Timothy Zahn: The Play's the Thing

“I’m currently attached to the State Department group in charge of escorting the Fuzhtian ambassador around,” I said. “We’re—”

“Oh, yeah, sure—Lebowitz. Yeah, I remember seeing you in the background in one of those TV shots. Couldn’t place you at the time—that was you in the brown suit and Fedora sort of thing, right? Sure. So what’s up?”

“The ambassador wants to be in a Broadway play,” I told him. “We need you to write it for him.”

There was a long silence. “You what?”

“We need you to write a play for him,” I repeated.

“Ah,” he said. “Uh… yeah. Well… can he act?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Oh, and the only translator he brought with him prints everything he says in rebus pictures.”

“Uh -huh. And you’re sure he really wants to do this?”

“We think so. He climbed up on the stage at the St. James tonight and started singing from ‘How to Succeed.”

Mark digested that. “So you’re wanting a musical?”

“I don’t think it really matters,” I said. “Fuzhtian singing voices seem to be the same as their speaking ones, except a lot louder. Might help with stage projection, but otherwise it’s not going to make much difference.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “And how loud can you make a rebus, anyway? OK, sure, I’ll take a crack at it. How soon do you need this?”

I looked at Fogerty. “He says sure, and how soon.”

“Tell him two days.”

I goggled. “What?”

“Two days.” Fogerty gestured impatiently at the phone. “Go on, tell him.”

I swallowed. “Mr. Fogerty, the head of the delegation, says he needs it in two days.”

I don’t remember Mark’s response to that exactly. I do know it lasted nearly five minutes, covered the complete emotional range from incredulity to outrage and back again, tore apart in minute detail Fogerty’s heritage, breeding, intelligence, integrity, and habits, and never once used a single swear word. Playwrights can be truly awesome sometimes.

Finally, he ran down. “Two days, huh?” he said, sounding winded but much calmer. “OK, fine, he’s on. You want to tell him what it’s going to cost?”

He quoted me a number that would have felt right at home in a discussion of the national debt. I relayed it to Fogerty and had the minor satisfaction of seeing him actually pale a little. For a second I thought he was going to abandon the whole idea, but he obviously realized he wouldn’t do any better anywhere else. So with a pained look on his face he gave a single stiff nod. “He says OK,” I told Mark.

“Fine,” Mark said, all brisk business now. “I’ll have it ready in forty-eight hours. Incidentally, I trust you realize how utterly insane this whole thing is.”

Privately, I agreed with him. Publicly, though, I was a company man now. “The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity,” I told him.

“I hope you’re right,” he grunted. “So where do you want the play delivered?”

The next two days were an incredible haze of whirlwind chaos. While Fogerty and a skeleton crew escorted the ambassador on a tour of New York, the rest of us worked like maniacs to organize his theatrical debut. There was a theater to hire on a couple of days’ notice—no small feat on Broadway—a complete stage crew to assemble, a casting agent to retain for whatever other parts Mark wrote into this forty-eight-hour wonder, and a hundred other details that needed to get worked out.

To my quite honest astonishment, they all did. We got the Richard Rodgers theater hired for an off-hours matinee, the backstage personnel fell into line like I’d never seen happen, and Mark got his play delivered within two hours of his promised deadline.

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 lit 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 tiling 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, looking 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 looked 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?”