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Escape | Mar 17 2004

It’s 3:49 p.m. and I just finished writing the story I’m reading tonight. Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t know it ends. Now I know. I would have known earlier but I didn’t have time to write it.

This morning a friend joked that instead of the story I just finished, I should read a story about a man who doesn’t have time to write the story he’s supposed to read.

“And I will write this when?” I asked.

“You’ll ad lib it.”

This reminds me of a story. Long ago I was in a theater company. One of the company members, a brilliant comedic actor, presented a two-act play for us to perform. We did a reading of the first act, liked what we read, and decided to do it. A few weeks into rehearsals, after many delays in getting us the second act—which, we were told, simply needed some tweaking—the playwright confessed that he hadn’t written a single word of it, and wasn’t even sure how the play ended.

The next day six company members gathered in my bedroom to write the second act. We started from the beginning and wrote it straight through, line by line. None of us had any idea of how it was going to end, so we simply kept adding more lines and scenes, in a kind of horizontal pile. Finally we reached what we recognized to be the final scene. Here all the characters are on stage at once, and at last it looks as though the two protagonists will be caught. (They’re clowns, by the way, one of whom has been posing as the president of a Central American republic.) We knew only this: Somehow they escape. But how? Notably, my friends and I faced a similar predicament. To finish the play, we needed to get those characters out of that room, but how?

I remember the moment we solved it. Someone suggested, perhaps as a joke, that the main clown pretends to be a detective who, in classic murder mystery fashion, delivers his brilliant solution to a roomful of awed suspects. The fact that no crime had been committed, mattered not. The force of this detective’s personality would hold the room in thrall long enough for he and his compatriot to escape. Or rather, this would be the clown’s logic at the moment he suddenly turns and shouts in a bad French accent, “Nobody leaves this room!”

It was a desperate move, not only by him but by us, and yet it led, in both realms, to the solution. The solution was this: The clown’s hackneyed and pointless accusations all turn out to be true. When he claims that there’s a knife in so-and-so’s pocket, a knife appears there—to shock of everyone present, the clown most of all.

The clowns are saved by a divine streak of dumb luck, arrived at through desperate improvisation.