"In his new fiction, playwright, poet and novelist Mac Wellman has created an hilarious satire of American theater. Chris Name, a nobody working at the local Sweet Thumb River Valley Reactor complex, is suddenly taken up by a local theater director, who presents Name's play, the performance of which ends in the death of the theater company's chief and in the end of more than one theater career. As in Wellman's acclaimed fiction Annie Salem and his satire of New York's art and literary denizens, The Fortuneteller, Wellman has created in this new work a world peopled by cantankerous, wistful, confused, and frightened people who have lost parts of their body, their minds, and their souls in the perpetual machine of the American dream."--BOOK JACKET.