Timothy Zahn: The Play's the Thing

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 Marie 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 last?” 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.

Yet in some weird and inexplicable way, it all worked. What the ambassador lacked in acting ability he more than made up in sheer raw stage presence; his inability to sing his way out of a laundry sack created a strangely effective Yin/Yang with the rear-projected background singers; and over and through it all was woven the unceasing and surrealistic flow of pictures from the RebuScope.

And when it was over, they gave him a standing ovation.

“Well,” Fogerty said, watching from the wings as the ambassador lumbered out for his fourth curtain call. “Thank God that’s over.”

“Yes,” I agreed, watching the ambassador do the Fuzhtian version of a bow, which to me looked more like a seriously deformed curtsy. “It was fun while it lasted.”

Fogerty gave me a look which would probably have been one of his famous glares if he’d had any emotional energy left to glare with. “You must be joking.”

“No, really,” I insisted. “It felt good to be on Broadway again. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.”

“Missed the fawning and applause, you mean,” he countered. Glares were out, but he could still handle snide. “Well, better tuck the greasepaint back in your suitcase. Time for you to go back to being anonymous again.”

“I’m not so sure about that, Mr. Fogerty,” Angus said, coming up to Fogerty’s side and showing us his RebuScope monitor. “Here’s what the ambassador said right after his second curtain call.”

“At least it doesn’t have the word ‘Broadway’ in it,” Fogerty grunted. “You have a translation yet?”

“I’m not sure,” Angus said. “It seems to be ’eye w-ant to go on street.’ ”

I sucked in my breath. “That’s not street, ” I said carefully. “It’s road. ”

Fogerty frowned at me. “ ‘Go on road’? What in hell does that—?”

And then, suddenly, he got it. But to my amazement, his face actually brightened. “On the road, ” he said. “He wants to take the play on the road. ”

I threw Angus a look, saw my same surprise mirrored there. Fogerty, actually happy about this?

“No, I’m not having a breakdown,” Fogerty assured us. “We’ll take it on the road, all right. But this play is too good to waste on humans. We’re going to take it to the Fuzhtian worlds.”

He smiled with brittle slyness. “And along the way, I expect we’ll finally get a look at some of this wonderful Fuzhtian technology we’ve been dying to see.”

He gestured across the backstage to Lee. “Start getting everything organized,” he called over the applause from out front. “We’re taking this show on the road.”

And we did. For three months we slogged across space in the ambassador’s starship, stopping at star after star, planet after planet, theater after theater. Setting up, watching the ambassador play to packed houses, tearing down, and moving on again.

For the rest of the crew and me it was a lot of work, though fundamentally not a lot different than doing a tour back in the States. Fuzhtian worlds—and there were a lot of them—each had their own peculiar odors and sounds and colors and climates; but when you get right down to it, roast leg of glimprik and steamed colfia vegetables taste the same everywhere you go.