Plot
The setting is an ancient Greek amphitheatre, circa 500BC. Diabetes, an actor, and Hepatitis, a writer, sit on stage lamenting about how Hepatitis' new play lacks a good ending. They begin to frequently break the fourth wall, interacting with the audience and making note about how they are fictional characters in a play. Hepatitis asks if anyone has a major in philosophy, resulting in an audience member named Doris Levine joining the action on stage, while Diabetes calls the play's author Woody Allen for advice on how to proceed.
Another playwright, Trichinosis, joins the stage, saying that he has a machine that will help give the play a satisfying ending. The machine creates thunder and lightning effects, and allows an actor to descend from the roof in a harness in order to play God descending from the heavens to intervene at the conclusion in Hepatitis' play. Doris notes that this is a deus ex machina , while Hepatitis begins questioning God's existence. Eventually, another playwright named Lorenzo Miller enters and says that he author of a greater play, and that the real audience is fictional. Blanche DuBois enters, saying that she is tired of the brutality of Tennessee Williams' play. Hepatitis finally accepts Trichinosis' machine, and his play begins.
The play-within-a-play involves Diabetes playing a slave who is forced to courier a message to the king. He is nervous after being told that if the message is bad news, the king will execute him; he opens the message, but is not reassured when it reads only the word "Yes". He eventually reaches the king's castle and realises that "Yes" is an affirmative, and thus fundamentally good. However, the king reveals that the question that the message provides the answer for is: "Is there a God?", which enrages the king as it means that he will go to Hell for his sins. Just as the king is to execute Diabetes' character, Trichinosis' machine malfunctions and strangles the actor playing God. Hepatitis hurriedly tells Diabetes to ad-lib the ending, but several other fictional characters appear and several members of the audience begin to run amok at the breakdown of reality. Eventually, all the other actors leave and Diabetes and Hepatitis sit on stage alone together, repeating their lines from the beginning about the need for a good ending, suggesting that the entire play exists in an infinite loop.
Wallace Michael Shawn is an American character actor, comedian, voice artist, playwright and essayist. His film roles have included those of Wally Shawn in the Louis Malle directed drama My Dinner with Andre (1981), John Lahr in Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987), Mr. James Hall in Clueless (1995) and providing the voice of Rex in the Toy Story franchise. He has previously appeared in a variety of television series, including recurring roles as Grand Nagus Zek in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Manny in the game Kings Quest (2016), Cyrus Rose in Gossip Girl (2008–2012), and Dr. John Sturgis in Young Sheldon.
The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall", the convention assumes, the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th century onward, the rise of illusionism in staging practices, which culminated in the realism and naturalism of the theatre of the 19th century, led to the development of the fourth wall concept.
A story within a story is a literary device in which one character within a narrative narrates. Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration: novels, short stories, plays, television programs, films, poems, songs, and philosophical essays. The inner stories are told either simply to entertain or more usually to act as an example to the other characters. In either case, the story often has a symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in the outer story. There is often some parallel between the two stories, and the fiction of the inner story is used to reveal the truth in the outer story. Often the stories within a story are used to satirize views, not only in the outer story, but also in the real world. When a story is told within another instead of being told as part of the plot, it allows the author to play on the reader's perceptions of the characters—the motives and the reliability of the storyteller are automatically in question. Stories within a story may disclose the background of characters or events, tell of myths and legends that influence the plot, or even seem to be extraneous diversions from the plot. In some cases, the story within a story is involved in the action of the plot of the outer story. In others, the inner story is independent, so that it can either be skipped over or be read separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. Sometimes, the inner story serves as an outlet for discarded ideas that the author deemed to be of too much merit to leave out completely, somewhat analogous to the inclusion of deleted scenes with home video releases of films. Often there is more than one level of internal stories, leading to deeply-nested fiction.
Sweet and Lowdown is a 1999 American comedy-drama mockumentary film written and directed by Woody Allen. Loosely based on Federico Fellini's film La Strada, the film tells the fictional story, set in the 1930s, of a self-confident jazz guitarist Emmet Ray who falls in love with a mute woman. The film also stars Uma Thurman and Anthony LaPaglia. Like several of Allen's other films, the film is occasionally interrupted by interviews with critics and biographers like Allen, Nat Hentoff, and Douglas McGrath, who comment on the film's plot as if the characters were real-life people.
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Epic theatre is a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners who responded to the political climate of the time through the creation of a new political theatre. Epic theatre is not meant to refer to the scale or the scope of the work, but rather to the form that it takes. Epic theatre emphasizes the audience's perspective and reaction to the piece through a variety of techniques that deliberately cause them to individually engage in a different way. The purpose of epic theatre is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to see their world as it is.
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The Purple Rose of Cairo is a 1985 American romantic fantasy comedy film written and directed by Woody Allen, and starring Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, and Danny Aiello. Inspired by Sherlock Jr., Hellzapoppin', and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, it is the tale of a film character named Tom Baxter who leaves a fictional film of the same name and enters the real world.
Metamorphoses is a play by the American playwright and director Mary Zimmerman, adapted from the classic Ovid poem Metamorphoses. The play premiered in 1996 as Six Myths at Northwestern University and later the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago. The play opened off-Broadway in October 2001 at the Second Stage Theatre. It transferred to Broadway on 21 February 2002 at the Circle in the Square Theatre. That year it won several Tony Awards.
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Norman Rose was an American actor, film narrator and radio announcer whose velvety baritone was often called "the Voice of God" by colleagues. He was best known as the voice of fictitious coffee grower Juan Valdez in the Colombian coffee television commercials and the announcer-narrator of NBC's Dimension X.
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Disney Junior – Live on Stage! was a live show attraction featuring puppets of characters from Disney Junior's popular television programs, located at three Disney theme parks: Walt Disney Studios Park at Disneyland Paris, Disney California Adventure at the Disneyland Resort and Disney's Hollywood Studios at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.
