Playwright’s Note

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"Behold, I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to receive it."
—Friedrich Nietzsche

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"‘It would never occur to me, sitting at an Eric Clapton concert, to wonder if Eric Clapton thought he was better than me. Eric Clapton is on the stage. I’m in the audience. What more is there to say?’"
—Dave Sim

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Well put, Freddy and Davey.  Well put!

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Well, here’s the third offering by me, Pete, and our weird little group known as Nosedive Productions.  I guess with this little program-filler material, I’d like to take this time to share with y’all some of my thoughts about what this play, "The Awaited Visit," is (with the hope that those of you who choose to hunt and track me down after the show won’t berate me with either questions I can’t hope to answer or allegations I can’t hope to defend).

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To paraphrase Evan Dorkin, the brilliant author of Fun With Milk and Cheese (Dairy Products Gone Bad), "The Awaited Visit" is not a commentary on our society’s haste in granting superlatives to media-friendly personalities ("The sharpest intellect the Pentagon has ever known…the most beautiful star in Hollywood…").  It is not an inquisition on the exploitation of genius.  It is not a thesis on how the desire for intelligence has become a corrupted and self-serving exercise.

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It is not a study in how sex is used as a weapon.  It is not a comment on the fraudulence of authority figures.  It is not a parody of our culture’s taste for junk which is masked as intellectual legitimacy.  It is not an exploration of the roles teachers and students play.

It is not about our herdlike mentality as we blindly follow self-proclaimed "experts."  It is not an analysis of the arbitrary nature of intelligence.  It is not a term paper on how heroes and role models invariably disappoint.  And it is not an examination of how Those who Want abuse Those who Have.

It’s a play, stupid.

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James Comtois, Brooklyn, NY