And again with the rehearsals, every night this week, which isn't surprising, since we open next week, but JESUS CHRIST MAKE IT STOP. I know I shouldn't bitch about a situation that I knew full well what I was getting into, but then again, if I can't bitch here, where can I bitch, apart from my home, my work, the theater, and various other nooks and crannies on the Web? Nowhere!

Feeling stressed out as well, our lunatic Teutonic director has become alarmingly ticcy. We were rehearsing some of the manic little musical ditties that are part of the show, and the actor playing Fourth Leper hit a sour note. S. (the director) flinched in a violent and disturbing manner, writhing like a salted slug, and in his wracking misery, he inadvertantly flung a sharpened pencil away from his body. It flew like a missile and sank with a dispiriting PLURT right into the eyeball of our Second Attendant, who screamed miserably and clawed his ruined face before falling down dead on the grass. The rest of the cast nervously stopped singing gradually, winding down like a tired Gramophone.

After a silence, someone said, "Shit, man, there goes Leper Four. Now what?"

S. stalked the fringe of the "stage" menacingly. "FUCK ZEE LEPER! Louzy zinger, the fuckink leper! I replace him with anybody!" He noticed a dog running in the park. "HUND!" he screamed. "I get zee dog to play zee leper!" He was becoming more and more crazed as he cast about for more insulting choices to replace our fallen, pencil-pierced comrade. S. picked up a small stick. "Stick! Stick plays Leper Four! Stick has just as much stage presence! Vee do not need terrible fucking dead actor with poor reaction times!"

We stared at him uncertainly for a moment as he madly capered with his stick, until presently the actress playing Papal Attendant said insinuatingly, "I hope Mr. Stick there can sing alto." S. froze for a moment, anxiously caressing his beloved stick, and then collapsed to the ground in a boneless heap, and then began lowing miserably into the turf. "AAAAOOOHH-HOOOOOO!" he moaned horribly. "Ziss show, she is up zo many butts!" The cast stood around uncomfortably. It really was a horrible noise he made; it sounded utterly hopeless and damned, like someone being forced to watch Tom Green.

To make things worse, night was encroaching on us, and this brought a fresh horror: mosquitoes. Waves and waves of ravenous mosquitoes. They attacked the cast like an Egyptian plague. As you might imagine, it is difficult to remain "in the moment"--as we bullshit artists like to say--when you are being assailed by millions of tiny pitchforks; we howled like coyotes. "I say, Father Frapper--AAAAHHHHH!" I yelled at one point, as a buzzard-sized mosquito landed on my chest and promptly speared my heart with its proboscis. Within seconds, the beast had expanded to the size of a basketball, filled with tomato-colored arterial blood; I batted at the thing feebly, and it finally fell off my chest and lay on the ground, waving its horrid legs in a happy expression of blood-gorge.

Another chilling scream erupted from the actor playing Third Melon-Eater as he was borne off into the night by a horde of the winged horrors. We saw his frantically waving limbs framed against the bright moon as the vicious insects carried him off to certain death, and heard his dismal cries for help, which we were unable to answer. It was all we could do to beat back the remaining insectile waves. S. thrashed at the air in furious self-defense and howled imprecations at the bugs, the terrible show, his miserable lot in life, and at the loss of precious human life.

"FUCK!" he bellowed, "Ziss iss all fucked to fuck! Anozzer actor gone!" He sounded desolate. "I need anozzer dog, zen. Or anozzer stick. I do not care." He wept with despair, and crumpled again.

The actress playing Angry Mob murmured in my ear. "I hope stick number two can sing tenor."