4. A Virgin Sacrifice on the Volcano

During one particular performance on those cold February nights, I felt free, larger than life and truly at home before the audience. I had some of the best and worst shtick in the play as a moron thug. I made Hat Chet Man a character analogous to myself, an impossible person who did not even try to be probable. Instead of the usual biographical bragging in the Program Notes on the players I had written:

I'm Cayle the professionally human character.... I just wandered in here by accident and they won't let me go. At night they hang me on a coat-rack and at night it gets so cold I've got icicles growing in places I can't scratch.

I was effective as an actor because life to me was always a play, and I truly identified with my character. I did the role with pathetic abandon, and when I felt the whole audience laughing hysterically the role took on a reality independent of mine but just as deep, and equally painful too.

In one gag a character named Jesus Kriebel offered Hat Chet Man some fortune cookies as a diversion from guarding the evil master, Dr. Wurst. When Jesus waved the fortune cookies in front of Hat Chet Man, he was amazed and gleefully mouthed "ORRCHHHNN OOKEEEZZZ?" Snatching them greedily, he tore open the bag with clumsy hands and snarling teeth, then chewed them up whole and spat out everything, spewing out the paper fortunes last. This cartoon-like glee became pathos, for the house was actually howling with hysterical joy in ferocious laughter.

At that moment, to my surprise, I felt my soul more naked than ever before, as I felt the primal hunger of that roar which could laugh at my dying if I did it in character and with style. Then, looking up at them I felt a kind of terror and beauty in this realization-and they laughed even harder. There were outrageous guffaws and yelps from them. But to me, playing an absurd Asian half-wit, I knew it was also my life's core they feasted on. The frenzy of the maenads who tore apart the body of King Pentheus under the spell of Dionysus was like this. Dionysian comedy was tragedy, I knew. In this laughter there was a deep mystery, horrible and horrifying.... If death is the mother of beauty, this laughter was the father of beauty. That they could devour me this way was, in retrospect, a compliment. But right then I felt more like a virgin being sacrificed to a volcano. Much later, Jenny and her housemates Peggy and Celia who were watching from the audience would say to me how hard this was to watch because they knew who I was. In their living room, Jenny even said, "I thought you did a really good job.... But I thought it was a bad, stereotype part."

I tried to explain how Jeffrey's play didn't stereotype in the usual horrible way-everything was deployed with self-conscious irony. I was a parody of a stereotype, not a seriously Asian moron thug. Besides, Jeffrey gave much worse tasks to other characters, especially the one representing himself in his youth.

But all this ironic art was lost on Peggy who just blurted out: "You were exploited!"