Wrestling With Andre: A Parody of My Dinner With Andre

CHIP’S NARRATION:

I am dining with the man who first discovered me–the man who first put one of my plays on the professional stage. His name is Troy Morris and he continues to supply me with work to this day, even when most theatre directors will not come within ten feet of me.

You see, a few years ago, I wrote a political play that did not go over well with many liberals in the Manhattan theatre community. They blackballed me and I have been writing under a pseudonym ever since. Chip Mudryk’s the name. I hate it, but it keeps me working.

We’re dining at this rather expensive restaurant because Troy wants to help me wrap my head around the plot synopsis this producer friend of his named Greg Grassley gave to him. The play is about professional wrestling–a subject I know nothing about. Troy knows this but insists the subject matter is perfect for me, especially since the paycheck attached to it is a big deal for both of us.

TROY:

It seems glib on the surface, doesn’t it? Professional wrestling. Where’s the humanity, the drama? A three-act play about savage men in tights cavorting around a wrestling ring. Who would want to see that? True theatergoers would never subject themselves to such garbage. It’s crass and lowbrow. Right down there with SPAMALOT and THE LION KING.

CHIP:

My sentiments exactly, Troy. People can go to Madison Square Garden if they want to watch wrestling. Let’s keep that tasteless spectacle out of our theatres.

TROY:

Oh, Chip. Those feelings weren’t mine. I merely expressed what any random theatre snob might say about a wrestling play coming to the Manhattan theatre district.

CHIP:

Meaning I’m a theatre snob.

TROY:

I wasn’t referring to you, Chip. Although sometimes, I think you’re not above a little bit of snobbery yourself. No, I think a good play about wrestling is exactly the shot in the arm the theatre needs today.

CHIP:

Troy, are you calling professional wrestling art? I get the money part involved with this project but I wouldn’t go around calling it art. I mean, pro-wrestling’s not even a real sport. It’s steeped in artifice. Everything about it is fake. Now, I am not scoffing at the money. God knows I need it, but I can’t trick myself into thinking this will be anything more than pedestrian commerce.

TROY:

You’re going about the synopsis all wrong, Chip. Are you familiar with the work of the French philosopher Roland Barthes?

CHIP:

It’s been a while. What are you referring to exactly?

TROY:

You see, Chip. Barthes wrote about wrestling in THE WORLD OF WRESTLING, a chapter in his seminal book MYTHOLOGIES. He said the public doesn’t care if wrestling is fake or not. The public is only interested in what it sees playing out before them, not what it thinks about what it sees. He called wrestling a spectacle of excess. And that is how you should look at it as well.

TROY (Continued):

It is NOT a sport. It is spectacle, and as such it is on par with the greatest of spectacles: Greek drama and bullfighting. To quote Barthes: “It is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of Arnolphe or Andromaque.”

CHIP:

Are you saying a wrestling play is about hamming things up? Being overdramatic, and over the top? Is that what we’re aiming for here, Troy?

TROY:

Yes. Because it’s an inherent part of wrestling. There’s no guessing in wrestling. The audience must understand everything on the spot. The goal is absolute clarity. They don’t have time to question motives, decipher inscrutable character traits. The physical type of the character should say it all. It should be so obvious that when I see a character with the obese sagging body of an Abdullah the Butcher I immediately recognize this man is a “bastard”. As Barthes said: “His actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.”

CHIP:

I like subtley, Troy, and this subject matter is a little too on the nose for me. I don’t think my audiences would appreciate me being so obvious.

TROY:

You have an audience, Chip, because WE have an audience–you and me together. And as much as I love nuance and complexity in my theatre dialogue, I am appreciating it less and less in my everyday life. There are too many conversational games in my social interactions. I don’t know about you, but I’m an awkward person to talk to in a social situation. I can’t really tell when someone is being sarcastic with me. I take things quite literally. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve concluded people don’t like me because of some social faux pas I think I made during a conversation.

CHIP:

My analyst calls it Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

TROY:

Right. So you’ve experienced it too?

CHIP:

Just a few minutes ago, actually. I consider myself an honest person and I grew up with a group of friends who didn’t like poking fun at each other or joking about personal issues. They were a rather sensitive, artistic crowd.

TROY:

And that’s what I am saying, Chip. Imagine all the theatre goers who sit through the most nuanced of plays, who have a lack of discernment when it comes to sarcasm or verbal cues of all sorts. The kind of wordplay your more seasoned theatre goers would be challenged by, would overwhelm the theatre irregulars we hope to bring in to the fold.

TROY (Continued):

You see, Chip. Barthes spells it out this way:

” We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of ‘paying one’s debts’) always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theater. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private.”

CHIP:

I understand what Barthes is saying…I think…but I’ve never watched a wrestling match in my life, Troy. I wouldn’t know where to start. I have no point of reference, you see.

TROY:

Of course you don’t. I know that, and that’s why I brought this with me today.

WAITER (stops at their table):

Gentlemen, more drinks?

TROY:

I think I’ll have another spritzer, if I may.

WAITER: And for you, sir?

CHIP:

Another shot of amaretto, please.

WAITER:

Coming right up.

WAITER EXITS

CHIP:

What is this? A compact disc of a wrestling match?

TROY:

Yes. The match on this CD is regarded by many aficionados to be one of the best wrestling matches of all time:

Mick Foley vs. The Undertaker in a Hell in a Cell match at King of the Ring 1998: renowned for its brutality and the intense rivalry between the two wrestlers.

CHIP:

And this is supposed to help me understand everything I need to know about wrestling?

TROY:

Not everything, but it’s an important start. In a play, or musical, I can talk about suffering, defeat, and justice, but it will only seem real in the context of the past and the future.

CHIP:

Well, that’s not necessarily true. I’ve written quite a few plays showing torture scenes in the present. The one that got me blackballed by the liberal contingent of our theatre community showed a lot of suffering.

TROY:

The suffering you show in your plays, Chip, is temporary, and often enigmatic. Powerful prison guards exacting their sadism on innocent political prisoners solely because they can. And because the audience knows the torture will come to an end soon enough, because there are other plot points to reach, they look upon the prisoner’s suffering as a stopping point in the storyline, and not as something real and possibly interminable.

Barthes said:

” The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions; to grind the face of one’s powerless adversary or to scrape his spine with one’s fist with a deep and regular movement, or at least to produce the superficial appearance of such gestures: wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture.”

CHIP:

Are you asking me to pander to sadists now? Is this the crowd we’re aiming to please?

TROY:

No, Chip. I’m asking you to work with the symbolism of wrestling. There are clear audience expectations involved in a wrestling story, embodied by people who look like the heroes and villains they envision. When one wrestler puts a hold on another, we know why the victim of the hold suffers. We know who is oppressor is and why he has such control over him.

CHIP:

Why not just make this a play about boxing? I mean: what is the difference? There’s plenty of sadism in boxing.

TROY:

Because for all its drama, boxing is fair. If unfair boxing is wrestling, then it follows fair wrestling is boxing to a certain extent. Both sports are constrained by rules. And because of its spontaneous nature, the ending of a boxing match can be abrupt. It’s the confusion of wrestling that heightens the drama, provides the rhythm. In boxing, there is no perfect ‘bastard’.

CHIP:

What do you mean by perfect ‘bastard’?

TROY:

Well, according to Barthes, the perfect ‘bastard’ is someone

“who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, therefore asocial. He takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favor, and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so. Sometimes he rejects the formal boundaries of the ring and goes on hitting an adversary legally protected by the ropes, sometimes he reestablishes these boundaries and claims the protection of what he did not respect a few minutes earlier. This inconsistency, far more than treachery or cruelty, sends the audience beside itself with rage: offended not in its morality but in its logic, it considers the contradiction of arguments as the basest of crimes.”

CHIP:

What about the hero? Doesn’t the public yearn for a hero? Shouldn’t the hero be the one the public desires?

TROY:

Of course, but it’s less about anyone particular hero, and more about the moral concept of justice. Barthes was very clear about this: “The idea of ‘paying ‘ is essential to wrestling. The baser the action of the ‘bastard’, the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return. If the villain–who is of course a coward– takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming unfairly to have a right to do so by a brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment.”

CHIP:

I will watch this as soon as I can. Can you tell me who wins?

TROY:

You should watch it tonight. It will inspire you. And no I can’t tell you who wins. Suffice it to say they are both bastards. Greg Grassley wants a first draft next week. Do you think you can do it, Chip?

CHIP:

There are too many bills stuffed in my mailbox for me to say no. I will have it for you next week.

TROY:

Thank you.

WAITER:

Spritzer. Amaretto.

TROY: Thank you.

TROY (Continued):

A toast.

CHIP:

Why yes.

TROY:

To an amazing first draft.

CHIP:

Cheers.

CHIP’S NARRATION:

When the restaurant was completely empty, and the dinner check arrived, Troy insisted on paying for the whole thing. Our waiter looked at me as if I was a freeloader who didn’t deserve to be here. I met his gaze steadily and he looked away.

I treated myself to a taxi ride with the money I didn’t spend on dinner. On the way home, I stared out the cab window trying to imagine a wrestling ring, trying to imagine a perfect ‘bastard’. Neither of these came to my mind.

Instead, I pictured a man with 1930s-style tortoise shell glasses and an Eraserhead-style haircut sitting in front of his Underwood Universal typewriter, waiting for inspiration to hit him. This man is staying in this nightmarish hotel room with paper-thin walls, peeling wallpaper, and grimy windows facing out onto a brick wall.

I feel like I know this character already. He’s been tasked with writing a wrestling movie but he cannot wrap his head around the subject. What does he know about wrestling? Nothing. Loud maniacal laughter is booming through the walls. It’s keeping the writer from typing. The page is waiting. The writer calls the front desk to complain about the noise.

Moments later, there’s a knock at the writer’s door. He opens it and sees a hulking figure standing in the door frame. It’s the man who was making the racket.

He apologizes to the writer and waltzes into the room uninvited. This is our perfect bastard. This is the start of my play.

I’m breaking the rules and loving it. Thanks to my dinner with Troy.

ARIEL (SIGN OFF):

You’ve been listening to Wrestling with Heels On. Join me in two weeks, maybe, and we’ll take another stroll down Villainy Lane.

On the Sports History Network.