A Play By Mike Nichols By Kurt Cline

There is no script.  Nichols sits, back to the audience, as the actors improvise dialogue.

–My daughter went to the movies last night in open-toed shoes.

–Oh, that’s so déclassé!

Nichols turns and speaks:  “The idea for the play is that no one knows what it’s about. Like the sound of traffic in the rain — after awhile you don’t even hear it.  It’s the same with concepts.”

–But clowns wear them, don’t they?

–What?

–Open-toed shoes. Great big —

–Great big ones but not open-toed.

–Well, yes, open-toed — they’ve got that flap at the end.

© 2014 Kurt Cline

Kurt Cline has been a poet and performance artist for the past thirty years. His poems have won awards and appeared in numerous small-press magazines such as, most recently, Wilderness House Literary Review, Black Scat and Clockwise Cat. His full length poetry collection Voyage to the Sun: Poetry and Translations was published by Boston Poet Press in 2008. Cline’s folk-punk CD, Alien Shoe came out from 12 Studio in Taiwan in 2013. He is currently Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at National Taipei University of Technology. Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness; Tamkang Review, Glimpse: Phenomenology and Media; Cuadrante and Communication, Comparative Civilizations and Cultures: Journal of the Jean Gebser Society.

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