Star Song and Other Stories Part 16

"New York is the city that never sleeps, isn't it?" he countered, jabbing a finger at the phone. "Besides, we need to get this on track. Go on, start punching."

There were six New York playwrights with whom I had at least a pa.s.sing acquaintance. The first five numbers I tried shunted me to answering machines or services. My sixth try, to Mark Skinner, actually went through."Mr. Skinner, this is Adam Lebowitz," I said. "I don't know if you remember me, but I was a.s.sistant set designer when your play Catch the Rainbow was at the Marquis. I'm the one-"

"Oh, sure," he interrupted. "You're the one who came up with that rotating chandelier/staircase gizmo, weren't you? That was a snazzy trick-tell you the truth, I was d.a.m.ned if I could see how that was going to work when I wrote it into the play. So what's up?"

"I'm currently attached to the State Department group in charge of escorting the Fuzhtian amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sador 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? 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.

"Okay, 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 amba.s.sador 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 mean feat on Broadway-a complete stage crew to a.s.semble, 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 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 amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sador 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 h.e.l.l 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 amba.s.sador'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 amba.s.sador'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 bas.e.m.e.nt dressing room where we'd been working.

"Took your sweet time about it," he growled, s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 amba.s.sador was bellowing at the topof 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 amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sador didn't want to leave, of course, and seemed quite prepared to make a major diplomatic incident out of it. Fortunately, Fogerty had antic.i.p.ated this one and had already arranged to rent one of our hotel's ballrooms so that we could continue the rehearsal over there. The amba.s.sador 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 a.s.suming 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 Gren.o.ble 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 amba.s.sador 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 itwas the best Broadway play ever conceived and written in under fifty hours.

Yet in some weird and inexplicable way, it all worked. What the amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sador lumbered out for his fourth curtain call. "Thank G.o.d that's over."

"Yes," I agreed, watching the amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sador 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.sured 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."