The play was a masterpiece in its own unique way: an actual, coherent story completely cobbled together from famous scenes and lines from other plays and movies. Fogerty nearly had an apoplectic fit when he saw it, wondering at the top of his lungs why he should be expected to pay a small fortune for what was essentially a literary retread. I calmed him down by pointing out that (A)
this would allow an obvious entertainment buff like the ambassador to learn his lines with a minimum of rehearsal time, which would get this whole thing over with more quickly and enable us to get out of our overpriced Manhattan hotel and back to the overpriced Washington hotel which the government already had a lease on; and (B) that Mark had even managed to choose scenes and lines that should translate reasonably well on the RebuScope, which would help make the show at least halfway intelligible for the audience. Eventually, Fogerty cooled down.
We met at nine sharp the next morning for the first rehearsal... and, as I should have expected, ran full-bore into our first roadblock.
"What's the problem now?" Fogerty demanded, hovering over Angus like a neurotic mother bird.
"I don't know," Angus replied. "It's the same message that started this whole thing: 'I want to be in a Broadway play.' "
"So he's in one," Fogerty bit out, throwing a glare up at the brightly lit stage. The ambassador was standing motionless in the center, repeating the same message over and over, while the other actors and crew stood nervously watching him, most of them from what they obviously hoped was a safe distance. News of the St. James incident had clearly gotten around.
"I know that, sir," Angus said calmly. "Perhaps he doesn't understand the concept of rehearsals."
Fogerty trotted out the next in line of his exotic curses, sharing this one between the RebuScope and the ambassador himself. "Then you'd better try to explain it to him, hadn't you?" Angus stood up. "I'll try, sir."
"Wait a minute," I said suddenly, leaning over Angus's shoulder. "That doesn't say 'I want to be in a Broadway play.' It says 'I want to be a Broadway play.'"
"What?" Fogerty leaned over Angus's other shoulder.
"There's no 'in' in the message," I explained, pointing. "See? 'Eye w-ant to—'"
"I see what it says," Fogerty snapped. "So what the hell does it mean?"
Angus craned his head to look at me. "Are you suggesting...?"
"I'm afraid so," I said, nodding soberly. "He wants to be a Broadway play.
The whole Broadway play."
There was a moment of shocked silence in which the only sound was the ambassador's rumbling. "He must be joking," Fogerty choked out at last. "He can't do a one-man show."
"Would it be any more incomprehensible to an audience than what we've already got planned?" Angus pointed out heavily. "None of this really makes any sense in the first place."
Fogerty turned a glare on me. "I am not," he said, chewing out each word,
"mortgaging the White House to pay for another play."
"The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity," I reminded him. "If we don't keep him happy—"
"I am not," he repeated, gazing unblinkingly at me, "paying for another play."
I looked up at the stage, trying to think. A one-man play.... "Well, then, we'll just have to use this one," I said slowly. "The ambassador's already got the lion's share of the lines. If we just take the other actors off the stage..."
"Rear-project them, maybe?" Angus offered. "Like—like what?"
"Like they're all part of a dream," I said. "The whole thing can be done as a monologue: his reminiscences of life on the stage."
"You're both crazy," Fogerty said. But there was a thoughtful tone in his voice, the tone of someone who has exactly one straw to grasp at and is trying to figure out where to get the best grip on it. "You think you could do the rewrite, Lebowitz?"
I shrugged. "You'd do better to see if Mark would—but if you'd rather, I could probably handle it," I corrected hastily at the sudden glint in his eye. "But it would take some time."
"You've got three hours," he said, snapping his fingers and gesturing his secretary over to us. "Lee can handle the typing and other paperwork—you concentrate on being creative."
It turned out to be easier than I'd expected to convert the play down to a one-man format, and I still sometimes wonder if Mark deliberately designed it with that possibility lurking in the back of his coffee-soaked mind. Still, the whole job took nearly four hours, and Fogerty was about ready to climb the scrims by the time Lee and I emerged from the basement dressing room where we'd been working.
"Took your sweet time about it," he growled, snatching the sheaf of paper.
"You want it good or you want it fast?" I quoted the old line.
"I want it fast," he retorted, rifling through the pages. "Who's going to know from 'good' on this thing anyway? Come on."
He led the way onto the stage, where the ambassador was bellowing at the top of his lungs. Singing, Fuzhtie style. Vaguely, I wondered which musical he was doing this time. "While you two were twiddling your thumbs down there, we got a
sort of rear projection system put together," Fogerty told us. "That'll take care of the other actors—excuse me; the extras. The bad news is that we've only got a couple of hours now before we have to clear out for today."
"That should be enough time for a run-through," I said. "And the ambassador seems to be a quick study. Let's try it."
We did, and he was. But even more than that: if Angus was interpreting the RebuScope messages correctly, he absolutely loved the play. We got all the way through it and were five pages into a second reading when the stage manager arrived to kick us out.
The ambassador didn't want to leave, of course, and seemed quite prepared to make a major diplomatic incident out of it. Fortunately, Fogerty had anticipated this one and had already arranged to rent one of our hotel's ballrooms so that we could continue the rehearsal over there. The ambassador acceded with what I
thought was uncharacteristic good grace, and we all trooped back. For a long time after that, through the wee hours of the morning, you could hear his dulcet singing tones from everywhere near the ballroom, as well as from certain portions of two other floors. Rumors that he could also be heard in Brooklyn were apparently unfounded.
We had one more day of rehearsals, and then it was opening night. Opening afternoon. Whatever.
I'd been too busy the past few days to get around to wondering exactly what Fogerty was going to do about an audience. I suppose I was assuming he would simply round up the members of the local Federal employees' unions—and any other warm bodies he could find—and plop them down in theater seats, at direct gunpoint if necessary.
Nothing could have been farther from the truth. New York Mayor Grenoble and half the city council had turned out to see the play, along with several high-ranking members of the governor's office, and even the Vice President and a Secret Service contingent. The rest of the theater was packed with playwrights, actors, and your basic upper-crust New York intelligentsia. Somehow, Fogerty had managed to get this billed as The Event Of The Season, and no one who considered himself a theater aficionado was about to miss it. Under the circumstances, I wasn't surprised to learn Fogerty was also charging them $150 apiece.
They finished filing in, settled into their seats, and stopped rattling their programs. The house lights dimmed, the curtain went up, and the play started.
And to my utter surprise and endless relief, it was great.
I don't mean the ambassador was great as an actor. His Fuzhtian expressions and body language—if he had any—were completely opaque to the human audience. His singing voice as already noted was merely a much louder version of his speaking voice, and his speaking voice itself was no great shakes to begin with.
Mark's play wasn't particularly impressive, either, though I have no doubt that it was the best Broadway play ever conceived and written in under fifty hours.