A Coup de Théâtre
The audience in Rheinach Theater was growing restive when, midway through the première of the biographical drama, Kafka and Girls by the controversial playwright Hans Pinscher, Minnie Klugsuss forgot her lines. Her mind went blank, and, for a moment, she gaped at the male lead, Marek Bezdek, then said, “Another seven-and-seven, Herr Schaftsmann?” The sentence was a whimsy devised by her late father, something to say whenever she wished him to stop lecturing or making fun of her. It just popped into her head and she said it.
The audience stirred uneasily, but Marek didn’t miss a beat.
“How about making it a seven-and-six? I’m feeling a little light-headed.”
Minnie went with it. She raised a finger and replied, “Better be careful. If your head grows too light, those ears of yours might fly off with it.”
Marek made an anxious face. “It’s not impossible. My head could ascend into the ice mountains.”
“How about just two ice cubes, then?”
Marek pretended to look even more worried. “It could ascend into the ice mountains and be lost forever.”
“Accused men are all attractive, but you are also witty.”
“Wit is for virtuosos. Virtuosity may be fit for preening lawyers, but for accused men it’s out of place.”
“But aren’t you a lawyer?”
“Alas, yes. That will no doubt be another charge in the indictment.”
“Then you’ve seen the charges?”
“Not as yet, but I have filed the necessary application along with the required affidavit and accompanying brief.”
“I read somewhere that a lawyer is somebody who composes a document of ten thousand words and calls it a brief.”
“My memory isn’t perfectly reliable, but I believe I wrote that. A poor joke. But I admit, my brief isn’t brief.”
“See? Accused men are not only attractive and occasionally witty but also humble. I think that without much effort you could raise self-deprecation to a high art.”
“Like a whining Klezmer clarinetist?”
“Not a bad analogy. So, would you like to have that drink now?”
Marek raised his arms and looked at her greedily. “I’d sooner have you.”
Minnie took a step backwards and batted her eyelashes. “Maybe, but not yet. First, you must tell me what you like about me.”
“Your fingers and your accessibility.”
“Oh? And what do I remind you of?”
“A bridge. A bridge with long fingers and dependable legs.”
Minnie laughed. “A bridge to what?”
“To the world understood by animals.”
“By animals? Is that why the war between the sexes always ends in bed?”
Marek replied sententiously. “A perpetual war requires an infinite number of truces.”
And so it continued, with Minnie and Marek improvising tenderly, angrily, gnomically, wittily, flirtingly until the performance did, indeed, wind up in bed.
The audience, of course, believed it was Pinscher’s play. They began to find it interesting, then fascinating. The critics from the Berliner Zeitung, Tagblatt, and Morgen-Zeitung did too. All three noted that, while the play began ploddingly, it became electrifying halfway through. They all wrote glowing reviews. Demand for tickets soared; but, as the performance could hardly be repeated, the play closed.
Hans Pinscher was enraged. He hired a lawyer and sued the theater, the director, and especially Bezdek and Klugsuss. The brief came to just under ten thousand words.
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