[Saturday Night Saloon series, 1/9/10, Brooklyn, USA]

Finales aren’t a plot point, they’re a genre. You can save a lot on comics and invest it in a lot of popcorn-counter runs if you just get the planetary-blowup last issues of comic companies’ crossover events and skip the scenes leading up to the big dance-competition throwdown in the average multiplex pageant. Hence, while the leadup episodes of Vampire Cowboys’ Saturday Night Saloon series of monthly episodic plays were each their own reward, every company knew what they were there for when it all came to an end.

Dustin Chinn’s “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!”, which had proven four previous times that there’s no longer any limit once you’ve gone too far, concluded its tale of time-traveling martial-arts action figures by launching right into that dance-competition you craved, with bonus cross-millennial rap battle as the Rangers travel to the early-’70s Bronx in a final conflict for the past and future of hip hop that’s too complicated to go into and too immaterial to matter as the crew convert the real-life audience into their block-party grandstand and gleefully get buried under their own fallen fourth wall.

Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” pushed the plunger on a matching self-referential implosion, as the play’s unseen narrator stops explaining and starts interrupting for some deus-ex-machina plot wrap-ups to complement onstage eminence Kelly Rae O’Donnell’s tour de force demonic-possession solo, an occult-madonna set piece that makes Mike Mignola’s comics seem not so unfilmable after all.

Payoffs can be emotional as well as pyrotechnic, so Mac Rogers’ “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ “Entrenched” each pulled the surprise ending of authentic pathos, the latter with a depressingly redemptive scenario of eternal sacrifice by a time-manipulating scientist who will never know he’s a savior; the former with a downbeat private armageddon for the ecclesiastical melodrama’s faithless-cleric heroine and her fallen former-lover antagonist.

The jewel of this evening’s logical conclusions was Crystal Skillman’s cybotage potboiler “Hack,” an entire narrative cobbled from coming-attractions-style outbursts giving way to action-flick afterthought serial epilogues, all seen through the interface of Skillman’s masterful eye for archetypal cliché and suicide-mission self-invention. The dramatis personae of shadowy e-terrorists, teeth-gritting commando spooks, and those who play them on their Facebook page go through a gauntlet of real-time jump-cuts, faked fights, echoing gauzy flashbacks and other actually-absent production tricks that both make you aware of how helpless contemporary movie and TV performers are without their FX bells and whistles and how irreducible are the talents of this definitively game-faced ensemble.

Having thrown everyone clear of the blast at the end of each month’s bill, Jeff Lewonczyk’s “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” settled for no less than crescendoing its cliffhanger about a madly propagating mutant fungus with a Lovecraftian quantum orgasm and climactic mountain cave-in. And then a singalong. Because nothing ever ends, and even if the world’s blown up and the theatre’s dead, the true artists are always up for renewal.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]

The High Cost of Living
(A nod to Neil Gaiman, of course)

The intrinsic understanding the dream world had availed me of its physicality allowed not only the ground rushing up towards me to fill me with the fear of death, but also to put me at peace with the knowledge that I would not actually die. This was a dream after all, and I would only wake as I slammed into the canyon floor. (Freud was wrong.)

I opened my eyes. The dream had ended. It was dead. It was nothing more than a memory: a photograph on the back of my eyelids. Is this then what death is? Is death when something is left only as a memory? Is death when the thing can no longer speak for itself? The dream was gone, and I lived to tell the tale. Then what happened to the dream? Did Morpheus retake his creation to recycle it as someone else’s nighttime fantasy? Did it simply vanish? Or did it retreat to the Dreaming to live out the rest of eternity in indescribable peace? Not one person or thing can know. One person or thing can only guess.

By trade, writers are guessers. They pontificate wildly upon topics that erect a protective wall of mystery before the intrusive eyes of science and religion. It is all a guess. Some guesses are accepted by scientists, and some are accepted clergy, but it is still all a guess.

To Gray’s Anatomy, death is the ending of all vital functions or processes in an organism or cell. To the Bible, death is the final state of the unsaved, and “…he who keeps My word shall never see it.” To the scientists, Gray’s Anatomy is indisputably correct. To the Christians, the science is incomplete. Neither views are wrong. Science cannot disprove faith, nor can faith disprove science. Writers accept this fact, thrive off of it, and then make names for themselves with it.

To young Raymond Douglas Bradbury, “Death is your little sister one morning when you look into her crib and see her staring at you with blank, blue eyes… When you stand by her high chair four weeks later and realize she’ll never be in it again to make you jealous of her because she was born…”

To Neil Gaiman’s character, Robert Gadling, “Death is rubbish… The only reason people die is because everyone does it. You all just go along with it.”

Abbe Faria, Dumas’ heroic mentor to the Count of Monte Cristo, views death as “…sole consolation of my wretched existence… God grants that there no longer exists for me distance or obstacle.”

Then what defines death? Each writing exposes a different view on the subject. Each writing is just as arguably correct as the next because each writing draws expertise from the same vast uncertainty. Upon reflection, we come to the conclusion that death is logically indefinable but by one overlooked trait: nothing may die without first living. Death is the price paid for life. Whether it is a cell phone, chivalry, or a person that has died, it is innately understood in any philosophy, that these things were once alive. Death, in all its incarnations, is the high cost of living.