To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band…
A prison from which only a reverse trepanation can spring them. A surgical strike: the bore of story through the braincase, into the firing core. The local cast of cripples picking it out for their amateur theatrics recognize in dim silhouette their own dispensation, the disaster that repeatedly leaves them here. And — good God — the trepanner, the first drowsy surgeon adult they chose to do the dirty cutting, to sink the cranial post holes for the soul's release, sees it in a sick flash: that's it. That's where this group comes from. Their strangeness, their dress, their slew of alien languages. They've sprung up subsurface into this Angel Transylvania, drawn irresistibly to this vaguely familiar kiss-off rhyme. Only this time, they cannot keep from uncovering where it has taken them.
The streets in town are a bloodbath of crisis. Slaves and whipping beasts in life, the children, in disappearance, drive their collected parents to mass remorse. Shrieks and torn clothes form the Markt-platz's new airs. The time for self-indulgence is forever past, but no one who should realize that does.
The town council mounts an emergency session in the Ratskeller. "I swear to you," a panicked Bürgermeister calls into the screaming chamber, "we can make more of them."
Joachim's entrance accuses worse than the condemned Christ whispering, Not ten minutes more with me? His sorrow slams the room into silence. The illiterate puppet councillor, the merchants' sop to the artisan class, walks stonily up to the town rolls, lowers his palm onto the leaves, and commands, "Write it down." On this specific day, through our own common failure of imagination, our inability to project…
Stone Dresser dictates the precise message that will carry down through fixed myth to alert future sicklings, invoke them to rise up, retrace their dazed return. "On June 26, 1284, through stupidity and a mass tin ear, we killed our children."
As for casting: no need to trek across town to those studio lots, the instant vistas of belief shot on dislocation. No call to solicit in the film set cafeterias where centurions lunch with storm troopers, senators with psychopaths, fake doctors with would-be children. They are self-sufficient, cast-ready, right here within their own institution.
Nico knows, from the moment he decrees which of Linda's therapy performances they're going to mount. The withered sideshow boy, age disengaged, has it all blocked out already. There's not a chart on the ward who couldn't become a shortsighted, self-serving adult politico, by modeling the role on a favorite probation officer. To play the paralyzed townies, they need only ape the service nurses and orderlies. After all, they have only to stand there, stony accessories after the fact. For the well-meaning, bighearted, but ultimately fumbling indentured public servant — what the hell; how about everybody's favorite Minnesota Mexicali, in her first cross-dressing role? Nico will even let Ms. MinneMex take producer's credit, providing she remembers who's calling the aesthetic shots.
Rats they possess, in their usual superabundance on this, the wrong side of what were once upon a time the tracks. You can hear them scuttling around behind the plaster, see them sunbathing up on the roof or surfing the stagnant parking-garage pools. Casts of rat thousands are no problem, and if there's any labor dispute, some gnawing Actors Equity thing, they always have the cockroach understudies — the ones the size of a child's fist — to fall back on. And for a lead, Nico has his eye on this guy, a latent messianic, as ready-made a piper as fate could pitch in your path.
No; casting presents only one insurmountable snag. They have no children.
Dwarfs, maybe. Midgets, mites, pygmies, Lilliputians — chopped up, scaled down, wasted, disenfranchised. Shriveled, hypernecrotic baby elders nodding off on the toilet with a milk-shake-straw hypodermic spiked into whatever limb is still soft enough to break and enter. Eleven-year-old mothers of their own little half nieces and half sisters. Self-mutilating infants. Housing project survivors. Teen mob operatives and operatees, test cases and trial recipients for unbearable hardware. Million-dollar-a-week underground business middlemen. Those who will go directly from their treatment here to prison terms for murder or worse. They have a steady supply of underage, balloon-letter, sponge-bread breeders and bed wetters. But not one child.
Tag? Tops? Piggyback? That would strain the suspension of disbelief to breaking point, even among the Playhouse playhouse set. They haven't even so much as a single credible summer-stock juvenile. Intensive care just turfed a little girl, left her lying on Linda's doorstep after a few weeks of "Hail Marys" during which they hung her up strapped to the sustaining meter-taps. She is the size and shape of a dachshund thorax, with two smashed ribs, fissured head, and torso smeared all over with a shiny, blue-green oil slick, like a fungus colonizing the skin of a faltering Bartlett pear.
"Wreck of the Hesperus," Plummer called her — anesthetized pros' parlance. "Peanut sittin' on a railroad track. The tyke had pelvic inflammatory disease so bad we had to do a double eggbeater on her." One year old. The man responsible — Mama's current beau, looking for diversion during her latest delivery — wound up getting fifteen years. The kid, as always, got life. Linda is to treat the baby for lingering limb impairment and pass her on to the social worker, who is left, in turn, to thrash things out forever with the assistance of the anatomically correct Raggedy Anns and Andys.
These are their choice for young ones.
But Nico knows they will need even this maimed creature. They must dress her in peasant rags and deed her to some surrogate big sister, herself rustically keloided from neck to nether parts. Offer the baby up to be chucked into the air in time to the delivering ditty. That, on second look at the synopsis, is exactly the point, the secret of this story's draw. The day on which their bruised, abused, futureless ancient counterparts skipped town seven hundred years before is the same day that will freeze facts in their pragmatic tracks, finally freeing these chart-condemned to do the tag thing. Go piggyback. Believe in amateur theatrics. Act out the child's play.
cient counterparts skipped town seven hundred years before is the same day that will freeze facts in their pragmatic tracks, finally freeing these chart-condemned to do the tag thing. Go piggyback. Believe in amateur theatrics. Act out the child's play.
Nico takes over the idea as if it had been his from the start. He launches a massive promotional blitz to sell the story to the others. Persuading the boys consists of the usual bribes and blood threats: debts canceled for cooperation, crucial comic sequels withheld for failure to comply. Most of the street savants, with some grounds, consider the entire project yet another load of Eurocentric, racist, imperialist, hegemonistic, queer-ball, degrading eco-exploitation. Why the fuck should they dress up as a bunch of doomed little Kraut goombas? And nary a martial arts sequence in the whole script.
Nicolino, inspired, co-opts these holdouts. '"You: we need you for the Rat King, Mr. Rat Heavy Heself. Big, ugly beefalo muffa, and chillin' like nobody's B. And you, you can be that Julius Caesar rat, the one who lives to write home about it. You, we're going to let be the principal baby-brutalizer. Strip you to your waist, give you a hockey mask. Think how awesome your tattoo will look under the footlights."
They're sold the instant they start bargaining for plum parts. This frees up Nico to concentrate on the females. In practice, he needs the blessing of only one of them: the boat princess, that Stepaneevong. The one who chose the fable in the first place. Through no effort of her own — she's either out in the halls learning how to limp without a crutch, or tucked in bed, booking for an imaginary final exam — she's become the revered senior statesgirl. Fagging unfair, but go figure. It's as if all the other mindless rope skippers, the guaranteed survivors of this ward, have wind of what's up, and defer to her in shame.