A WORD TO THE AUDIENCE A stage manager with clipboard enters from behind curtain, , and addresses the audience….. "Good evening. The management and the producers wish to thank you for your patronage. Our play is closing tonight, so you will always have a special place in our hearts. The reviews, which apparently escaped your attention, have moved the playwright to seek sanctuary in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Linda Tripp got better reviews. Unfortunately, they have just been read by the cast, and are weighing heavily upon them. The darlings are strewn about backstage like the last scene in "Hamlet." Actors are normally a plucky lot - let's leave them to themselves a few more moments, until good taste and compassion allow us to bring up the lights. I, too, have been thrown over the side, but, like a British explorer, I am accustomed to heroic failure, and will try to carry on in the best traditions of the theatre. In consideration of their fragile condition, please turn off all beepers, cell phones, radios, blenders, hair dryers and other devices. No audio or video recordings, no photo flash, for that matter, no flashing at all, is permitted, except, of course, on stage. A CD of my best-loved announcements is available in the lobby. If you have any plans to consume anything in a noisy wrapper, let's take advantage of the delay, make a game of it, and get it over with, in an American spirit of co-operation… Altogether now, 1-2-3 -- Strip your candy! That's it, all at once, down to the bare, luscious morsel. Crinkle, crinkle, crackle, crackle. Excellent. Outstanding. I wish the matinee people had half your discipline. You now have a piece of candy melting in your hand. You might as well pop it in your mouth. Whispering, then, will become something of a trial for your companion to follow. "I thought thith wath a mewthical", sort of thing, or "Did you thee that dreth in the thecond row?" In your other hand, you should have a crinkly, crackly, possibly sticky, wrapper. If you throw it on the floor, we are both, both going to be very sorry. I won't be more graphic about the penalty, because I don't want to upset those innocent patrons who came hoping for a good time. A word to those worthy souls - a good time is not in the cards tonight. The theatre experience is not always a pleasant one. Much of it is designed to make you feel relieved at the end of the evening to return to the cheerless chasm of your existence in Winnaponk, Long Island. Our playwright, in a frightful coincidence, is also a Winnaponker. Somehow unaware that his life has been unspeakably sad, he insists on speaking and writing about it at extraordinary length. In case you recognize yourselves on stage, we put his telephone number in the program, and we know he'd love to hear from you. In tonight's performance the role of the funeral director -I almost said, "will be undertaken by", but in the legitimate theater we never go for the cheap, or easy laugh, - will be played by Lou Gubrious. Isn't it wonderful to see actors having the courage to keep their own names! Billy Crudup! Janeane Garafalo! Renee Zellweger! Give me the crackle of a Hershey wrapper any day. When we get underway, the role of the Overseer will be taken over by the understudy, Fred, Fred, oh, Fred Somebody. Don't feel sorry for him, he always wanted to be a somebody. We've had some luck, the role of Miss Partridge has been written out of the play entirely, and not a moment too soon. There has been a lot of fuss about the scene in the play involving audience participation. This is entirely voluntary, and any law suits or unhappy love affairs that ensue are not the management's responsibility. If you are approached by a cast member and can't fend him or her off with an umbrella or other sharp instrument, pretend you're a non-English speaking foreigner. If you are a non-English speaking foreigner, you are surely in the wrong theatre, wondering when the music starts and struggling to understand what I'm saying, but we're grateful that your confusion has helped carry the show this far. In this country, KATZ, K-A-T-Z is an actual family name, and artistic considerations alone governed the author's decision to title the play after its unhappy protagonist, Mr. Katz. It's silly to suggest, as some have, that the presence of a few baffled Germans and Brazilians in our theatre shows we tried to inherit an audience from a late, unlamented feline follies with a similar name. As for coughers, there is no point, with this play, in trying to suppress your outbursts until the laugh lines. There aren't any. Much of it takes place in wartime, however, so the playwright, a notorious hacker himself, has thoughtfully written in several offstage explosions. In the theatre, timing is everything. And the time has now come for the curtain to rise, so…. on with the show!" (exits) © Russell Connor