Timothy Zahn: The Play's the Thing

The first step, I decided, would be to figure out which Broadway offering would be the best one to take the ambassador to see. I put in a call to Tony Capello, theater critic, and we spent fifteen minutes discussing the current crop of plays and musicals in town.

Actually, the first twelve of those minutes were spent talking over the old times when I was a lowly carpenter and Tony was chief gopher for a succession of minor choreographers. I would have cut off the reminiscences earlier, except that the delay so obviously irritated Fogerty. When I finally got Tony down to business, his advice was instant and unequivocal: “And Whirrred When It Stood Still,” currently in previews at the St. James.

“So what’s the play about?” Fogerty asked when I relayed the recommendation. “According to Tony, it’s pleasantly harmless froth,” I assured him. “Nothing that’ll confuse the ambassador or put human beings in a bad light. At least, not in any worse light than plays typically do.”

“Assuming he understands it at all,” Fogerty growled, gesturing to his overworked secretary. “Lee, better have someone vet it anyway, just to be on the safe side. All right, what about this St. James Theater? It’s on Broadway?”

“Well, actually, it’s on West 44th Street,” I said. “But it’s—”

“West 44th Street?” Fogerty echoed. “He wants a Broadway play.”

“It is a Broadway play,” I told him stiffly. “The St. James is in the theater district, half a block off Broadway itself. It counts. Trust me.”

He glowered, but apparently decided he’d shown enough ignorance for one conversation. “Fine,” he grunted, “Let’s just hope it counts with the ambassador.”

The manager at the St. James, Jerry Zachs, was less than enthusiastic about the whole thing. “You must be joking,” he said, looking back and forth between Fogerty and me. “Bring that behemoth into my theater? Who’s going to pay for the fifty seats it’s going to cost me?”

“Oh, do try not to go off the deep end here, Mr. Zachs,” Fogerty said, his voice hovering between imperious and condescending. “We won’t have to remove more than nine seats at the most to fit him in.”

“Sure—to fit him in,” Jerry shot back. “What about these seats in front of him you want left empty?”

“That’s only another twelve seats,” Fogerty told him. “Four rows by three seats—”

“I can multiply, thank you,” Jerry growled. “I can also multiply by ticket prices and see I’m already out about a grand and a half. And what about all the seats right behind him where no one’s going to be able to see? Huh?”

Fogerty shrugged. “Fine. We’ll put his entourage there.”

“At full price?”

Fogerty lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t be silly. They won’t be able to see the show from there. How do you expect to charge full price?”

Jerry’s complexion was edging into a soft pink, which from my experience with him was a dangerous sign. “I’m sure we can work something out,” I jumped in before he could say anything. Fogerty had a virtually unlimited budget to work with, but he could go all chintzy at the oddest moments. “What’s important is that the ambassador be treated like the VIP he is.”

“That’s right,” Fogerty said, apparently believing I was on his side here. “The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity, Mr. Zachs, and the more favors he owes us, the sooner he’ll start coming across with some of this magic technology of theirs. This is just one of those favors.”

“ The play’s the thing,’” I said in my best soliloquy voice, “ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. ’”

Fogerty frowned at me. “What?”

“Hamlet,” I said.

“Shakespeare,” Jerry added acidly. “He’s done some plays and poems and stuff.”

“Thank you,” Fogerty said, matching Jerry’s acid pH for pH. “I have heard of the man. The point is that I can requisition your theater, no questions asked, like it or lump it. So you might as well like it. Anyway, you should be honored to have their first ambassador in your theater.”

“Besides, think of the great publicity,” I reminded him. “You’ll be able to use photos of the ambassador in all your future ads and—”

“Wait a minute,” Fogerty cut me off, his face suddenly stricken. “He can’t use the ambassador as a cheap come-on. This is a serious diplomatic mission.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jerry mused, picking up the cue and running with it. “When the King of Sweden came here, he let us use his name in some of our promotionals. I don’t see how this is any different.”

“Of course it’s different,” Fogerty snapped. “And if you even think about trying to take advantage of him that way—”

“Taking advantage?” Jerry asked mildly. “You mean like a six-hundred-pound government gorilla trying to gouge a poor innocent theater manager on ticket prices?”

Fogerty glared daggers at both of us. But he didn’t have time for a fight, and we all knew it. “Fine,” he bit out. “Full ticket prices for the whole entourage.”

“And full payment for the crew handling the alterations?” Jerry asked.

“We’ll be doing it all ourselves,” Fogerty gritted. “My people are already downstairs, waiting for the green light.”

“Well, then, I guess I’d better give it to them,” Jerry said, reaching for his phone. “A pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Fogerty.”

The alterations took only a few hours, about the same time it took to get the ambassador and the rest of the entourage up from Washington and settled into a hotel a couple of blocks from the St. James. We headed out that evening for the theater in the ambassador’s special car, which would have been a major challenge to drive in midtown Manhattan if the police hadn’t cordoned off the area for us. I’m sure that stunt made us lots of friends among the local drivers. Probably just as well we couldn’t hear what the cabbies were saying.

The theatergoers at the St. James, to my mild surprise, seemed to take the whole thing pretty much in stride. There’d been some hassles at Jerry’s end, I knew, sorting out the people who’d already bought the seats Fogerty had appropriated, but they’d all been moved or paid off or otherwise placated, and by the time we walked in with the ambassador everyone was feeling cordial enough to give him a round of polite applause. I presume he understood—there’d certainly been enough applause on the TV programs the Fuzhties had pilfered—but if he was either pleased or annoyed he didn’t show it. Fogerty showed him to his chair—which had indeed required the removal of a square block of nine seats—and the rest of us filled in behind him. The house lights dimmed, the curtain went up, and the play started. In the reflected light from the stage I saw Fogerty lean back in his seat and cross his legs, the tired but smug image of a man who has faced yet another political brush fire and successfully stomped it out.

He got to be smug for exactly three minutes.

I had given up trying to see anything around the ambassador’s bulk when, without warning, he heaved himself to his feet. Someone behind me gasped—the Trinidadian representative, I think—and I remember having the fleeting, irrational thought that the ambassador had realized I couldn’t see and was courteously getting out of my way. An instant after that I realized how absurd that was, and my second thought was that he must have to go to the bathroom or stretch his legs or something.

He didn’t. With a roar that shook the spotlight battens, he climbed up on the empty seat backs in front of him and made a ponderous beeline for the stage.