The Rolling Stone Interview

The first thing you notice as he breezes into the restaurant is that mane, possibly the most luxuriant hair in the whole history of atrocities, a field that has long placed a lot more emphasis on what you blew up than on how you looked blowing it up.  But the times, as a young Dylan, who this casually insolent dazzler resembles more than a little, once said, are a-changin'.  Used to be you could be a musician or a writer or a mad bomber without ever glancing in the mirror.  No longer.  Fertilizer, check.  Blasting caps, check.  Conditioner, check.

He arrives with a shuffling glut of men in tow.  Not so long ago this guy was on his high school wrestling team; now he's graduated to the rarified echelon of people who travel with entourages.  Well, prison guards, anyway — same diff.  "Sorry I'm late," he mumbles, sounding not even a little bit sorry, and you don't even mind.  Being young with good eyebrows means never having to say you're sorry; ditto, probably, being charged with malicious destruction of life and property, at least until after the verdict.  The carelessly hot young Chechen slides indifferently into the chair across from you and continues his semi-non-apology: "I had to fire off a couple of Tweets, then getting through security at the prison was a bitch.  Plus, I can't walk too fast in these shackles — took me like forever to get in from the parking lot."  He emits a sheepish snort of a laugh and tosses his head, a chestnut forelock flopping ingratiatingly over his handsome caterpillar of an eyebrow.  "Listen to me complaining.  Felon-world problems, right?"

You try to take a sip from your iced tea and the straw misses your mouth.  He smiles patiently.  He's got nothing but time.  For now, anyway.  You scan the handwritten questions you'd jotted the night before and all of a sudden they seem insufficient.  Standard-issue magazine-profile stuff.  You're not even sure you want to keep writing this piece in the second person, which seemed so cool at first but increasingly seems like a lot of work.

I flip my notebook closed and firmly, conspicuously, slide it aside — a signal, I hope: Let's Get Real.  He just keeps drilling lazily into me with those espresso-colored eyes, the half-smile never wavering.  He already knows all about getting real.  He got real before I even got here.  Before I ever wrote my first half-page profile of a Barenaked Lady, this guy was in the back seat with Real unhooking Real's bra strap."You made such a huge splash with your very first appearance on the national scene," I say.  "How in the world do you follow that up?"

He tosses that hair again.  The hair should have its own show on the CW.  "Well, that's the question, isn't it?" he says.  "That's something everyone who gets a lot of attention right out of the gate thinks about.  The Strokes.   McConaughey.  Eric Rudolph.  This is actually something my brother and I talked about a lot.  We thought about maybe following up with something in New York, as you know — 'if you can make it there' and all that — but that didn't really come together."  He exhales.  "I'm sort of coming to terms with the idea that I may never be able to repeat the impact of my debut."

I lean forward, nodding.  "Because of the sophomore slump?"

"Well, more because I'm probably going to get the death penalty," he says.  "And stuff like that."

"Gotcha," I say.  "So, where do you stand on legalization?"

"Oh, I'm for it," he says.

"You are?"

"Yeah," he says.  "Totally pro."  Then he blinks.  "Wait a second — what are we talking about?"

"This is a piece for Rolling Stone," I say.  "So, I mean, we're talking about weed.  Obviously."

"Oh, never mind," he says.  "I thought you were asking about the legalization of bombs.  I'm totally for the legalization of bombs.  I don't really care about that other thing."

So much for that.  What next? All I can think of is the litany of questions that everyone in the media already knows he won't answer: about jihad, about whether he'd ever had a relationship with Jennifer Aniston, about whether we could see any pictures of him as a lifeguard.  Am considering switching to third person.We're interrupted when a couple of young women stop at the table.  "Oh my gosh," one of them bubbles, "Are you who I think you are?"

He nods with a sleepy smile.  "Yep."

"I'm so sorry to interrupt," she says, "but... would you mind?"

"Go ahead," he says.  The two women spit on him and continue on their way.

"You must get a lot of that," I say.

He shrugs insouciantly.  "Can't really complain," he says.  "No one forced me to get famous, y'know?"

Then I realize he'd mentioned his brother earlier.  I tread gingerly:

"So," I say.  "About your brother."

His gaze turns distant, his eyes two bottomless pits of melancholy-flavored fudge.  "Well, I won't be collaborating with him again, obviously," he says softly.  "But I take comfort in knowing he went out doing what he loved most.  Which was, y'know, hating."

The guards step forward; our time is almost up.  He still has to make the rounds to other publications — Details, TV Guide, Tiger Beat.  This is the young reporter's last chance.  She stands and says "I know this is inappropriate but just one thing before you

CONTINUED ON P. 49, AFTER SOME BEACH PICTURES OF THAT GUY FROM MAROON 5.

Gotham City 32771

(Enter COMMISSIONER GORDON.)COP: Evening, Commissioner.GORDON: Looks like we're late to the party, Officer.COP: Yep, nothing to see here.GORDON:  So what do we got?COP: Seems to have been some kind of an altercation.  Two guys got into it, the one over here ended up dead.  The other guy's right here...GORDON:  Oh, no.  Not him again.COP: What, you know this guy?GORDON: Just another one of these pain-in-the-ass vigilantes running around my city.COP: Oo, you mean Batman?GORDON:  No, not Batman.COP: Green Lantern?GORDON:  Uh-uh.COP:  ...Bat-Girl?GORDON: This guy look like a Bat-Girl to you?  No, this is a new one.  Calls himself...HERO: (guttural, gravelly)  I'm Zimmer-Man.GORDON:  I told you last time, Zimmer-Man, you can knock it off with this stuff, we've got the law enforcement thing covered.HERO:  Listening to sound advice isn't one of my superpowers, Commissioner.GORDON:  So what is it this time, Zimmer-Man?  Another skinny kid with Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea?HERO:  Worse.  This one was packing Rolos and a Snapple.  They're escalating.COP:  Who's escalating?HERO:  Don't have all the facts yet but I'm calling them the Sugar-High Gang.  They get all hopped up on sucrose and corn syrup and you don't know what they're gonna do.GORDON:  So, let me guess, this guy attacked you...?HERO:  Attacked me.  Right.  Attacked me real bad.GORDON:  And I don't suppose you provoked this at all.HERO:  No.  I'm Zimmer-Man.  What happened was, I was cruising along in my Zimmer-Mobile...COP:  That looks like a Ford Festiva.HERO:  Anyway, I spotted this guy and immediately he seemed suspicious.GORDON: Suspicious how?HERO:  Just didn't seem like he belonged.  Not very belongy.  Like, at all.  Plus, he was walking so casually.  Leisurely.  I don't trust anyone who's so casual and leisurely and without sufficient belongitude.GORDON:  Did the subject appear to notice that you were following him?HERO:  Yes!  And then he started acting really nervous.GORDON:  Imagine that.HERO:  So I called it in to the police, y'know, like you've asked me to do...GORDON: Actually I've asked you to stop doing this sort of thing altogether.HERO:  Remembering stuff isn't one of my superpowers, Commissioner Gavin.GORDON: Gordon.HERO:  See?COP: What'd you say when you called it in?HERO:  Usual stuff: "these fucking punks," you know, "these assholes always get away," typical small talk.GORDON:  Sounds like you'd really made your mind up about this guy.HERO:  Hello, did I not tell you about the casualness?  So then the operator asked me "Are you following him?"  And I said "Yeah," and she said, "Okay, we don't need you to do that."GORDON:  But you did it anyway, didn't you?HERO:  She didn't tell me not to do it; she said I didn't need to do it.GORDON:  So splitting hairs is one of your superpowers, then.HERO:  Maybe.  If that's a cool thing.  Point is, that's what being a hero is all about: I do the things nobody needs me to do.GORDON:  You certainly do.HERO:  But actually, instead, what I did was, I got out of the car to look for some street signs to find out where we were.  So I could tell the operator.GORDON:  Don't you live around here?HERO:  Directions aren't one of my superpowers.  So I get out of the car, looking for signs, and out of nowhere this guy jumps me and starts beating me up.GORDON:  Really.HERO:  That's right.GORDON:  This unarmed kid, who I imagine we're going to find out yet again has no record of violent crime, just decided to attack a stranger and beat him up?HERO:  Yep.GORDON:  Huh.HERO:  Plausibility isn't one of my superpowers.GORDON:  So I imagine what happened next was...HERO:  I shot 'im.GORDON:  You —.  Of course you did.COP:  You want I should cuff this guy, Commissioner?GORDON:  No point, I imagine.  I assume no one saw what happened here, Zimmer-Man, apart from you and him?HERO:  Just the two of us, Commissioner.GORDON:  No one at all who can offer a competing version of events and who hasn't been killed?  By, y'know, you?HERO:  Nopers.GORDON:  Figures.  All right.  Looks like even though you did something awful, it doesn't mean we can sentence you to prison for it.HERO:  Yay me!GORDON:  You've pretty much managed somehow to walk the narrow territory between abhorrent and illegal.HERO:  That's my superpow—!GORDON:  Yeah, no, I just got it, even as I was saying that I, yeah.  But listen, seriously, I mean it: stop doing this, okay?  Just, y'know, knock it off.HERO:  I hear you, Commissioner, and we're on the same page.  Just one question: wondered if you might want to work with me to set up like a Zimmer-Signal, let me know when you need my help with creepy outsider weirdos walking around suspiciously with or without snack foods?  Like a big light or something, maybe just like a penlight with a—?GORDON:  No!HERO:  Hey.  I'm just a legally armed upstanding citizen, Commissioner, keeping an eye out for fucking punks on the streets.COP:  Yeesh, Batman doesn't talk like that.HERO:  Batman's a thug.  He wears a hoodie.  Zimmer-Man out!GORDON:  I'm getting too old for this shit.

"I Gave Myself the Best Part"

Recently my new play Some Other Kind of Person closed at the InterAct Theater Company in Philadelphia, which had also commissioned and developed the script.  It was a terrific production and a great experience, and along the way the theater published on its blog an interview between me and the multitalented future superhero Kittson O'Neill, reposted below.KITTSON: Is there a childhood trauma that led you to write plays?  Tell us all about it?ERIC: Obviously there was.  I don’t want to go into too much detail but the experience left me with a crippling fear of prominence.  Playwriting, of course, was a natural career path.  It was either this or whittling.KITTSON: What is the first play of yours that was ever performed?  What was it like to watch?ERIC: The first was actually something I wrote in the third grade; I didn’t really watch it, as such, because I was in it; I gave myself the best part; and it was AWESOME.  I wrote a play every month of the school year.  Friends and I would put it on, and the rest of the class was forced to sit and watch it.  The concentrated doses of mandatory attention from my peers, along with occasional bursts of approval, were addictive and pretty much left me unfit to do anything else with my life.  It was my third grade teacher who suggested that I orchestrate these shows and it’s entirely possible she may be liable for some kind of educational malpractice.The first full-length play of mine that was performed when I was an adult playwright pretending to professionalism was an equally heady experience: it was a large-cast self-indulgent prop-heavy comedy with Brechtian banners, brief nudity, a full bathtub, and occasional musical interludes; there was no reason any sensible theater should have decided to do it and yet they did and the cast was terrific and the director was a hoot and the whole experience was, unfortunately, very, very encouraging.KITTSON: What other jobs have you done in the theater?ERIC: I’ve been a terrible actor and an uninspired director; I’ve been involved in ineffective marketing and half-hearted fundraising.  I barely passed the class in college where we had to hang lights and hammer stuff, and I’ve worked in multiple literary offices where my chief job function was to reject scripts that would later go on to great acclaim and financial success elsewhere.  The other night I was at a school event in my daughter’s cafegymnatorium and one of the other parents said “Hey, Eric, you know how to do theater stuff, come up here and close these curtains,” and I thought, “I’m totally going to break these curtains.”  The job I do is really the only one in my industry that I can do competently.  Everything else is, sadly, beyond me.  On another note, I’d like to mention that hyphenates are show-offs and no one likes them.KITTSON: Is that supposed to hurt our feelings?  Seth and I forgive you.  Is there a play or production that really blew your mind artistically?ERIC: I’d like to be able to say “Tons of them,” but it is of course common knowledge among frequent theatergoers that most shows fall regrettably short of mind-blowingness.  The fact that we keep going back and hoping for that kind of transcendence is a testament to how good the stuff can be when it’s really, really good — or of how bad we are at learning from experience.  The middle part of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away blew me away in performance, as did a wordless interval in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses.  I saw Brian Bedford in a pair of Moliere one-acts that played like someone had finally perfected this comedy thing everyone’s been tinkering with for all these centuries.  And I keep reading everything Young Jean Lee writes, waiting for her to stumble and let me down, but she hasn’t done it yet, which is, of course, very irritating.KITTSON: You are a pretty fearless writer.  What is the craziest thing you ever put in a script?ERIC: I’m reluctant to embrace the “fearless” designation since, to date, none of my writing projects has involved running into a burning building or catching a spider.  Still, I’m personally fond of the scene in one of my scripts that involves a parade of actual children in an elementary school pageant that has been hijacked by a fugitive bomber and turned into lurid anti-abortion propaganda.  Every time we get to that scene in a public reading of the script it makes me uncomfortable, which seems like maybe I’m doing something right.  Strangely, that play has yet to be produced anywhere.KITTSON: That’s from HUNTING HIGH, which is the first play of yours I read.  I thought it was awesome.  Okay, so what is the craziest thing of yours that you have seen make it on to the stage?ERIC: At the beseeching of an actor, I wrote a scene that required her to urinate at length on stage every night — so that was something that happened.  I’ve also got a one-act comedy that revolves around blackface and minstrelsy in ways that I think are interesting; that one’s been produced as well, albeit only once.  One anonymous online commenter called it “funny enough to stun a charging rhino” and another said, “I’m not sure but I think maybe it might be racist.”  Which I think are pretty good blurbs.KITTSON: What inspired you to write Some Other Kind of Person?ERIC: The initial inspiration came from the experiences of Nicholas Kristof, the genuinely fearless journalist who, in the course of reporting on the problem of sex slavery, purchased the freedom of two Cambodian prostitutes and followed up on their experiences thereafter.  Where others might hear such a heartbreaking story and say, “How can I help?” I heard it and thought, “Hey, I think I have an idea for a play.”KITTSON: There are a lot of allusions to fairy tales, particularly Cinderella, in SOME OTHER KIND OF PERSON.  You have kids.  Do you read them fairy tales?  The real ones or the not-so-nightmare-inducing versions?ERIC: I read my kids whatever we have on hand that’s shortest.  I mean, the kids are great and all, but I’ve got stuff to do.KITTSON: I know you are a huge nerd, so when are you going to write a superhero play?ERIC: No, you are!KITTSON: Nerds are the new cool kids. Seriously.ERIC: I’d love to write a superhero play, especially since I invariably feel like superhero movies fall short, but I sort of wonder if I’ve missed that window — seems like maybe there’s already a swell of geek theater happening, and from playwrights who have more nerd cred than I do.  That said, I have some ideas and you’d look great in a cape, so let’s talk.KITTSON: Your case of whiskey is in the mail.  So, have you been to Cambodia?  What did you do there?  Honestly, are you Bill?ERIC: Get out of my head!!!  I’ve done some traveling around the world — often, as it happens, on an employer’s dime, to do business, no just business, there wasn’t anything wrong with what we did — and so I do know well the cocoon of the corporate-friendly hotel, the siren song of room service, the frisson of risk that attends the notion of venturing out alone when you don’t know the language and don’t know what you might find if you get off at the wrong stop.  That said, my experiences overseas were less interesting than Bill’s, and very nearly 100% legal.KITTSON: Yeah right.

Sympathy for the Actor

I recently found myself in the uncommon position of acting (which, given my rudimentary thespian skills, I rarely do, out of respect for the craft and for humanity); even more unusual was the fact that I was acting in a project that I’d written.  I was playing a character I’d created on the page, uttering lines I’d written myself.Which is too bad.  No playwright wants to be in the position of writing for a severely limited actor.  I’ve been fortunate in that, as a playwright, I’ve only intermittently encountered that situation in the past, and the way I’ve typically dealt with it has been by trying to assess what overlap, if any, might exist between the role and the actor’s limited strengths, and then using carefully guided language to herd the actor, through the director, into that little Venn-diagram patch of optimization.  (Doesn’t always work – indeed, as I think about it, it’s possible that it has never ever worked – but as I said: good news is that I’m rarely in this position.  Fortunately, lots of actors are awfully good at what they do.  Otherwise, I surmise, they might pursue some other career, something less overtly insane.)At any rate, this strategy definitely didn’t work when I was the actor.  Because I already knew all my tricks, I could tell when I was being herded, and I resisted and resented myself and there was a big writer-actor schism and I would’ve gone off and sulked in my trailer if I’d had a trailer.The least surprising outcome of this experience was that it increased my already semi-awestruck respect for what actors do.  I already harbored a fanboy-sized appreciation for the way actors find layers in dialogue, knit successive moments together into a character arc, and deploy a seemingly endless array of inflections to find twenty terrific ways to say a single line.  I discovered that I mostly only have one inflection available to me per line – that’s all I got, that’s the only one that comes up, it’s like I downloaded the free version of the acting software because I’m too cheap to pony up for the Pro edition that offers multiple inflections, a menu of facial expressions, and templates for What To Do With Your Hands.  (My operating system probably wouldn’t have supported it, anyway.)So as I delivered each line I did so with this sort of double consciousness: an awareness of how I was saying the line, paired with an awareness that there were funnier ways to say the line that other actors would find but that I couldn’t seem to find those or make my mouth do them.  (I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure none of this is what Stella Adler would have recommended that I be thinking about during a performance.)Additionally, I acquired a new measure of respect for actors on the seemingly fundamental level of just memorizing stuff.  I’d received occasional compliments in the past from actors – remarks along the lines of “Your stuff is so easy to memorize,” something about the rhythms or the train of thought or something, I didn’t analyze the compliments too much; I just accepted them in a cursory way because of course I’m getting compliments because of course I’m awesome – but now that I was trying to commit my own dialogue to memory I had a revelation: beat changes suck.  They fucking suck.  I don’t know how you burrow deep enough into a character’s consciousness to vault the conceptual gaps represented by these arbitrary beat changes.  There’s nothing logical or playable about these beat changes – they don’t have anything to do with character; they’re just about the writer needing to steer the script in a new direction.  Freaking amateur.  Who wrote this crap?All of which is by way of saying that I will either never write another beat change again, or  just never act in my own stuff again.  That second thing is probably more likely.

S*M*A*S*H-up

(FADE IN on the grungy 4077th S*M*A*S*H camp, a ratty assemblage of olive-drab tents and battered jeeps set in a dusty, scrubby valley.  A crooked post in the compound has nailed-up arrows indicating the direction and mileage to various destinations:  Chicago, Grover's Corners, Osage County, Avenue Q.  The P.A. crackles to life.)

P.A.: Attention all personnel.  Due to lack of interest, this year's Broadway season will be canceled.  Also, Off-Broadway will now be Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway will be Off-Broadway, and Hoboken will be lower Manhattan.  That is all.

(JULIA and TOM, exhausted in their stylish scrubs, partake of martinis at their makeshift still in their tent.)

JULIA:  Fourteen hours of meatball workshopping.  Even my exhaustion is exhausted.  I can't feel my feet.
TOM:  I can't feel your feet either.   I propose a toast: to this place.  To our life.
JULIA:  Be it ever so humble, there's no place like development hell.

(They down their drinks.  JULIA makes a face.)

JULIA:  This tastes terrible.  I mean more terrible than usual.
ELLIS:  I put ground-up peanuts in your martini!
JULIA:  Ellis, damn it!  I'm not allergic to peanuts.  Stop doing that to everyone!
TOM:  Little ferret-face.
ELLIS:  Gotcha!  Heh heh heh heh heh.

(RADAR enters the tent with a clipboard in hand.)

RADAR:  Morning, sirs...
TOM:  Radar, we just got out of workshopping.  If you try to send us back to that rehearsal hall I'll tie your boots to your nose hairs.
RADAR:  Gosh, that's not friendly.  Nobody ever talks that way in Iowa.
TOM:  What is this "Iowa...?"
JULIA:  Flyover country.
TOM:  They have theater there?
JULIA:  Yes but they serve... food... at it.
TOM:  Ugh.
RADAR:  Captains, I'm just here to remind you that you're scheduled to give the leading ladies superfluous physical examinations at oh nine hundred hours.
TOM:  ...But I'm gay.
JULIA:  And I'm a heterosexual woman, and I only sleep with men with whom I have exactly zero chemistry.

(With a weary groan, DEREK rises from a nearby bunk.)

DEREK:  Oh bloody hell, do I have to do it all around here?  Tom, Julia, shall I just take everything off your plate?  I'll fix the musical, I'll woo the producers, I'll defile the leading ladies and while I'm at it I'll be the only one around here with even a modicum of personality?  Would that work for you?  Would that be helpful?

(Beat.)

TOM:  — Yeah, could you?
JULIA:  That'd be great, thanks.
RADAR:  Hold on.  —Choppers.
JULIA:  I don't hear any—
RADAR:  Wait for it.

(Sound of incoming choppers.  Julia, Tom and Derek wearily stumble to their feet and scramble out the door.)

P.A.:  Attention all personnel.  Incoming pages.  All available personnel to the rehearsal room.  Don't worry folks, you can sleep when you're dead or after "Phantom" closes, whichever comes first.

(Cut to the rehearsal room, where everyone's in scrubs and masks, each at an operating table working feverishly on a script draft.)

TOM: (to NURSE:) Highlighter.  White-out.  Could I get some suction here, this character arc is a disaster.  I'm going to have to resect the whole second act.

(DEREK peers over JULIA's shoulder, watching her work.)

DEREK:  Switching everything over to a male POV, eh?  Interesting technique.
JULIA:  It always works.  It never doesn't work.  Could I get some more wrylies over here please?
P.A.: Attention all personnel.  Due to conditions beyond our control we regret to report that a new play by Neil LaBute opens tonight.

(RADAR enters.)

TOM:  Radar!  Put a mask on!
RADAR:  I have a message.
JULIA:  If it's about my royalties, give it to me straight.  I can take it.
RADAR:  Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake's plane... was shot down... over the Sea of Japan.
JULIA:  Oh my God!  Oh my God!  Is he dead?
RADAR:  Worse.  He's in regional theater.
DEREK:  That poor bastard.
RADAR:  There weren't no survivors.
TOM:  Keep working, guys.  These scripts are just going to keep coming and they're not going to revise themselves.
DEREK:  Julia, that is really really great work you're doing there.  You've taken that mess of a wounded draft and turned it into one of the most brilliant scripts I've ever seen.  Pure genius.
TOM:  Well, let's hear it out loud!
JULIA:  Oh, okay, if you insist.  "Act One.  Lights up—."

(CUT TO: the mess tent, some hours later.  Everyone sitting wearily around a table, drinking coffee.)

TOM:  That was the most brilliant play I've ever heard, Julia.
EILEEN:  It really was remarkable, Captain.
JULIA:  Too bad no one will ever hear it aloud again.
DEREK:  Why is that?
JULIA:  Not sure.  But oh well.
EILEEN:  Ugh.  Why is my coffee so gritty?
ELLIS:  Heh heh heh heh.
EILEEN:  Ellis!  Enough with the peanuts!
ELLIS:  Gotcha.

(EILEEN throws her drink in DEREK's face.)

DEREK:  Blimey!  Why'd you do that?
EILEEN:  It's my character trait.  Seriously, it's my only character trait.  Now I don't have a beverage in my hand any more and I feel myself slipping away.
P.A.:  Attention all personnel.  Will Jessica and Bobby please report to the compound for this week's random distribution of background dialogue.  And it is requested that you kindly stop being more compelling than the main characters.  That is all.
EILEEN:  This damn place.  How much more can we take?  We've lost so many loved ones already.  Frank, Leo, Dev... Julia's scarves... Theresa Rebeck... poor sweet Karen...
KAREN:  I'm still here, I'm just right here.
EILEEN:  All gone, all taken away in their prime and we may never see them again.
KAREN:  I'm right here.  I'm literally in like every other scene.
EILEEN:  Those poor kids.

(KAREN gives up, slips into a Bollywood-tinged fugue state.)

JULIA:  Well, it could be worse.  We could all have—gag—dramaturgs.
TOM:  Ugh, dramaturgs.
DEREK:  Horrid creatures.
RADAR:  Yeah, I saw something about them when I was previewing our training films about communicable diseases.  Gross.
JULIA:  Hey, you.  Yeah, you.  Iowa.  Who are you, anyway?  You're not a stage manager, you're not a dancer, you're not a designer.  You could be an actor except I didn't notice any listings on the call sheet for "Creepy diminutive wide-eyed manchild."  Who are you, and why are you here?
RADAR:  I'm just someone who pays attention to what you do, and knows everything that's going to happen to you before you do.
JULIA:  ...A critic?
RADAR:  Nope.  The audience.
TOM:  Well, that explains why he keeps getting smaller.
RADAR:  —Hang on.  You hear that?
JULIA:  Hear what?
RADAR:  —Cancellation.
JULIA:  I don't hear any—
RADAR:  Wait for it.

(Freeze-frame.  IVY belts "Suicide is Painless.")