idea concerning the unpublishability of my masterpiece has just occurred to me: Suppose this manuscript became the text with which an ensemble of unsuspecting actors were secretly observed preparing themselves to audition for the role of Adolf H. Would not such a seemingly improvisational scenario translate my otherwise unreadable opus into what is commonly called "Dramaturgical Dynamite’?" I knew it! At the bottom of this literary bird cage some Jewish intellectual would be found lurking!

B.S.: Ah, but this isn’t just any bright Jewboy, F.U.! Mordecai G, it turns out, is the mysterious mastermind every literary detective in Europe has been looking for since the first performance of Private Parts knocked the theater world’s collective socks off. And, thanks to L.R., UTG has acquired exclusive proof not only of Mordecai G’s identity, but that his "evanescent acquaintanceship" with Adolf H was probably more factual than otherwise.

F.U.: And how, may I ask, was that double miracle accomplished?

L.R.: By actually locating the legendary "lair" wherein he who is mentioned throughout Private Parts as its "author" secluded himself for thirty years while generating the world’s largest collection of a single dramatist’s output of entirely unproduced plays.

F.U.: Are you saying this Semitic smartass sentenced himself to a life of solitary confinement for the sake of an art only he could appreciate?

B.S.: As it happens, F.U., the motive for his martyrdom wasn’t all that pure, was it L.R.?

L.R.: Not quite. As he admits in the epilogue to Speculations [Reading:] "Retrospectively my "tragic" career as a reclusive playwright can be seen resulting from a set of circumstances more comical than any put to paper by Chekov, Moliere or even Aristophanes"

B.S.: To make a very long story short F.U., our intellectual superman mistook one of Vienna’s routine pogroms for the onset of that Final Solution To The Jewish Question perennially advocated by Austria’s more ardent antiSemites.

F.U.: So, this rare case of artistic altruism turns out to be the tale of just another Yid saving his own skin! Which raises the interesting point of how this desert island dramatist solved the practical problem of keeping his body and soul together all those years?

L.R.: Apparently he survived on that supply of matzo, powdered milk and honey traditionally kept by most European Jews for just such emergencies. More importantly, his creative appetite was satisfied by a stock of paper, pens and ink that proved to be excessive for even his stupendous literary output. Paradoxically, in the twenty-ninth year of his ordeal, he did exhaust the one commodity whose supply he assumed would be unlimited—ideas!—those building blocks for what he hoped would become the tallest literary edifice ever erected by an entirely obscure author.

F.U.: For all of its Mahleresque aspirations then, this sad song ends on a supremely sour note!

L.R.: So it seemed until, in what must have been a divinely orchestrated act of desperation, Mordecai G turned his attention from fiction to the long forgotten fact of his momentary encounter with Adolf H.

B.S.: Can you picture that, F.U.? Having wasted his entire adulthood inventing fake dramatis personae whose immortality he hopes will rub off on their maker, the failed playwright recalls an episode from his youth when history’s most theatrical character actually knocked on his door!

L.R.: It seems one of the lodgers from the room below, coming home drunk or delirious one night, climbed a flight of stairs too many and mistook his reclusive co-lodger's barricaded door for his own; whereupon he banged away, begging to be admitted. You can imagine the dread this produced in one whose worst nightmare begins with just such a nocturnal commotion. And even when he recognized the voice outside as being that of the itinerant postcard painter who signed his work "Adolf H," Mordecai G remained suspicious. After all, Adolf H wouldn’t be the first starving artist who sold someone else’s soul for the sake of his own survival. So, like Kafka’s "Burrower," he played possum while his potential exterminator spun the "Enchanted Coffee House" tale that subsequently became the anecdotal preface to its listener’s magnum opus—

F.U.: Just a minute! If its author remains perpetually entombed how does the manuscript of his "masterpiece" find its way into the public domain?

B.S.: That’s the strangest part of this story, F.U.—it never did see the light of day until L.R. tracked the damned thing down recently!

L.R.: What we all thought to be the original manuscript was in fact that rarest of rarities; an exact copy which, unbeknownst to its author, had been previously written by another writer.

B.S.: Although a similar situation was reported recently from the Argentine, where an illiterate peon—wholly unfamiliar with Cervantes—dictated a verbatim facsimile of Don Quixote before a convention of psychic scientists.

F.U.: In my experience, information emanating from Argentina must be liberally salted.

L.R.: In this case however, as you can see for yourself, the original manuscript and its duplicate are identical in every respect but one; only the genuine article contains on its title page that scribbled footnote changing all that follows from being the most unreadable rubbish into what could be the play to end all plays!

F.U.: Come now L.R.; in one form or another the Private Parts plot has been around since Hector was a pup. Petronius mentions it as being bastardized by Plautus out of Aeschylus! As Charenton’s playwright-in-residence, the Marquis de Sade was obsessed with staging variations on a scenario in which he and his fellow inmates unwittingly entertain their keepers with acts of improvisational depravity exceeding those for which they had been committed. In a somewhat tamer vein there is Andreyev’s backstage look at circus life in He Who Gets Slapped. And closer to home, of course, we have all these behind-the-scenes-of-a-beautycontest peepshows disguised as sociological "docudramas." So why all this fuss about who gets the credit for first cooking up this ontological omelet entitled Private Parts?

L.R.: Because the issue of whether our production of Private Parts will be just another academic exercise or a scientific breakthrough in what was once the "art" of casting, hinges on the actuality of the characters we are asking our actors to become. Hence, it is crucial to establish the author of Speculations as a bona fide missing link between Adolf H as a failed post card painter and as a future Fuehrer.

B.S.: Look at it this way, F.U.—would The Merchant of Venice generate the gut reaction it does if a down-and-out Shakespeare hadn’t been forced to do business with an East End pawnbroker whose name really was Shylock?

F.U.: I’m sorry, but I fail to see what Shylock and Adolf H have in common.

L.R.: Aside from being the two roles all actors want more than any others—they epitomize the way a great playwright can take the thinnest slice of life and make it into a cosmicsized work of art!

F.U.: And yet, until you found this annotated original, its imitation served the very same purpose, did it not? A fact, by the way, which makes me ask what aroused your suspicion concerning the possibility author A was unintentionally perpetrating a fraud on author B?

L.R.: The answer to that, gentlemen, is—nothing! Using what I thought was the one and only original manuscript of Speculations to scout locations in Vienna’s Old Jewish Quarter, I found myself standing in the midst of the very scene described by the author in his prefatory chapter entitled "My Last Look At The Outside World"—

B.S.: Assuming that telltale window in the facade of an ostensibly nonexistent garret would lead the authorities straight to his hideaway—the crafty kike filled it in with the same bricks used to build all of those ghettostyle boardinghouses.

L.R.: Nevertheless, by simply reversing the author’s POV I had no difficulty pinpointing the likely location of his lair. Moreover, from where I stood, the row of identical buildings contained only one whose attic was windowless!

B.S.: A miscalculation whose consequences for Mordecai G would certainly have been fatal had not all the other assumptions about his impending doom been similarly erroneous!

F.U.: Another nail in the coffin of Semitic infallibility! [He and B.S. laugh lustily.]

L.R.: The address was now that of a detective agency owned and operated by a certain S. Wiesenthal, whose specialty, it turns out, is missing persons. No sooner had I explained the purpose of my visit than Wiesenthal uttered a "gevalt!" and invited me up to his attic—confessing on the way that, as a professional gumshoe, he should not only have noticed the missing window but, even more obviously—the very flight of stairs we were then climbing must lead to some destination other than the "deadend" specified so suspiciously in his lease—

F.U.: Was it wise—a delectable "shiksa" like you—consenting to participate in a stairclimbing scenario that could have been lifted straight from The Protocols of Zion?

L.R.: Before entering the ghetto I had taken the precaution of packing a pearlhandled Walther in my purse. But the gleam in Wiesenthal’s eye was more entrepreneurial than cabalistic. Already he was calculating his fee for what promised to be the richest archaeological find since Howard Carter stumbled into King Tut’s tomb. No, the closest he came to violating my Aryan anatomy was a cheap feel he may have gotten when we put our shoulders together while battering the garret door in. And then it was strictly back to business as we stood on that newly-opened threshold of a vault full of paper more precious than any banknotes if it did indeed represent the undiscovered canon of the greatest playwright since Goethe.

The scene was truly fantastic. The tiny room’s 4 walls were filled from floor to ceiling with row upon row of manuscripts— enough plays to keep the world’s rep companies busy for a month of Sundays, with matinees thrown in for good measure! In every cupboard and closet there were bundles of rough drafts, notes, outlines, rejected ideas, abandoned projects. And, in the center of it all—at the humble kitchen table he used for a desk—sat the mummified remains of the man who had crafted his own burial treasures; still clutching a pen in his hand, an ink blot marking the very moment of his demise—a moment he had heroically postponed until that footnote to the title page of his masterpiece could be written! But now, while Wiesenthal calls his lawyer, tax accountant and cardiologist, I begin my cursory examination of, what quickly becomes obvious, is a stupendous collection of—crap; not a word of it worth the paper it was written on!

F.U.: So, at one end of this twisting trail, Herr Wiesenthal is left holding a roomsized bag of someone else’s artistic shit; but, I wonder, to what end is it leading us?

L.R.: To the very heart of that paradox in which, having finished what was intended as a monument to the futility of his vacuumized existence, the dying playwright realizes he may have unintentionally authored a manifesto that might indeed revolutionize the very nature of theater!

B.S.: Which answers your initial question of why and how tonight’s unrehearsed performance of Private Parts will solve all of Project Blockbuster’s otherwise insoluble casting problems.

F.U.: As an abstract proposition the "why" might make some sense but a lot more selling of the "how" is needed before G.D. buys the kind of cockamamie preproduction package UTG has put together so far.

L.R.: Tonight’s operation is practically failsafe. Following standard Private Parts procedures, the actors have already been deceived into believing their dressingroom is not a stage upon which every move they make is seen by an invisible audience via a trick version of the conveniently prosceniumsized rehearsal mirror.

B.S.: As you said yourself, F.U.—stripped to its barest essentials, what is this socalled "play of plays" but a rather overwrought variation on that oldest of all showbusiness scams—The Simulated Sneak Preview?

L.R.: Which UTG has updated with the following innovations. First; while our "human guinea pigs" watch from their conventional fullfrontal perspective, we will stay hidden behind the scenes of this backstage drama, eyeballing it via these state-of-the-art, one-way peep holes.

B.S.: The view couldn’t be more intimate. We’re practically breathing down the actors’ necks!

F.U.: Good grief, they’re all wearing numbers! It’s more like a cattle auction than a casting call!

L.R.: Second; by means of this newfangled device imported from Hollywood, we can continuously monitor the gut reactions emanating from our guinea pigs—

B.S.: Supersensitive anal readout sensors have been installed under every seat in the house, F.U.—we’ve literally got our corporate finger on every one of those assholes out there!

L.R.: Running our idea of the Fuehrer up a multibillion Deutschmark flag pole is one thing, but whether the man-in-the-street will actually salute him is a matter which, it must be admitted, requires the kind of technology applied to such questions by our American competitors.

B.S.: This Kiester Meter is really the damnedest contraption, F.U. Right now we’re getting an audience-wide reading which, incidentally, seems rather on the high side considering the show has yet to start. But by manipulating these dials, we can isolate any seat in the house and get a printout of its occupant’s physical and mental state. For example—[Sound of dials clicking.]—sitting in seat number C-34—we have—[Sound of printout.]—a female aged 31—Height; 1.87 meters— Weight; 60.2 kilos—Bust; 85—Waist: 50, Hips; 84—

F.U.: So far she has all the makings of a world-class piece of theatergoing tail!

B.S.: To which data we can add the fascinating fact that she isn’t wearing any undergarments!

L.R.: Her bare bottom should reduce our Kiester Meter margin of error to zero!

B.S.: I.Q.wise, she’s in the 130 range—

L.R.: Definitely not your average opening night bimbo!

B.S.: Judging by the fluctuations of her psychomagnetic field I would say she’s on the verge of having a conventional orgasm or an intellectual crisis of similarly convulsive proportions—

F.U.: Fool! Don’t you see what’s happening! She’s reacting to every word we speak! See how she spiked just then! And again!

B.S.: F.U.’s right, L.R.—something is definitely haywire!

F.U.: This "foolproof" plan of yours is coming completely unglued!

L.R.: No. It can’t be—there must be an explanation—

F.U.: There is! Those human "guinea pigs" of yours have overheard us planning their exploitation. The cat is out of its bag! Project Blockbuster is all but kaput!

B.S.: Or the Kiester Meter is malfunctioning. I wouldn’t put it past those Hollywood Hebes to have monkeywrenched this black box they sold us!

L.R.: That’s probably it, B.S., but to be on the safe side we’ll put the show on hold while I investigate.

Scene 4

FEMALE DRAMA CRITIC rises from seat in audience.

FEMALE DRAMA CRITIC: That does it! I’ve had enough of this all-too-typical attempt at tormenting some perfectly decent female whose only "sin" consists of her occasionally furtive flirtation with an author more interested in rape than romance!

PLAYWRIGHT-OF-THE-MONTH: [Who is sitting next to Drama Critic.] Have you lost your mind?

FEMALE DRAMA CRITIC: I refuse to sit still for this pornographic invasion of my privacy!

PLAYWRIGHT-OF-THE-MONTH: But of all people, you should understand what is really happening. For one thing, this scene you are planning to make will certainly compromise the anonymity we’ve tried so hard to establish—and for another, it delivers you right into his dirty dramaturgical hands. How else can this interminable prologue end, unless someone provides its author with just the diversion he requires for one of his copyrighted Epistemological Vanishing Acts—after which he reappears in complete control of what would otherwise be a dramatist’s worst nightmare, but for the seemingly spontaneous improvisations of an outraged audience member. Good God, the insidious sonofabitch has not only tricked this Pulitzer prizewinning practitioner of verbal ping pong into saying much more than he should; he has me saying it in that flagrantly neobaroque style of his!

FEMALE DRAMA CRITIC: Well, the way I see it, two are needed for his kind of totalitarian tango—and this is one drama critic who would rather waltz her way up the aisle before the curtain rises on what she foolishly bet her professional reputation would be a watershed event in the history of America’s cultural wasteland. The only question now is whether I dance out of here on my own—or do we exit as the couple we’ve been pretending not to be?

PLAYWRIGHT-OF-THE-MONTH: Hold on! There may be a third option! It just occurred to me that, ironically, the prolongation of this precurtain blackout provides us with a loophole through which we can literally crawl before our still-secret identities become public property—quick! Follow me—like this—on your hands and knees—before the swine gets wise and—[Spotlight illuminates him.]—reads my mind. [Continues crawling up aisle to EXIT at rear of auditorium, with spot following him all the way.]

FEMALE DRAMA CRITIC: So much for loopholes—and for the pair of playwrights in a lady drama critic’s lovelife! While one of my wouldbe husbands woos me with that flair for farce which wins him fame and fortune as Broadway’s answer to Moliere—the other remains perpetually obscured, like an opera house phantom.

Spotlight shifts to DRAMA CRITIC as PLAYWRIGHT-OF-THE-MONTH EXITS.

FEMALE DRAMA CRITIC: How predictable of you, darling; to illuminate your leading lady at the starkest moment of that naked truth when she finds herself not to be the selfstyled sex goddess of every frustrated femme fatale’s theatergoing fantasy, but the sacrificial centerpiece of an obscene ritual in which her slaughter comes only after the even more atrocious acts of intellectual enslavement she is made to perform in public. Isn’t that what you expect of me; that I should open this fur wrap and, with breasts bared, confess my complicity in the degrading spectacle you have in mind for me? I’m afraid Dexter has been right about you all along. There is more than just a bit of the Nazi in your work. One must really wonder whether this picture of Hitler you are painting tonight isn’t a selfportrait! Is there any other way to construe those filthy photographs you arranged for me to "accidentally" discover when that parcel of your private papers was "mistakenly" delivered to my office?

     Of course I eventually destroyed them, but those "souvenirs" of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek have a way of haunting a love affair that was on the spooky side to begin with. I mean: can a girl like me ever feel safe again after seeing those long lines of naked women waiting so meekly for their turn to be exterminated—concealing with only their bare hands what little remained to be imagined about their feminine mystique? As for those few who seemed to pose so deliberately for the camera in that full frontal statement of defiance (or sexual depravity) you find so "quintessentially enigmatic"—any fool knows those pictures were faked by the SS to make it look as if their victims eagerly participated in a real life version of the Buff & Snuff Scenario. In some cases they doctored the evidence with cutouts from girly magazines, while in others they planted professional ecdysiasts among the condemned to simulate those acts of gross indecency on which this final instalment of your canon is being erected!

     Oh, I know what you’re thinking—if only you could dictate your own review, it would start like this: "Last night at the [name of theater] a rare work of theatrical art was salvaged from that human rubbish heap we call "The Holocaust" when a collection of trashy concentration camp postcards was turned into America’s long-awaited Great Hitler Play." But even between such lavish lines of praise, my darling, one easily reads the true story of your careerlong struggle to build a theatrical Third Reich in which you play the part of Fuehrer to an audience whose total untermenschenalization is the not-so-obscure object of your dramaturgical desires. And there are limits to literary as well as political power beyond which the gods punish those who would revolutionize the nature of reality—even those with an honorary Swedish passport—like the one you are hoping to win this evening. Fool! How can you, who so assiduously analyzed the fatal flaws in such putative supermen as Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara, make the mistake of thinking any author can outdramatize the stark reality of Adolf Hitler’s cataclysmic existence? Yet who am I to criticize your unscrupulous machinations when I knew the name of the game you were asking me to play from the moment I found the first of those plainlywrapped manuscripts you "abandoned" on my doorstep? It was, after all, the familiar storyline for one of those B movies in which Boy with bardish designs sends Girl reporter pornographic proposition masquerading as Act One in what could be her aspiring drama critic’s dream-come-true of playing Madonna to newborn author’s eventual apotheosis. But while Girl plots Boy’s epiphany as her Pulitzer Prizewinning strategy, Boy’s Nobel Laureate plans call for crucifying Girl in prologue to his magnum opus. Only this time there is a surprise ending when sadder-but-wiser Girl exposes once-bright Boy as just another dirty old dramaturg! Oh it’s true; for the moment nothing I do or say will convince this audience I am not an actress and they are lambs being led to their slaughter. But let me leave them with this thought anyway: Is it not at least conceivable the inmates of Auschwitz delivered themselves into the hands of their murderers thinking it was all some sort of theatrical lark? The midnight arrest, the cattlecar ride, the electrified barbed wire, the insanely escalating horrors of their nightmarish brutalization and, finally, that most humiliating of all atrocities—as they are made to shed their concentration camp costumes and wait their turn to be exterminated—as if death itself was some kind of luxury that had to be rationed?

     Did those wretched women really swallow all that Nazi hogwash about a hot shower? Or could they have construed themselves to be extras in some documentary extravaganza—the blockbusting sequel to Triumph of The Will perhaps? After all, they were being filmed, were they not? And those were professional actresses posing so provocatively for the camera. Therefore: Why not a happy ending for The Final Solution whereby, when all the shooting is over, the dead arise from their mass graves and mingle with those who buried them at a gala postproduction party—with the mobile asphyxiation vans doubling as catering canteens and doling out not carbon monoxide; but champagne and caviar? And if some Plain Jane from Amsterdam or Sioux City is really lucky she might get to record in her diary how it felt to rub elbows with the matinee idol who played Adolf Hitler to her Anne Frank!

     Is such a fantasy any more improbable than your apres theater plans? When the final curtain falls on this nightmare of a play aren’t you also expecting to arise—if not from a mass grave, then from those seats in which you now sit like corpses? And then what? A visit backstage to have your elbows rubbed by some member of the cast; to inhale the fragrance of superstardom; to whet your appetite for a late supper and the stimulating conversation that always erupts in the aftermath of a thoughtprovoking cultural experience?

     And at last there is that return journey to those "castles" of yours whose sanctity is constitutionally guaranteed against being desecrated by any American equivalent of the Gestapo or SS. Never mind what happened to Dred Scott, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Versailles Treaty and Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression pact; The Bill of Rights is one scrap of paper that can’t be torn to pieces by a tinhorn dictator—or a tinhorn playwright for that matter! So ends your "vicarious" evening at "Auschwitz"—asleep in a soft clean bed with visions of sugar plums filling your heads!

     Well, I’ve said all I can say. Only the next few hours will tell whether tomorrow you awaken to yet another of your endless Christmas mornings—or if this moment turns out to have been your Ides of March, your Kristallnacht, your Barbarossa or Bolivia or Titanic or evening at Ford’s Theater! And, if this is your moment of truth—that moment of all moments whose outcome involves your being or not being—then I urge you for the last time to leave now while you still have a chance! [At aisle exit.] Ladies and gentlemen: The doors of this gas chamber have yet to be sealed shut! There is still just enough time—if only that split second in which all of life’s truly fatal decisions are made—to make your escape, as I now make mine!!! [EXIT.]

PRODUCTION NOTE: Depending on size and geometry of auditorium and chemistry of its human contents, Drama Critic should orchestrate her long speech for its most convincing effect; maximizing her contact with audience by moving about as much as possible. This effect should be enhanced by the wearing of a distinctive perfume. She should also somehow convey the fact that, beneath her luxurious fur wrap she is, as the Kiester Meter tells us, wearing only her birthday suit.

Scene 5

L.R.: [Via public address system.] Good evening ladies and gentlemen! On behalf of Universal TransGlobal Productions I apologize for the technical problems that have temporarily delayed our scheduled curtain time. Happily however, this provides me, The Casting Director, with a rare opportunity to introduce these proceedings with a few remarks concerning certain misconceptions about them which have arisen lately. In the first place, like all pure art, Private Parts is not a polemic—it makes no statement about the particular politics of Weimar Germany or any other similarly situated society. Its perspective is timeless, cosmic and 100% abstract. It is neither pro nor anti any "ism," be it Nazi, Marx, existential or even theatrical/totalitarian.

     Secondly, there is absolutely no reason for you, the audience, to bother yourselves about the "dangers" of suffering any permanent physical or intellectual damage from the rollercoaster ride you are about to take. All of this "propaganda" about human guinea pigs emanates from that infamous, Jew-infested, Ministry of Misinformation known as "The Hollywood Press Corps." To the contrary, since it is our fate you will be helping to decide tonight, every conceivable measure has been taken to protect your safety—measures including, as you may have noticed, the total isolation of this auditorium from the outside world. As a matter of fact, you couldn’t be more perfectly secluded if you were sitting inside some vast, theater-sized gas chamber! [Forces a laugh to signify her awareness of this joke’s dubious taste.]

     Which brings me to point three: the question of exactly who will be victimizing whom in this unorthodox production of what is itself a most unorthodox play. Hypothetically, of course, it is the actors who are meant to be sacrificed for the amusement of author and audience alike. In practice, however, most audiences have come to suspect the obvious. Namely: if the actors must be made to believe they are not in a play, it follows that a completely new cast is required for every performance! Even if this were possible, the eventual result would be to exhaust the entire pool of the world’s professional acting talent!!!!

     Hence the entire history of Private Parts has been paradoxical, to say the least! [More forced laughter.] The more popular it became, the less likely one was to see it decently performed. The expendability of actors reached the point where rank amateurs were recruited willynilly; and even the Shanghaiing of the odd theatergoer was not unknown. Now, in the final phase of decay, it is almost always done as a fully rehearsed production of what is only advertised as an "entirely improvisational experience." So, you must be asking yourselves—how have the folks at UTG solved this seemingly insoluble problem?

     The answer to that is surprisingly simple ladies and gentlemen! Since, contrary to its disclaimer, Private Parts is in fact based on the sinister offstage presence of an industrial entity whose resemblance to UTG is unmistakable, we have simply taken a page from its author’s ersatz audition scenario and will be using it this evening to actually cast a project whose blockbusting potential is anything but figmentary! Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, as I speak to you now, no less than 13 of the world’s greatest living actors are gathering behind that curtain to give what is, paradoxically, the quintessential performance of a play whose author never dreamed its absurd plot would one day become a reality!

     "But," you will say; and rightly so!—"how could sophisticated superstars like Herbert von Karajan, Oskar Werner and Marcello Mastroianni fail to see the situation they find themselves in now is identical to the one in which so many of their predecessors had been swindled into giving an extemporaneous performance of Private Parts? A very astute question, and one I can only answer by asking why you ignored all the warnings about attending tonight’s sneak preview? Surely you heard the horror stories of entire audiences disappearing without a trace—and individuals who complain of being permanently traumatized by what was promised to be only "an evening of intellectual stimulation." And yet, here you all are—supremely confident your fate won’t be that of your predecessors!

     Can these riddles all be explained by the public relations axiom that nothing is more incredible than the plain truth? Or, does a play like Private Parts flaunt its perils so as to entice its actors, audience and author to engage in a tripartite war of wits to see who triumphs at the curtain’s final falling? Will it be the actors—without whose blood, toil, tears and sweat the author’s script would remain just so much lifeless literature? Or, in this most democratic of art forms, is it only the judgment of the audience that matters?

     Lastly, we must consider the argument advanced by every playwright—that the power struggle between actors and audience is waged entirely within the domain of his mentality! But of all the many mysteries we might consider, the most immediate has to do with where these proliferating perplexities are taking you! Could it be into that rare state of epistemo-ontological chaos without which no work of art or political revolution can hope to establish its own worldview as a generally accepted fact of life? Does that explain the practice of setting the stage for Private Parts with the kind of extraordinary preliminaries you have been sitting through; and which, I am happy to inform you, are now at an end! Yes ladies and gentlemen, the moment for which you have been so patiently waiting is upon us! So; sit back and relax as the curtains open on what we all hope will be a historymaking show!

CURTAINS OPEN for:

Scene 6

At curtain actors are discovered in various stages of preparing to play an Adolf Hitler whose appearance and personality they are not necessarily certain about. Some will continue to experiment with costumes and makeup throughout most of the play. Occasionally they will come to proscenium and examine themselves in ‘Rehearsal Mirror’—testing the effect of gestures they think are ‘Hitlerian.’ Against this ebb & flow of activity, the following characters provide more or less fixed points of reference: BRECHT sits on toilet reading newspaper. KARAJAN remains near wall-mounted phones. PERON uses coffeetable as a desk for mountain of research materials he has gathered on Hitler.

Throughout the scene, and until focus shifts to him, LORRE wears soiled raincoat while applying a modified medical stethoscope to floor, ceiling and walls of dressingroom. Through hole in rear brick wall comings and goings of movie studio types (COWBOYS, INDIANS, KEYSTONE KOPS, etc.) can be seen.

KARAJAN: [Into house phone which he has been holding to ear throughout.] Yes, yes, yes—I am still waiting with my urgent call to the Casting Director! [Aside.] Who does this cunt think she is to keep a man like me dangling on the end of a telephone line? [Into phone.] No! I am not willing to speak with the secretary of the Assistant Associate Producer about a matter of this magnitude! [Aside.] And yet, alas, it is a fact of modern life that only a gumchewing imbecile like her can connect me with the one party upon whom my fate finally depends! Future historians may describe 20th century totalitarianism as the inexorable result of a revolution in telecommunicational technology, but when all is said and done, tyranny cannot be achieved by pushing buttons; not that I’m minimizing the talent required to enthrall people by the millions, but in the final analysis there are times such as this when the domination of a simpleminded switchboard operator is what the will to triumph is all about. Accordingly, before I can employ my powers of persuasion on our Female Casting Director I must first prove them in this game of telephonic cat and mouse.

     [Into phone.] What’s that? But my dear young lady, as I’ve already explained; someone in the highest authority must be told a mistake is being made that will turn this "casting call to end all casting calls" into an unmitigated disaster. To be specific: As things now stand I am scheduled to go on first when, according to the immutable protocol based on an actor’s number in his last losing audition, I should be third. [Pause.] Yes, my dear, I know that mathematically the difference between 1 and 3 is only 2—but in this case it is the "to" of being and not being! If I fail tonight—which as The Ice Breaker I am certain to do—there will be no next time for me. My name will be permanently zeroized. What name is that? Surely you must recognize the voice of Germany’s greatest living conductor! Even if classical music is not your "thing" you should be familiar with my more recent fame as Reichsminister For Culture. [Pause.] How dare you call me a common war criminal! [Pause.] I see. Being the "conduit" through which all corporate communications must travel you "quite naturally" heard about my recent indictment by the Allied War Crimes Commission. Well, in the first place, even in Germany one’s innocence is presumed until one’s guilt has been proven. In the second place, I am expecting the public phone to ring any moment now with the news that our Supreme Court has dismissed the charges against me as an impertinence. And, thirdly, it is you who commit a crime against me by failing to protect the reputation of one about whom, in the course of your employment, you have acquired such supersensitive information! [Pause.]

     You haven’t told another soul about my judicial problems? Yes, I agree. Telling only me doesn’t constitute a breach of confidentiality. You’re absolutely right my dear! It is I who should beg your forgiveness—which, liebchen, is precisely what I am prepared to do. [Aside.] At last! The basis for a quid pro quo arrangement has been created between us! [Into phone.] Please pussycat, dry your tears and tell me what act of redemption I might perform. Would a screen test cheer you up? What’s that? One has already been arranged for you by the Chief Accountant? [Aside.] The little schemer —she’s no stranger to the ins and outs of corporate corruption! [Into phone.] Still, there must be some small favor I can do to comfort a poor creature like you in these austere times—a kilo of soap powder, a carton of American cigarettes perhaps, or a pair of nylon stockings? A coat, you say? Of course! How practical, now that winter is on its way—and considering the shortage of coal. As a matter of fact they were flogging some surplus army jackets in the black market only yesterday.

      You were thinking of fur? Well, even rabbit is a rarity nowadays but it might be just possible to get—What’s that? Russian sable? With ermine trim and a matching hat and muff? You saw one in the window of Dorfmann’s? Yes, yes, I know the address. Size 12. And you can take delivery tomorrow at noon in the employee’s canteen. The parcel should be plainly wrapped, preferably in a brown paper bag to avoid any taint of wrongdoing. [He has jotted all this in a small notebook.] Consider it done liebchen! Of course I understand there are no strings attached. Nevertheless you will do what you can to complete my call to the Casting Director. That is all I can ask of you, liebchen—just a single ray of hope as I hang from this slender thread connecting us! [Aside.] Even at wholesale this escapade will cost me something in the region of three billion marks. Thank God I can afford it! [To actors.] At these prices is it any wonder she prefers the switchboard to stardom? But the real mystery is how such a conniver wormed her way into the woodwork of an organization that is itself comprised entirely of conmen, extortionists and flesh peddlers!

Scene 7

HELMSLEY: Interesting you should ask. Only last night I was having dinner with Eichmann at the Adlon—

SCHROEDER: Dining with UTG’s VP for personnel on the eve of an audition—isn’t that a breach of professional ethics?

HELMSLEY: For all his grandiose delusions, Eichmann is just another bureaucratic asskisser. It was Eichmann who, quite uninvited, sought to be seen publicly basking in the aura of my stardom.

SCHROEDER: Nevertheless, he has the power to hire and fire.

HELMSLEY: Yes, but only technically; and only the nut and bolt types. When it comes to artistic talent he’s a complete flunky.

SCHROEDER: Still, he has his itchy fingers in more pies than Krupp has canons.

THATCHER: It’s these zealous technocrats like Eichmann who will inherit the earth.

HELMSLEY: Our little Adolf certainly takes his work seriously. Would you believe he spent 6 months choosing the right girl for that switchboard job? More than ten thousand applicants were meticulously screened before he arrived at a short list containing a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead—all of whom were equally qualified for the job in every respect—forcing poor Eichmann to wrack his beetlebrain for a Solomonesque test to break the deadlock. Eventually he came up with what he called his "Final Solution"—one question whose correct answer would separate that single grain of wheat from the mountainous heap of human chaff he had discarded in the course of his preliminary winnowing. As a matter of fact, I have the damned thing here—[Produces folded document from wallet.] In his obsession for scientific procedures, Eichmann had his question typed in triplicate, insisting I keep a copy of it as "an historic record of his triumph!" This then is what the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead were asked—[Reading.] "One night the dreaded men wearing black leather coats burst into your boudoir and hustle you half naked into their Mercedes for a whirlwind trip to Berlin—"

WERNER: It’s just like that little pervert to adorn the most prosaic exercise of corporate tyranny with such pornographic embellishments!

HELMSLEY: [Resumes reading.] "Whereupon, still in a state of shock and dishabille, you are forced to sit on the hot seat of that notorious interrogationroom-cum-torturechamber in which our German ‘law enforcement’ agencies practice their inquisitorial skills so successfully—"

SCHROEDER: The Marquis de Sade couldn’t have cooked up a more succulent mise-en-scene!

MASTROIANNI: Alas, the female job applicant is, I’m afraid, quintessentially vulnerable!

CELINE: Job applicants? They might as well be spreadeagled on a fat Fieldmarshal’s fourposter!

HELMSLEY: [Reading again.] "Before your wits can be collected, a voice from the void is asking you about a ‘top secret’ conversation relating to a certain ‘Project Blockbuster’ which, as UTG’s central switchboard operator, you must surely have overheard."

THATCHER: Meaning the personnel department has been aware of Blockbuster from the very beginning!

SCHROEDER: So much for the secrecy oaths we were required to swear!

WERNER: And all the security arrangements we were promised for our own protection!

CELINE: Even more ominous is the way Eichmann anticipates the subversive ramifications of this whole Hitler affair—

BRECHT: No doubt about it. UTG is playing with political dynamite in its desperate bid to excavate a place for itself in the high rent district of what is becoming a worldwide cultural cartel headquartered in Hollywood.

THATCHER: What I want to know is: could our participation in Blockbuster be interpreted by the authorities as a criminal act?

MASTROIANNI: According to German tradition actors are not responsible for anything they do in the name of their art.

KARAJAN: Would you mind testifying to that fact before the Allied Atrocities Tribunal on my behalf?

WERNER: Is it really so inconceivable that we might find ourselves sitting on a Police hot seat as a result of this "cultural shindig?"

THATCHER: Who knows—maybe we can actually learn something useful from the tale of how these three females handled themselves under the pressure of Eichmann’s imaginary browbeating!

SCHROEDER: I have the feeling it is we who will be the victims of this story’s continuation.

CELINE: What choice have we got? Like any other audience, once our curiosity has been aroused it must be satisfied, regardless of the consequences.

THATCHER: For better or worse we must hear what happens to Eichmann’s three contestants!

HELMSLEY: [Reading.] "Immediately, the nature of your predicament becomes crystal clear. Like every good German you are duty-bound to help the authorities eliminate subversives. But you have also sworn a sacred oath to your employer not to divulge secrets such as the Project Blockbuster conversation you accidentally overheard. Moreover, as a matter of personal conviction you are persuaded that Project Blockbuster is protected by UTG’s charter as a cultural institution—a charter elevating artistic considerations above those of politics. So, there you are, perched on the horns of an insoluble dilemma which, the sinister voice now tells you, must be solved within the next ten seconds." [Refolds paper, returns it to wallet.]

WERNER: And? How did they react to this ultimatum?

HELMSLEY: According to Eichmann, the blonde answered without any hesitation—saying she would have no choice but to martyr herself for the principle of poetic license. Consequently, no matter how ruinous Project Blockbuster might prove to post war Germany’s experiment with democracy her lips would remain permanently sealed.

SCHROEDER: Shrewdly assuming that, since he is first and foremost a company man, loyalty to UTG will be the highest on Eichmann’s list of priorities.

THATCHER: Maybe too shrewdly! Eichmann is bound to suspect such extravagant idealism as being nothing more than the cynical calculation it probably is.

WERNER: Cynically calculated perhaps, but organizations like UTG have a habit of hiring those who tell them what they want most to hear!

MASTROIANNI: So much for the "suicidal blonde." What about the brunette?

HELMSLEY: Using the full ten seconds, her reply is more artfully constructed. While seeming to cooperate with her torturers, the brunette volunteers only the most insignificant details about the "Blockbuster conversation," using every opportunity in the process to set the record straight on UTG’s unimpeachable patriotism as a the pillar of German society.

MASTROIANNI: Brava, my raven-haired Brunhilde! A brilliant survival strategy! Ruthlessly pragmatic—but with just enough bias toward the hand that will eventually feed you!

THATCHER: You really think Eichmann can risk taking a viper like that to UTG’s corporate bosom? Who knows better than he how quickly the soul of an organization becomes poisoned by the venom of such sycophantic schemers?

SCHROEDER: As he is forever telling us; it’s not the mendacity at the top that matters but the accumulation of low level lies that undermines every structural aspect of civilization.

HELMSLEY: Finally then, we come to the redhead, who Eichmann claims took him totally by surprise. Instead of answering, she fell to her knees and begged him for more time; tearfully arguing against the scenario he is imposing on one so unpracticed in the machinations of counterespionage. Naturally, Eichmann was not moved by this appeal to his mercy. On the contrary, he threatened her with summary dismissal unless her answer was immediately forthcoming. Whereupon she confessed her instinct for staying alive at any price would force her total capitulation to the threat of torture and death. Accordingly, she would tell her interrogator anything he wanted to know about Project Blockbuster.

BURTON: At last, the voice of truth rings out!

THATCHER: But is she being candid—or, like Cordelia, is she outguessing the author of her dilemma by assuming the least likely answer is the one he has been looking for all along?

SCHROEDER: Since when is our Eichmann capable of thinking in such baroque terms?

WERNER: You’re wrong, but for the right reason. He does choose the redhead. Not for her candor but for the cowardice motivating her confession. Even so, it is not her surrender to some hypothetical fate that matters to Eichmann so much as her capitulation to his real threat of immediate disqualification. Like all petty despots he is fatally attracted to females who fear him more than they love or admire him.

HELMSLEY: Then you all agree on the redhead?

SCHROEDER: No. As a dyed-in-the-wool company man he must reward the blonde for her "suicidal" dedication to UTG.

THATCHER: I agree. Even if he suspects her of only telling him what she thinks he wants to hear, that is in itself sufficient reason for an arch applepolisher like Eichmann to hire her.

MASTROIANNI: But aren’t you all forgetting the clue Eichmann provides us with at the outset when he describes this entire affair as a technocratic triumph? Viewed in that light, the brunette’s ethical acrobatics must be seen as an exhibition of that virtuosity under fire only dreamed of by a personnel manager.

KARAJAN: On that point the proof is surely in the pudding. Who was I haggling with just now if not the most calculating kind of female? Besides, she sounded like a brunette should sound—deep, dark and sultry; in the way, as Sundayschoolers, we imagined all those ravenhaired ballbusters spoke in the Old Testament. What mere man, be he Jew or Gentile, is a match for Delilah or Salome—both of whom were, like the heroine of Eichmann’s experiment, brunettes?

BRECHT: Since a consensus seems unlikely, it looks like you will have to tell us who the winner was—

HELMSLEY: Alright—it was the blonde.

BRECHT: And—even more importantly: why the blonde?

HELMSLEY: Why? Because, of course, she had the biggest tits!

General reaction of dismay from AUDITIONISTS—shouts of ‘Fraud!’, ‘Bitch!’ etc.

Scene 8

BRECHT: [Referring to newspaper.] Apropos bosomy blondes; from Vienna comes word that human psychology is basically a function of those anatomical factors distinguishing one sex from another. Thus, as penis envy dominates the female mentality—so too might Eichmann’s seemingly inscrutable choice of the blonde be typical of the masculine urge to regain the Eden of his infancy; specifically—that mammarian landscape of milk and honey from which he is weaned by the unstoppable onset of manhood.

THATCHER: Call it biochemistry or aesthetics—when it comes to choosing one woman over another for whatever purpose one has in mind we are all Eichmanns.

WERNER: And what woman needs professor Freud to teach her the facts of socio-economic life as they apply to the role played by her cleavage?

SCHROEDER: If only our own situation were as simple as the tale of the three switchboard operators!

MASTROIANNI: What makes you think it isn’t?

SCHROEDER: You can’t put a tapemeasure to our talents.

HELMSLEY: Maybe not, but in UTG’s eyes what is any actor but a pair of tits?

CELINE: For all the ballyhoo about our acting abilities we are no better than hookers, parading our wares for the clientele of a highpriced bordello.

SCHROEDER: Isn’t that the point? Like the rest of humanity we may be whores but UTG is still Europe’s biggest and best bordello. And, as for the taste of our clientele, it couldn’t be more sophisticated or eclectic with names like Lange, Piscator, and Reinhardt dominating Germany’s cultural life.

CELINE: That’s certainly true! While on the one hand the actor becomes grist for Piscator’s ideological mill, on the other his pristine intellect is the apple of Reinhardt’s philosophic eye.

BRECHT: Not to mention Brecht’s habit of swallowing his acting ensembles whole.

BURTON: Yes—we’re all breastbaring hussies hoping for yet another of those one night stands comprising our illustrious careers!

SCHROEDER: So what? Does anything we do matter when all down the line a thousand years of theatrical tradition is in the final stage of disintegration? And, in the end, isn’t the burning issue of our winning or not winning decided by the toss of celestial dice?

THATCHER: Haven’t you heard? Since 1905 it has become unscientific to accuse God of crapshooting!

Scene 9

BRECHT: Not necessarily—[Referring to newspaper.] It seems the Aryan Academy of Astrophysics has published a paper written by a certain pig farmer and parttime cosmologist named Karl Emmanuel Schwank casting an ominous shadow over Einstein’s energy equation. It states here that: "Assisted by his young wife and a local handyman, Schwank has been testing the monotheistic assumption that all light travels at a constant speed, against the Teutonic intuition that, as in ethnic matters, some light is superior to other light, speedwise. Accordingly, every night for the past two years Schwank has placed himself at everincreasing distances from the farmhouse in which his beautiful young wife and the handyman are left alone. At the first chime of midnight on the village church bells, the wife and handyman simultaneously shine the lights of a candle and an electric lamp from their upstairs bedroom windows. Whereupon Schwank ascertains whether or not the 2 light beams reach his eyes at the same time. Up to a distance of 5.36 kilometers no discernible difference was observed. But on 20 November last, his blind faith in folklore was rewarded when the light from the electric lamp reached him a fraction of a second before that of the candle. Continuing the experiment out to a distance of 8.113 kilometers, Schwank was able to compute the speed of candle light as being 0.03% slower than electric light! Thus’, says Schwank, ’it has been demonstrated once again that German common sense will always triumph over the exotic ideas peddled by Einstein and his Semitic ilk!’"

MASTROIANNI: Who knows what other cosmic mysteries might be solved by the ingenuity of Germany’s pig farmers!

CELINE: Including what went on between his wife and his handyman in the bedroom each night that idiot went out to cuckoldize Einstein!

SCHROEDER: It’s a disgrace how items like that find their way into a press that was once the most respected in Europe.

THATCHER: Amazingly, such otherwise unbelievable gossip becomes credible when it appears in print. One has only to consider how effectively the Nazis have legitimized themselves by appearing in print even as the object of scorn and ridicule. God help us all when governments get into the publishing business!

BRECHT: [Pounding newspaper.] Say what you will about the political firepower of official propaganda, but between the lines of every establishmentarian puffpiece, one finds yet another subversive elaboration on the old Prussian "Pens and Swords" pun.

WERNER: Which one is that?

BRECHT: "A sword is mightier than a pen."

WERNER: That’s no pun.

BRECHT: Why not?

WERNER: The play on words is missing.

SCHROEDER: As always, it’s you who is missing the point!

WERNER: What point?

SCHROEDER: In Prussia punmanship is more a matter of swordplay than wordplay.

BRECHT: Still, as that archest of all saberrattlers, Bismark, complained about the proliferation of antichauvinistic graffiti: "One iconoclastic punster is worth an army of patriotic penpushers."

THATCHER: And whose Teutonic mentality has not been traumatized by that most recent masterpiece of mind over matter—

CELINE: Referring, of course, to the infamous "Deathcell Communique to OKW?"

SCHROEDER: In which the Wehrmacht’s late "Woman in Prague" slyly summarized the Czech response to Germany’s lebensraum scenario as—

THATCHER: "Skoda’s canon works day and night but Kafka’s pen-is [Pronounced midway between ‘pen is’ and ‘penis.’] still stiffest prick in town."

CELINE: Thus—with nothing more than lipstick and prison toilet paper Clausewitz and his clique are written off as the answer to Germany’s ancient Aryan prayer for Deutschland uber Alles!

SCHROEDER: It wouldn’t be the first time our High Command was caught with its militaristic britches down.

BRECHT: They’re still smarting from that boot in the ass they took at Kopernick!

THATCHER: Being kicked by a counterfeit captain is one thing, but when has the entire German army been buggered by a woman using an epistolary dildoe?

CELINE: And in whose image does she make her fake cock but that of the prize Kike, Kafka!

SCHROEDER: Kafka’s kikishness is of little consequence when you consider how her metaphorical gunplay ruffles the feathers of Freudian orthodoxy in that synagogue where the Rhinegold of German matriarchy is changed into the gelt of Judaic machismo.

THATCHER: Are you saying this atavistic Lysistrata hoists the military mystique and psychiatry’s claim to universal fame on the same phallic petard?

SCHROEDER: In the last analysis her "Deathcell Communique" totally demickeyizes Freud’s misogynistic dickdom that: "Motivated by pen-envy alone what can the most Amazonian authoress achieve but the ersatz sex of literary lesbianism?"

CELINE: Still, the crucial question remains: Was her double entendre deliberate, or does Kafka’s "penis" arise merely from a typographical ambiguity?

BRECHT: Whether "pen is" or "penis," does it matter when Kafka epitomizes all those who put their penish pricks to the bubble of a Greater Germany?

THATCHER: Which is what makes this jumpedup corporal’s prospects for success so promising. He alone of all Germans understands that a New Order can only be won in a war of words.

BRECHT: [Slapping newspaper.] Exactly what this article seems to be saying when it reports the "mysterious disappearance of an American audience during the performance of a play entitled Private Parts."

WERNER: Mysterious indeed! Such things are happening all too frequently in the theater nowadays.

SCHROEDER: Only last night the Schauspielhaus emptied itself between the Prologue and Act One of Drums In The Night—

THATCHER: What can you expect when Brecht is involved!

BRECHT: This case doesn’t seem to be the usual one of an offended audience writing its own marching orders. No. Apparently these Americans actually vanished into the thin theatrical air of a play whose advertised intent was [Reading.] "To simulate that state of intellectual anarchy which sets the stage for whole nations to surrender their sense of reality to one man’s totalitarian imagination."

CELINE: What mortal script could aspire to such divine perfection?

BRECHT: It says here that: "Devoid of plot, the play acquires a relentless—almost tyrannical—momentum from the dialectic developing between a dressingroom full of actors who are discovered waiting to audition for a role they all want but only one can have."

SCHROEDER: Relentless momentum? What could be more tedious theatrically than the circumstances we find ourselves in now?

THATCHER: Perhaps. But similar scenarios are becoming all too fashionable—

BRECHT: [Reading.] "Backstage Monkey Biz Boffo In Breslau!"

THATCHER: Referring, I suppose, to Andreyev’s look behind the scenes at circus sexlife in He Who Gets Slapped?

WERNER: Or, more likely, to those peepshows permitting the public to see a dressingroom full of beauty contestants fight each other tooth-and-nail for the dubious distinction of wearing a phony queen’s cardboard crown.

SCHROEDER: Are you comparing us to a stageful of starstruck ingenues whose debasement provides some prurient playwright with his reason for being?

CELINE: Didn’t de Sade describe all actors and actresses as being nothing more than "pornographic objets d’art?"

THATCHER: Not exactly. What he really said was: "Obscurity is not in the eye of its audience, but in the enforced act of beholding that indecent behavior an author imposes on his cast of characters."

MASTROIANNI: Which could mean the watching of any "casting call scenario"—simply to see who the one winner will be—can acquire the orgiastic aura of a gladiatorial gangbang!

KARAJAN: Or might an even more sadistic storyline be the one that keeps its audience waiting to discover which actor turns out to be the lone loser?

WERNER: As in the Fake Frenchman sketch where, when confronted by 12 circumcised suspects, the spectators must guess which one the offstage "authorities" will choose as he whose genuinely Jewish pecker qualifies him for a one way ticket to The Great Ghetto In The Sky.

THATCHER: But by definition a distinction must be made in every play between the characters’ fate and those of the actors who only portray them.

SCHROEDER: Yes. For us the vital question of being or not being is only raised after the final curtain comes down!

WERNER: And even then it isn’t so much a matter of life and death as the more down to earth problem of reestablishing one’s preperformance personality—

BURTON: As the Bard himself put it when penning his own epitaph: "Here lies that playwright of playwrights who, for all his claims to ontological fame couldn’t, it seems, alter the actuality of a dying he did not do upon a stage."

SCHROEDER: We don’t need Shakespeare to tell us what the facts make perfectly plain—since we are not on a stage, this is not a play!

Scene 10

ENTER FASSBINDER via stage door with valise, dressed in flamboyantly eccentric style of a latterday Oscar Wilde. He is followed on by JEWISH IMPRESARIO wearing a long black coat bearing yellow Mogen David, and holding a copy of The Text.

JEWISH IMPRESARIO: [Continuing argument he has been having with FASSBINDER.] So tell me; what is an actor’s agent for if not to protect his client from selfdestructing? At least let me negotiate a script approval clause into our contract. This so-called "bible" gives UTG a blank check on your creative prerogatives. God knows whose words you will someday have to eat if you are actually unlucky enough to win this boobytrapped prize of theirs.

FASSBINDER: [Having stopped to clip and light a cigar.] For the last time Max, the die is cast. My mind is made up, and nothing you can say will change it. [EXIT into a makeshift ‘Star’ cubicle extreme upstage left that resembles a portable outhouse.]

JEWISH IMPRESARIO: [Addressing cubicle door.] Since when did the God give actors the brains to stage manage their own affairs? [To AUDITIONISTS.] No offense intended ladies and gentlemen, but it is a fact of theatrical life that acting ability and business acumen are rarely found in the same package—hence the need for men of my managerial skills. [Rhetorically.] Well, no matter what happens, my conscience is clear. I’ve done all that any agent can be expected to do for his client—and, by the looks of this socalled "dressingroom," more than those who are representing you in what I can only describe as a cattle auction. [Indicating cubicle.] At least I’ve had my prize bull separated from the common herd by this token concession to the privacy his superstardom deserves! Ethically of course, I am prevented from using my influence on your behalf tonight— and God knows how desperately I desire my client’s defeat in this unwinnable war—but nothing stops me from offering you my card for future reference. [He distributes business cards. AUDITIONISTS are not impressed.]

     As you can see, Max Meier, Inc, GmbH, Ltd. and dba, has his finger in most of this nation’s pies. Don’t let my outcast’s emblem deceive you, ladies and gents. Without entrepreneurial untermenschen like me the German "economic miracle" would come apart at its seams. I’m into everything from pop-up toasters to limo rentals. Any creature comfort you desire can be supplied at—or below—wholesale by The Max Meier Movable Merchandise Mart. In the social sphere: Max Meier’s Dating, Escort & Nuptial Service caters to the longest and shortest of sexual relationships—and everything in between. If you’re in the market for a private eye, the Max Meier Investigative Agency is at your service 24 hours a day. And, as if I didn’t have enough on my plate, the sheer drama of these theatrical times we are living in has tempted me to seek my own movie moguldom with an up and coming enterprise to be known as The Max Meier Independent Production Company! [Distributes more cards.] Only yesterday I picked up a load of surplus Nazi propaganda footage for peanuts which, with some creative editing, might be turned into a major motion picture entitled: Nuremburg 1932: A Study in Power Politics as the Art of Orchestrating Mass Hysteria—or maybe something a little less pretentious, like: Triumph Of The Will. And, by this time tomorrow I’ll be in Munich bidding for the rights to The Eva Braun Story; after which it’s back to Berlin for a meeting with an SS group to explore the joint venture possibilities of some shooting they have planned for locations in Poland. I’m telling you boys, WWII will make GWTW look like Andy Hardy Goes To College! Every actor with a German accent and a duelling scar is standing on the threshold of a showbusiness bonanza! But, since making money is easier than keeping it, let me call your attention to a certain Zurich financial firm by the name of—you guessed it!—The Max Meier Institute of Fiscal Science; an entity by which your hard earned cash can find its way into a bewilderng variety of tax shelters, legal loopholes, invisible assets and offshore investments. Speaking of which, I just happen to have with me some state-of-the-art portable radios I can let you have for the sensationally low price of 8 marks 50! [Takes radio from inside coat.] No takers? It doesn’t surprise me, what with all the depressing news they are broadcasting lately. [Puts radio back into coat and produces paperback book.] Now here’s an item that will lift your mind from the cares of gutter politics! An unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterly’s Lover marked down to only 65 pfennig a copy! [There are no takers.] Think of it! Two of these literary classics for a single Reichsmark! [Still no takers.] Alas, it’s true—[Puts books into coat.]—in this optically oriented era the entire output of a print media pornographer like D. H. Lawrence is worth less than this set of fullfrontal photos showing the Einsatzkommandos in action at Babi Yar; isn’t that right, sir? [He offers LORRE sample photo from envelope he has taken from inside coat. One by one he hands LORRE more photos as:] Have you ever seen a finer example of life in the raw? As a connoisseur like you can easily tell sir, these are not actors and actresses but real people captured by an amateur shutterbug in poses that couldn’t be more provocative. Notice, if you will sir, how artlessly the twin motifs of sex and death entwine themselves in what can only be described as "an improvisational orgy of Wagnerian proportions"—culminating with what must surely be the snapshot to end all snapshots. [Hands LORRE final photo.] It’s difficult to put a price on such a rarity. In the back alleys of the Reeperbahn the crudest imitations routinely fetch a thousand marks. But they can be yours sir, for a mere 500. [LORRE pays him.] Thank you sir! Our transaction has saved this little scene of mine from being a total waste of time! [Pockets banknotes.] So, comrades—good evening; and if you will permit me a final impertinence: may God grant that one of you gets his wish to out-Hitler my bread and butter!!!! [EXIT via stagedoor.]

Scene 11

WERNER: What were you saying before that interruption?

SCHROEDER: Since we are not on a stage, this is no play!

THATCHER: Ah, but for centuries this was the stage of a suburban spielhaus—until UTG outgrew its Berlin studio and swallowed these premises whole. Even so, until quite recently, it was only used as a theatrical laboratory where, in the name of "market research," artistic experiments were conducted on ordinary audiences unaware of their role as human guinea pigs.

SCHROEDER: A strange stage that stands surrounded by walls as solid as these!

THATCHER: Isn’t it obvious how that mirror fills the empty space once separating actors and audience?

WERNER: There is something sinister about the way this huge looking glass so perfectly replaces what would otherwise be a proscenium!

SCHROEDER: What else would you have a Rehearsal Mirror do!

WERNER: Rehearsal mirror?

SCHROEDER: Doesn’t every dressingroom have one?

WERNER: Since when?

THATCHER: Since never!

CELINE: What sense would a mirror that size make?

SCHROEDER: How else can we see ourselves exactly as we will later be seen on stage?

THATCHER: You’re confusing this prosceniumsized mirror with the trick type used to mislead amateur acting ensembles into thinking their obscene improvisations are not being observed.

WERNER: Yet for all we know we could be staring into the object every actor imagines in his worst nightmare!

CELINE: Not a rehearsal mirror, but a nonrehearsal mirror!

SCHROEDER: A nightmare which, however, only comes true in some impresario’s fantasy of staging a production so perfectly he not only subjugates its actors and audience, but also usurps for himself the total tyranny of authorship.

MASTROIANNI: Some fantasy! As schoolchildren didn’t we get our first taste of the forbidden fruit of art au naturel by secretly observing such impresarial impromptus as "An Evening Spent In An Accidentally Overbooked Honeymoon Suite" and "Secrets Of A Sorority House Slumber Party?"

CELINE: And who can ever forget that piece de resistance of spontaneous dramaturgical combustion—"The Inmate’s Anxiety Upon Discovering The Lack Of Drains In Their ‘Shower Room’ Floor?"

Scene 12

WERNER: Ah, "The Inmates’ Anxiety"—if only I could erase the memory of those naked nonentities giving what in fact proved to be the performance of their lives!

THATCHER: It was something of a shock—expecting a cheap theatrical thrill and getting instead that full frontal look at life in the raw—

MASTROIANNI: —a look that may have been more disturbing than any we could have imagined at the time. Haven’t we all been haunted ever since by the question of what acting is all about when, as theatrical superstars, we can only hope to approximate the histrionics of those rank amateurs performing in such real life horror shows?

LORRE: [Who has been drilling hole in wall right with manual bit and brace.] A better question to ask yourself might be how actors of your expertise can be deceived by those crass imitations of reality—

MASTROIANNI: Are you saying I don’t know what I saw with my own eyes?

LORRE: Did you really think that even for the inflated price of a Buff & Snuff Show ticket you were buying the sight of what I have spent my entire life trying to see?

THATCHER: We were naive in those days, but even the most unsophisticated onlooker can distinguish between standard showbusiness shit and the pure shinola of an authentically transcendental theatrical experience.

MASTROIANNI: If our subsequent careers prove anything surely it must be that the psychological pandemonium climaxing one of these unrehearsed atrocities (when at long last its victims fully appreciate the finality of their impending doom) can’t be faked; no matter how artfully some atavistic Sophocles might attempt its contrivance.

LORRE: As a lifelong connoisseur of keyhole phenomena I can assure you: reality rarely arranges itself into a theatrical format. Far from it! What one actually see through a gas chamber peephole is not ninety minutes of methodically attenuated horror—but the depressingly tedious spectacle of condemned humanity incapable of expressing its angst in anything but the most predictably unimaginative manner. There is the screaming, of course, and a few shouts of defiance. Some cursing, some praying—and the "peep show to end all peep shows" is kaput. In a minute or two their impoverished emotional and artistic vocabularies are entirely exhausted. Incapable of rising even to the momentous occasion of their actual extermination these "amateur actors" of yours sit in a stupefied silence punctuated only by their pathetic sobs and whimpering.

Scene 13

THATCHER: Getting back to our discussion of the actor as a pawn in the chess game played between author and audience: For all his lipservice to a "Wagnerian weltanschauung" doesn’t Hitler, as the Historic Heldentenor of All Time, prove that only fools wait in the wings for someone to write them an aria to sing?

SCHROEDER: To say nothing of Churchill bricklaying his way to "political oblivion," but still managing to pull a few parliamentary strings from his Kentish Elba!

WERNER: If that’s the case, why do we sit here believing our immediate future won’t be the one which took those Americans completely by surprise in what they thought was just another "harmless" production of Private Parts?

SCHROEDER: Because we are not performing a play! Besides, this is Europe, not the Wild West; where every wagon train full of starstruck actors is an ambush-in-the-making.

HELMSLEY: Whatever sins it might commit in resisting Hollywood’s bid for cultural supremacy, UTG would never desecrate that which throughout a thousand years of theatrical tradition has always been sacred. These imperial powerplays come and go, but in Germany the dressingroom remains that holiest of holies—a place in which an actor is shielded from the kind of dramaturgical doubledealing practiced in less civilized societies.

THATCHER: And yet, is anything so sacrosanct it can withstand UTG’s corporate will to remain viable?

SCHROEDER: UTG’s competitive instincts can hardly be described in such ruthless terms. As the champion of an ancient ethos, it is merely asserting its corporate claim for coexistence in the 20th century.

LORRE: If only we could avoid the cataclysmic implications of even our most modestly justifiable complaints! But just as Germany’s legitimate yearning for lebensraum turns into a do-or-die policy of Deutschland uber Alles—so UTG’s desire for mere industrial survival must, I fear, involve us in a global struggle for theatrical hegemony. Didn’t my own artistic downfall begin naturally enough with a child’s curiosity concerning what his mother was doing in her bedroom with an encyclopedia salesman? Thus was my innocent eye drawn to its first encounter with life as melodrama—dooming me at the age of 6 to an adulthood obsessed with this idea of someday finding that keyhole of keyholes through which I would see people playing the parts they only play in what they think is their complete privacy.

WERNER: How could any 6-year old fail to guess why his mother invites a strange man into her bedroom?

SCHROEDER: Obviously he was teaching her the ins and outs of door-to-door salesmanship!

MASTROIANNI: Or demonstrating how his product covered a subject like Domestic Promiscuity from the ‘A’ of Artistic Foreplay to the ‘Z’ of "Zing Went The Strings of My Heart!"

CELINE: No doubt about it, old boy, you were mistakenly mystified by just one more case of a frustrated hausfrau’s midmorning fuck fantasy coming true.

LORRE: Perhaps. But, since mother left her key in its latch that day, the issue of her fidelity remains mercifully unresolved. Still, like most of life’s misadventures, that first fiasco of mine was not a total loss. It taught me not to rely on chance encounters for the climax of my ecstatic expectations. Accordingly, while my prepubescent peers squandered their pocket money on the creature comforts of childhood I spent mine acquiring the tools of my future trade—until now I possess a portable arsenal of audiovisual paraphernalia representing the very state of the voyeur’s art! This bit and brace, for instance, with whose diamond-dusted tip I can penetrate the thickest armor plating [At this point finishes boring his hole.] And this little beauty: The Opticalfibre Periscopic Probe With Nocturnal Capability! [An item he produces from his case and puts into hole he has drilled.] Which, when plugged into the merest excuse for an aperture, provides me with a panoramic view any gynecologist would trade his practice for! One evening on my recent visit to South Africa I managed to see what no white man had ever witnessed before—the supersecret sex rites practiced by Bantu couples only on moonless nights in the darkest depths of an abandoned coal mine; an event I was able to document with this miracle of microtechnology —a miniaturized motion picture camera fitted with an infrared telephoto lens! And, last but by no means least—the ultimate weapon in my war on privacy; a device so sensitive that, through the thickest walls of an artist’s studio, it can detect the sound of a posing robe slowly sliding its silken way down a model’s satin smooth skin until—with a noise no louder than that made by velvet crushing velvet—it falls at her feet to form a pedestal of discarded drapery upon which she is seen standing in a state of nakedness so ineffable it is doubtful if Manet, or even Modigliani, could recreate on canvas a moment whose magic ordinarily remains the private property of the painter and she whose fullyfrontalized nudity is theirs alone to share.

Unless, perchance, a third party can invade their privacy by secretly situating himself so as to witness that spectacle of spectacles an otherwise perfectly decent woman allows a man to examine at will in the name of art—[During this speech he has been assembling the apparatus into which he will harness himself in due course.]

WERNER: What about glass?

LORRE: Glass?

WERNER: I mean, could that magic stethoscope of yours tell us if there is an audience on the other side of this mirror?

LORRE: I don’t see why not—[Approaching proscenium ‘mirror.’] I doubt if any organism; especially such a collective one—can conceal its existence behind what is, in point of fact, a gigantic diaphragm. The slightest vibration will betray them; if they are in fact out there. A cough, a gasp, the creaking of a seat—any one of those thousand noises made by the most disciplined audience should tell the tale we want to be told! [Puts business end of stethoscope against ‘mirror,’ listens through earpieces, then removes them.]

WERNER: [After brief pause.] Well?

THATCHER: What’s the verdict?

LORRE: Nothing.

WERNER: Nothing?

LORRE: Not a whisper, a breath—or even a yawn.

WERNER: [At footlights.] They’re out there I tell you! Somehow the sonsofbitches have conspired to keep every trace of their subversive existence a secret!

LORRE: Impossible. No group of human beings can sustain a silence so absolute—

SCHROEDER: He’s right. What play’s pregnant pause is so perfect it is never interrupted by the proverbial pin being dropped in the form of a solitary sniffle, sneeze—or snore?

PERON: The explanation for which is—the audience is attempting to break a spell that, if left in force, threatens to convert their casual evening at the theater into a state of permanent enchantment. Hence we know that "nervous laughter" is in fact a reflex action calculated to rupture that dramatic tension which might otherwise stretch its intended sufferer beyond some ontological point of no return.

WERNER: Would you mind repeating that in plain German?

PERON: Certainly. As a general proposition it is safe to say an audience must, now and then, declare its independence from the intellectual tyranny which, paradoxically, provides its very reason for being. At all these public beheadings, for example, there comes a moment when the mob identifies so strongly with he who is about to undergo life’s final adventure it finds itself struck suddenly dumb as the executioner’s ax rises in what now becomes the superslowed motion of an everexpanding evanescence until—victim and onlookers alike appear to be on the threshold of freezing forever in a final photographic frame—at which precise instant a woman’s scream shatters the impending tableau into an avalanche of sights and sounds, cascading down the steep slope of our quickened consciousness in a freefalling montage of flinting steel, severed heads, jets of hot blood, postmortem convulsions—and the diverse expressions of wonderment written on the faces of those who have survived a brush with someone else’s death. And all of that underscored musically by the extended echo of the awesome crescendo every crowd is compelled to choralize when its orgasmic expectations have been collectively climaxed. In a situation such as this, however, the tables become turned. If its continued existence as an audience depends on sustaining a status quo in which its very being is a secret, the only appropriate survival strategy is one of preventing the proof of its presence.

CELINE: A logical strategic objective perhaps—but is it tactically feasible?

SCHROEDER: No. It’s manifestly impossible for an audience to orchestrate such a conspiracy of soundlessness without first violating the very silence they seek to achieve!

PERON: Unless—

THATCHER: Unless the entire question of their being or not being out there has been beggared by the presumable fact they have overheard us asking it!!

WERNER: Of course! If the bastards have been watching every move we make, it was a piece of cake for them to do to us what is always done to the cast of Private Parts! No matter how we struggle, those assholes have us by the balls!!!

Scene 14

Wearing a shabby raincoat, LORRE has occupied himself to this point by applying an oversized stethoscope to the walls, floor and ceiling of set. Having found what he was listening for he drills a peephole in wall downstage right, using elegant tool taken from trunk in which a variety of such implements is kept. Having bored hole he sets about constructing complex apparatus by which he will observe the scene he has discovered next door. This contraption is built on frame of an exercycle, which serves as its operator’s seat and as a legpowered dynamo. When it is finished Lorre will be surrounded by all sorts of primitive and state-of-the-art equipment that will allow him to film through peephole and record his comments on tape, disc or wire.

LORRE: [Having strapped himself into contraption.] That should just about do it—

CELINE: I can’t believe all this paraphernalia is needed for what used to be the cheapest of thrills.

LORRE: [Occupied with finetuning apparatus.] Like so much else nowadays, the "art" of voyeurism has become an exact science. In the age of fiber optics, miniaturized microphones and infrared cinemaphotography, even the most ardent of amateur eyeballers can’t ignore the miraculous ways in which modern technology has extended our sensory horizons. Moreover, fancy gadgets like this have added a certain mystique to what was once considered a disgusting, if not illegal, activity. As a card carrying member of The Society For Anthropological Reconnaissance, I have joined that community of scholars whose "peeping" into the darkest depths of human behavior has become socially acceptable. And as an actor, of course, there is a decidedly artistic aspect to my research into these little dramas one can only observe surreptitiously. Notwithstanding the sad fact they usually fail to satisfy all of one’s theatrical appetites—now and then one comes close to seeing a scenario so divinely improvised no amount of playwriting could ever improve it. Thus my prayers persist of someday secretly seeing that show of shows every one-man audience hopes to witness every time he peers through yet another of those key holes beyond which all the acting is done au naturel. But enough of this selfimposed suspense! Something tells me the curtain may be going up on the spectacle I have been waiting a lifetime to see! [Begins pedaling. Puts eye to camera.]

WERNER: [After a brief pause.] Well? What’s happening?

LORRE: [Dictating into recorder.] So far, so good. Subjects in dressingroom nextdoor seem oblivious to invasion of their privacy. First impression is of Seraglio Syndrome; whereby uninhibited behavior of female sexslaves is fostered by not unreasonable assumption their living space has been spyproofed by he whose personal property they have become. Preliminary data further suggests softcore skinflicks featuring steambath as pretext for undraping voluptuous victims of serial "sex killer"—or even XXX-rated variation on Buff & Snuff scenario; with genuine gas chamber disguised by homicidal moviemaker as "studio sauna" for use of newlydiscovered starlets. Situation also has elements of psychological peepshows in which ladylike relationship between aspiring bathingbeauty contestants or sorority house initiates degenerates into a storm of conflicting survival instincts. So far, however, it must be admitted we may have stumbled on to nothing more sensational than the usual dressingroom full of nude and seminude actresses doing what that cast of characters always does in a stereotypical behind-the-scenes look at theatrical life in the raw.

     Accordingly, we find Miss America and Glamor Puss engaging in the predictable backstage smiling contest—while The Superannuated Sex Goddess shows off her statuesque curves for the benefit of Bright Eyes and Baby Face—both of whose postpubescent rough edges could use some rounding off. As for Watermelon Tits and Elephant Ass, they persist in telling every joke in the book about juxtaposing their freakish physiques into one perfectly proportioned torso, with the left overs being donated to a Home for Underendowed Femmes Fatales. Typically, Mona Lisa reacts to all of this without altering her enigmatic smile. Imperturbability is the name of the game she always plays! Whereas the emotions of Snow White, The Virgin Mary, Goody Two Shoes, and The Girl Who Lives Nextdoor are a mixture of shock, shame, scorn and catkilling curiosity—while last on the list, Plain Jane sits pondering the dim prospects of having the "candlelight" of her inner beauty noticed in such a dazzling display of "skin deep" incandescence—[Rubs eyes.]

     And yet—can it be? Are these expert eyes deceiving me or are those adorable creatures intentionally deglamorizing themselves! [Puts eye to camera.] Yes! There can be no doubt about it! Something very peculiar is going on in there! A kind of Ugly Duckling story is unfolding in reverse as these twelve swanlike beauties seem to be turning themselves into Plain Jane lookalikes! The scene abounds with bizarre sights! Prizewinning bosoms are being bandaged flatter than yesterday’s potato pancakes! Coiffures of spun gold and platinum are changing into those shitbrown hairdos worn helmetstyle by the schoolward bound brigades of juvenile Jewesses one sees marching from the ghetto each morning.

     Similarly, their cosmetic gameplan consists of removing every vestige of the camouflage they so artfully applied to hide the true state of their facial affairs; in order to acquire the soap-and-water complexion of a freshly scrubbed farm girl. Off too come the spiked pumps, silken hose and lace edged lingerie of the cinematic sex symbol. In their stead we have something akin to the Maedchen in Uniform effect created when fully grown women are forced to dress themselves in the homespun undies, pleated skirts and starched white blouses of a female military academy; or that pornographic "penal colony" to which unfucked frauleins are sent in their wettest dreams of sexual servitude.

     The result of these attempts at uglification is, of course, ludicrous and quite futile. The original Jane still remains the plainest of them all. Nevertheless, I smell something faintly Danish in this otherwise rotten kettle of selfdefeminizing fish—can it be the posthumous odor of Otto Beorn—that martyr to naked truth—whose burntout remains will forever smolder beneath the permafrost of Scandinavian morality? After all, wasn’t it he who invented the "Schoolgirl School" of playwriting with his keyhole perspective on the indecent side effects of educational regimentation?

     Among the many provocative titles of his one-man genre can any pornophile forget such trailblazing examples of scholastic smut as: The Classroom Games All Girls Play When Their Professor Is Away, and What A Mother Superior Sees Through the Two-way Mirrors Hanging In Every Convent’s Cloakroom; not to mention that earopening masterpiece of nocturnal dramaturgy—The Pajama Party (or) Those Supersecret Sex-notes Coeds Compare In The Darkness of A Collegiate Dormitory? Yes, yes, yes! That could explain why these adult actresses have all come to this audition with what looks like those cheap notebooks into which, as undergraduates, they furtively confided their innermost secrets.

     Although, only God knows what such a collection of trashy teenage confessionals has to do with choosing Hitler’s leading lady. But perhaps that question is already being answered by Miss America who has begun reading aloud from her girlish memoirs the "shocking" story of her first encounter with that hard fact of English style boarding school life known as "the indecently exposed faculty member." Whilst chasing a stray cricket ball one afternoon, it seems, our 12-year old heroine discovers her Latin professor standing behind a mulberry bush with a most curious object protruding stiffly from the open folds of his academic robery. He attributes this faux pas to a call of nature he was powerless to resist—an explanation our future Miss America finds very difficult to swallow since all of her experience indicates that: "one simply can’t take a proper pee without squatting." Furthermore, she doesn’t understand what in the world that strange object he keeps stroking has to do with the topic they are discussing. Smiling at her ignorance, the professor suggests filling this void in her knowledge of basic biology with an extracurricular tutorial on comparative anatomy. Whereupon he proceeds to demonstrate, in the most practical terms, those peculiar properties of that most virile appendage known in Latin as a "penis"—but which most men commonly call their "pricks," "peckers," "cocks," "safecrackers," etc., etc.—But at this point The Superannuated Sex Goddess interrupts the story by throwing her hands up in a gesture of surrender. She’s heard enough of this story to know it was fabricated from the whole cloth of some male ghostwriter’s masturbatory imagination—an observation which is punctuated by a ventriloquial fart Mona Lisa manages to produce without altering her enigmatic smile!

     Tearfully Miss America confesses she did indeed employ a hack to concoct the kind of diary a Reichsfuehrer would like his future femme fatale to have written. Apparently the girlhood she actually spent in Kansas was unmolested by a single one of the traveling salesmen her farmerfather habitually invited to spend the night in a spare bedroom adjoining that of his daughter.

     And now, of all people, Plain Jane puts her two pfennigs’ worth in by pointing out how the true story of Miss America’s everendangered virginity has more pornographic punching power than any of those dastardly plots hatched by villainous playwrights to terminate their heroine’s maidenly innocence. "After all," she adds, "could any connoisseur of German erotica hope to find a fictitious variation on the ’Menage a Trois’ leitmotif more innovative than this factually unconsummated case of vicarious incest? Naturally this precocious observation has the effect of making its hitherto inconspicuous utterer the focus of attention. Suddenly the pigeons perceive a cat in their midst! Watermelon Tits and Elephant Ass are aiming feather ruffling gestures in Plain Jane’s direction. Mona Lisa’s lips have puckered themselves into a lethal-looking beak, and even The Virgin Mary sends the most menacing signals with her clawlike fingers. But it is Goody Two Shoes who finally draws real blood by asking Plain Jane how a good little girl like her from the ghetto got to be such an "expert" in the obscene reading habits of the Master Race?

CELINE: So—even in the selection of Hitler’s leading lady "The Jewish Question" raises its homely head!

LORRE: Plain Jane tries retreating into the shell of her former anonymity but this ploy only encourages her enemies to launch an all out attack. Her resistance is surprisingly fanatical, but against odds of 12-to-1 she soon finds herself stripped stark naked and spreadeagled on a carbon copy of our coffeetable. Worse yet, that most personal of all her possessions has become public property as Elephant Ass begins to read aloud what its first page tells us is "The Diary of Anne Frank"—a title Mona Lisa doesn’t think will ring any publishing business bells. There is general agreement that Plain Jane’s pen name lacks the sexual resonance a bestselling authoress should engender —and I myself must admit it seems extremely doubtful Anne Frank will ever be added to that list of leading ladies which includes the lethal likes of Mata Hari, Cleopatra, Lulu and Helen of Troy!

     The initial entry memorializes its author’s 13th birthday party—among whose inexpensive gifts, she parenthetically speculates, this blank book could one day become the most precious manuscript any young girl has ever written. As an opening episode it concerns itself with items that are more prefatory than seductive. She explains, for instance, that her purpose is not to leave behind an immortal work of art, but to honestly document an adolescence she anticipates will be anything but the kind of "sexual odyssey" described in the trashier type of teenage confessional. In the opinion of The Girl Who Lives Nextdoor such an introduction can only cause the de-arousal of any curiosity its reader may have had regarding his prospects for finding that paydirt all diary freaks seek between the covers of every new schoolgirl’s notebook they open.

     And, speaking as one who has browsed through his fair share of under-the-counter autobiographies, I can certify that one seldom buys such books unless they literally begin with a bang; or at least the strongest hint of one occurring in its authoress’ not-too-distant future! In Plain Jane’s case, this unbreakable rule remains unbroken. Her critics quickly condemn the next few entries as even less likely to turn their writer into a literary lioness; dealing, as they do, with such mundane matters as: Our introduction to Anne Frank’s imaginary confidant, "Kitty"; Her monumentally noneventful first love affair with a total nobody named Goldberg, and; The Chatterbox Essay Scandal, whereby our budding wordsmith so cunningly composes a punishment exercise it not only makes a monkey of the man who ordered her to write it, but thoroughly emasculates him in the process.

      According to Glamor Puss, this is definitely not the kind of spice your better selling confessionals are seasoned with. And yet, for this listener at least, traces of that sexually perverted sub text buried beneath the legitimatelooking surface of most literary landscapes can also be discerned between the lines this seemingly artless adolescent has written. Is it conceivable she has inadvertently accomplished what only the most famous female pornographers do so deliberately when deceiving each of their readers into thinking he alone has deciphered that message whose secret of secrets no respectable woman would ever dream of publishing in plain language?

     One must ask whether her coinage of an enchanting phrase like, "the unbosomings of a young girl," is really all that accidental. And there is this "Kitty" business. Can we fail to construe her choice of nomenclature used only by prostitutes to publicly describe that most private of their parts as anything but the surest sign this Anne Frank is not the sexual neophyte she appears to be at first blush?

     Yes, indeed! She has in fact stimulated my jaded curiosity to that sublime state of surrender all men reach in their losing war with a mind of the opposite sex! Not that my opinion means very much. The only question counting now is whether Plain Jane’s peers can also appreciate the finer points of an artform this rankest of amateurs may be on the verge of perfecting. The answer to which is, of course, a resounding "NO!" This literary lynch mob has heard enough! The case against Anne Frank’s Diary closes with a dramatic slamming shut of its covers. The verdict is "Guilty of boredom in the First Degree!" The sentence is "Premature death by neglect; with a recommendation that clemency for its inexperienced perpetrator should consist of inflicting upon her all of the atrocities normally enumerated in the "Memoirs Of A Former Virgin."

     Accordingly, they set about doing unto their "innocent" victim what has been so cruelly done to them by a world into which women are born as nothing more than sex toys. Generally their acts of indecency conform to the Jailhouse Initiation Rites found in most of those "Women Behind Bars" films; with the occasional oddity being improvised now and then; as, for example, the somewhat innovative use to which Plain Jane’s undefendable auditory orifices are put by the filthyminded whisperings of Mona Lisa and The Virgin Mary —and the equally novel way Miss America’s finger traces love letters on erogenous zones their recipient never dreamed she possessed. Still, no amount of feminine ingenuity can overcome the fact that a girl’s first fuck can’t be faked. The cast of characters for a scenario like this must contain at least one male member. Consequently, Elephant Ass flings the dressingroom door open to announce that a "fornicational freebie" is available within to any able bodied He Man willing to perform such a private act in public. The result of this help wanted ad is just the opposite of shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater—as every roustabout, stagehand, bitplayer and backstage *curiosity seeker within earshot joins a general stampede into what is supposed to be an emergency exit! And what begins as a comical case of overcrowding quickly develops into an orgiastic free-for-all! Suddenly every one of Plain Jane’s wouldbe sodomizers finds her own hindquarters endangered by a herd of stags bent on gangbanging their way through what they misinterpret as a roomful of frauleins eager to have their multiple fuck fantasies come true. But, just as all hell is about to break loose the sound of gun shots brings everything to a screeching halt. The Female Casting Director has appeared on the scene brandishing a pistol in one hand while in the other she holds that even more menacing instrument of authority—the battery-powered bullhorn, from which her voice thunders like that of an outraged goddess.

     Slowly she wends her way through what has become a human petrified forest—filling every ear with the fullest measure of her scorn. "Animals! Scumbags! Saboteurs!" How dare they spoil the plans she has so carefully laid with this vile spectacle of theirs! Her tonguelashing continues until she is suddenly struck speechless by the sight of Plain Jane, who, ironically, has become lost in the general sexual shuffle. "So, Frank, it’s you," she says, more like a disappointed den mother than a vengeful deity. "I should have known who the nigger would be at the bottom of this particular woodpile!" And, when poor Plain Jane tries to assert her innocence, The Female Casting Director interrupts, confessing the blame is mostly hers. She should have guessed what would happen when a little raven-haired Yid like her was added to this ensemble of blonde Aryan bombshells. It’s no surprise such an explosive mixture resulted in the most spontaneous kind of dramaturgical combustion!

     Returning her attention to the still-paralyzed orgiasts, The Female Casting Director warns them not to think her mea culpa exonerates them. Far from it! They remain in her dog house; not only because she caught them in the act of screwing around on company time—but because they failed to include her in their plans for what could be the climax of all her cinematic fuehrer fantasies! "After all," she tells them, "it’s no secret that every female casting director is a frustrated filmmaker who dreams of one day becoming a major motionpicture industry unto herself."

     And why should her aspirations be any less hubristic when, of all the parts played in staging a public extravaganza like Blockbuster, the one privately played by the casting director is the most quintessentially crucial? "Furthermore," she asks, "what scriptwriter can deny that once the stage he sets is populated by a perfect cast of characters, the actual unfolding of his plot becomes automatic?"

     Still, she concedes that no matter how cogently the case for her supremacy in the theatrical scheme of things is argued, its proof depends finally on whether the pudding they have so hastily cooked up turns into the triumph of actuality over art her casting director’s instincts tell her it will when she allows them to resume boiling this improvisational pot of theirs. No, their ears are not deceiving them! They will not only be permitted, but encouraged, to finalize this impromptu Fuckfest she so fortuitously interrupted! But not, however, until she returns with a crew to shoot them doing it! In the meantime, they must remain in this state of suspended animation. Not a single muscle is to be moved or hair rearranged. And, while it certainly won’t be easy, she commands even their private parts to maintain the preclimactic status quo!

     Whereupon, The Female Casting Director turns to exit—but, before she can complete her getaway, Plain Jane spoils it by asking if her departure means that she is not to be rescued in the nick of time from a fate worse than death? Naturally this stops The Female Casting Director in her tracks. She is forced to ponder the dilemma raised by Plain Jane’s impertinence, to wit: While she, The Female Casting Director, could not be more eager to exit the scene, can an act of impudence so flagrant be left unpunished? And, to further complicate the problem, wouldn’t her failure to deal immediately with Plain Jane’s lack of stage manners itself constitute a breach of theatrical etiquette? No matter how impolite the question interrupting her exit might be, any selfrespecting actress is obliged to answer it—which The Female Casting Director now does by asking Plain Jane: "Since when has immortality become so cheap the Anne Franks of this world can purchase it with nothing but a pocketful of daydreams?" Did she really think a total nobody like her could attract a crowd with anything less than the prospect of seeing her suffer the very fate about which she now so ungratefully complains? And whether Plain Jane likes it or not doesn’t mean much when the deck they are both playing with has been so divinely stacked that if this "Blockbuster" they are making is still being screened a thousand years from now, critics will say of Leni Riefenstahl’s Anne Frank Atrocity Footage—"Never in the field of freelance cinemaphotography has any female film maker said so much about so many of life’s largest mysteries so succinctly." Whereupon, without adding another syllable to what she manifestly considers an improvisational exit line par excellence, The Female Casting Director vanishes through the dressingroom door; leaving behind one of the oddest sights these old eyes have ever seen! While the stage is crowded to capacity with actors it couldn’t be more devoid of action— unless we construe the perpetuation of so pregnant a pause to be itself an act of dramaturgical virtuosity! Is it possible I am watching a demonstration of that most esoteric theatrical theory asking us if there is a point beyond which the dramatic hiatus drives its audience into a state of distraction so desperate they find their own ideas more entertaining than those of the playwright whose imagination first attracted them theaterward?

SCHROEDER: For me that point was passed a long time ago when you began spinning these interminable yarns about one day finding a pot of transcendental gold at the rainbow’s end of all those teacup tempests you manage to see through every cleft in God’s creation!

HELMSLEY: How many more of these dry holes must you drill before conceding that no play staged in public could ever be duller than even the most sensational of all those daily dramas real people privately perform?

THATCHER: Could that be the clue we’ve been looking for?

CELINE: The clue to what?

THATCHER: Solving the paradox of our being unable to say or do anything that will prove we have not become the unwilling participants in a Private Parts plot.

CELINE: Are you saying that, as the intended victims of an invisible author/ audience conspiracy, we actors can turn the tables on our wouldbe exploiters by counterconspiring to bore their bloodyminded pants off?

THATCHER: I couldn’t have phrased my own proposition more eloquently!

WERNER: [At proscenium ‘mirror.’] I like it! If the smartassed sonsofbitches are really sitting out there, they deserve a dose of their own Machiavellian medicine!

THATCHER: And if they’re not we can use the peace and quiet to ponder the possibility that this is indeed the audition we have all been waiting a lifetime to win.

CELINE: So, we agree?

ALL AUDITIONISTS: Yes—Agreed—What the hell—Why not?

CELINE: On a count of three then—like our next door neighbors, we will turn ourselves into statues.

BRECHT: I’ll do my damndest, boys—but this plumbing of mine has a will of its own.

CELINE: One! Two! Three!

Having assumed poses that are reasonably comfortable, the ensemble freezes.

L.R.: [After brief pause, heard via public address system.] Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the management, I apologize for a situation that has, temporarily, gotten somewhat out of hand. But not to worry! This little cloud is not without its silvery lining! In what will be their eventual failure to solve one of this play’s most perplexing problems—these actors have unwittingly provided us with a solution to the even more insoluble dilemma resulting from its "slice of life" style, to wit: How do we divide what must seem like one continuous event into the several acts of a conventional play without destroying the verisimilitude upon which its credibility so crucially depends? After all, in reality there are no intermissions, are there? Hence, from its premier performance, every staging of Private Parts has been plagued by a socalled "fatigue factor." It seems an audience won’t sit still for three hours of nonstop thinking; no matter how entertainingly the author dramatizes his ideas.

Houselights come up. Curtain closes.

L.R.: As you can see, however, the "intermission problem" no longer exists for us! This freakish act of fate couldn’t have come at a more opportune time, don’t you think! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are now free to stretch your legs, ventilate your minds, and refresh yourselves at the bar or in the lavatories—without suffering the slightest anxiety that anything of consequence will take place behind those curtains in your absence! And now you must excuse me while I devise a strategy to make the resumption of our play as plausible to you as its interruption!

End Act One

Act Two     Return to Index