His instruments arrayed, Reginald sat in the front row holding his pen to his notebook with surgical focus. The stage was completely dark. Reginald peered into the blackness only to be temporarily blinded as four pillars of flame appeared. The flames arose from the four corners of a wrestling ring, revealing an announcer. He spoke, proclaiming the main event and ushering in the contestants. Each man had his own unique entrance, each sauntering to the stage, each indulging in a series of lewd gestures, and all accompanied by theme songs of their own choosing (they were both, however, Kid Rock songs).
Scribbling hastily, Reginald began to pick apart the play. He decried the pyrotechnics as dangerous, he blasted the announcer as a defective tit and the wrestlers as effete maggot dicks. He wrote of the ring that it looked as if it were some prototype for a concentration camp. With cramping hand and wilting wit, Reginald leaned back, hoping to be inspired by this theatrical atrocity.
In the ring, the two foes set forth on elaborate musical soliloquies. The first, one Jeremiah Johnson, (wrestling name Stank Finger) a trailer park saint and admirer of butts, lamented his womanizing ways and checkered past, which he described as being "like a checker board fucked a leopard and gave birth to a monstrous half board game/half animal with more squares than a man could know what to do with." For him, wrestling was an art, the beauty of which was capable of assuaging his tormented soul. His competitor, a certain Delonte Parnell, (wrestling name Da Nurse) lashed out against a society which marginalized him and also Sears for not letting him use the $73 left on his expired gift card. A radical activist through and through, Delonte nevertheless had to hang up his revolutionary cap in favor of a nurses uniform and wrestling mask in order to pay the medical bills of the agoraphobic, OCD, IBS, diabetic, and anorexic Faulknerian man-child that was his uncle.
Winded and dismayed from their own soliloquizing both men took defensive stances at opposite ends of the ring. Unconsciously Reginald leaned forward. The bell rang, but the wrestling did not begin. Delonte and Jeremiah instead stood up straight, careening their necks to survey the imaginary crowd. The announcer clambered back into the ring. "Fight!" he said. "You must fight! If not for yourselves, then for me! And if not for me, then for Brian! He's a really good dude." Unfazed the two wrestlers stood motionless. The announcer continued, "Come on! It's Brian's birthday for god's sake!" Still they did not move. "Well, if not for Brian, than for them" the announcer spread his arms and with an exaggerated gesture he indicated the crowd.
Stank Finger walked slowly over to the announcer and put his hand on his shoulder. "There's no one there" he whispered. Whipping his head around frantically, the announcer scanned the crowd. He paused looking out across the audience. The announcer seemed to be staring past the stage, past the fourth wall, even past the many sphincters of the true audience, right into Reginald's soul. The announcer collapsed to his knees and grabbed his head, shaking and weeping uncontrollably. Da Nurse removed his mask and put on his stethoscope, sauntering over to Stank Finger he placed the listening end upon his chest. Titling his head, Da Nurse listened for a heart beat. He removed the stethoscope from his ears and looked into Stank Finger's eyes. They nodded in unison and then embraced. Suddenly the lights were cut. Reginald feared that it might be some kind of terrorist attack designed to strike at the very heart of this nation, i.e. community theaters.
That was, however, not the case. Instead, the lights came back on and a bunch of people dressed up in large heart costumes came out dancing to the Hilary Duff hit "Beat of my Heart." With intricate and often perilous choreography, the hearts, whose arms were subsumed in their massive costumes, pranced around the stage, kicking and attempting to do jazz hands. All the while, Stank Finger and Da Nurse chased them down. With body slams, power bombs, clotheslines, and boots to the face, the two wrestlers eviscerated the assembled host of hearts, leaving some apparently dead. Again the lights cut out.
Reginald chewed on both pens in dire anticipation. He heard much movement on stage, but could not see what was going on up there. Finally, the lights came up on a very different scene. A middle-aged man with a night cap slept, tucked into a large bed in a small bedroom. The door at the end of the bedroom burst open, revealing another middle-aged man carrying a tray with breakfast on it. He walked slowly over to the sleeping man, placing the tray on the ground before touching his leg and saying, "Richard. Richard, wake up."
Richard sat up startled. He grabbed the other man by the arms and said, "Oscar, I've just had the most marvelous dream! It was a vision for a new play!" Oscar shook with delight. "Ohhh, what will you call this vision of yours?" Richard stroked his chin vigorously and then snapped his fingers. "Oklahoma!" The curtain fell.
Reginald sprang to his feet as if he had been shocked. He clapped, wept, jumped, and hollered as if possessed. Blowing snot rocket upon snot rocket onto the stage as if they were bouquets of flowers, Reginald attempted to integrate what he had just witnessed into his critical mind. With a running time of 18 minutes, it was perhaps the shortest production he had ever seen. A revisionist history of theater encapsulated in a dream cliche with entirely anachronistic elements of contemporary wrestling. Reginald could not think. Compelled he tore his note book in half and, still weeping with joy, he pulled out his five remaining warheads. Unwrapping each of them, Reginald dropped trou and shoved all five up his urethra in an act of penance...or something.
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