All members of the cast dress conventionally, and with the dignity and style that is appropriate to a wedding ceremony.

The Bride wears a bridal gown, etc., but her face and hands are made up with thickly matted hair so that she appears to be some sort of animal. She is shackled with white ribbons to the frontside of an open box (6’ long, 2’ wide, 1’ deep, with carrying handles on either side) which rides upright on, but not attached to, a small, caster-wheel dolly. The open side of the box (facing toward the audience) is curtained with an opaque veil that can be lifted aside. The nude girl (the “cake”) rides inside of the box, hidden from the audience. At the entrance of the Bride in the wedding ceremony the Father of the Bride pushes the rolling structure with the two girls into position in front of the minister.

Life goes on as before. Without any show.

Our eyes are drawn to the very back of the stage. The curtain has gone up. And the whole theatre is a vast hall where the audience is about to watch a rehearsal in progress. But a rehearsal of what? There is no play. We are about to see theatre made before our eyes. Everyone is occupied with his own trivial affairs. After a while, however, the actors come together. Then a family in mourning steps out of the Théâter des Champs Elysées’ elevator; their faces are ashen white, as if started out of dreams.

These are the Six Characters in Search of an Author. Now these Six Characters want to come alive. They want to take part in drama. They are more real than you, stage manager, or you, barn-stormers. They are real and they are about to prove it.

Strangers had come to town to construct and operate a new kind of recreation: a great fun-house for adults. A sinister Disneyland with overtones of the World's Fair, carnival, gambling house, brothel, side-show, circus, and The Balcony. Here one could buy adult adventure. The strangers leased a great, empty warehouse near the docks and in it they built a labyrinth of rooms and passages. There were gates, obstacles, puzzles, games, and other people. What choices one had no one knew, and these choices would often be changed. It was all synthetic and symbolic, safe and legitimate.

But rumors alerted the town that concealed within the Great Gaming House were real games: gamblers could find high stakes, hostesses would sleep with patrons, etc. There was no way to distinguish the real from the synthetic, nor could the player sort the shills from the guests.

Art and politics have long been bad bedfellows. Politicians have converted art into propaganda and artists have welcomed alienation from bureaucratic societies. It very well may be that the modern nation is inimical to art, knowing at best how to “tolerate” it and at worst how to “suppress” it. In which case, my discussion is ended. But if art and politics are not oil and water; if, indeed, perception is basic to “social action,” we may develop a rapport whose possibilities should make both artist and politician stop and think.