kenning editions: The Masses Are Asses is a one-act whiteface agitprop farce"”an avant garde tragedy of errors, the only error being its own theatricality. A "Lady" and a "Gentleman" of audacious sophistication extol their superiority and smear "the poor" over champagne in a Parisian bistro that doubles as a South Bronx toilet (or is it the other way around?). A supposed lust for prestige stokes the terrorist group A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. ("Armed / Brave / Comrades / Determined / Efficient / Fighters / Gonna / Humiliate / Imperialism!"), whose bullets and bombs punctuate the night. Needing an effective distraction from the ambient siege (which sounds an awful lot like a characteristic evening in the burrough), the couple "pretend" to be common, drink straight from the bottle, and grind to the rhythm of the telephone as it rings and rings (presumably by would-be patrons of the establishment they insist to inhabit). But when the lady fails to snap out of the masque, the gentleman duly protests. Lapsing into reality, his fantasies suffer mounting complaints: "We don't even know what Staten Island looks like, never mind a foreign country." A fracas ensues, on the costs of "being and not being here," of play-acting class mobility, of deciphering the tyranny of community scriptures. The discovery scene is to be taken literally, breaking the fourth wall Pietri never bothered with in the first place, and is echoed by the contemporary routines of anaphoric protest ("You look eternally fine. / You look eternally finer.") and by the redundancies of prosodic correspondence ("Assholes"¦didn't rhyme, and it sounded too lower classish, so I changed it to asses when referring to the masses to give the ass class."), all consumed and reconsumed via the gentleman's portable cassette machine. The poet's caricatures of American entrepreneurial gusto are deftly disorienting. The audience, unable to entertain the terms of the "mass" spectacle, sees itself doubled in the voices of the two players thrown from offstage as crime and calamity threaten to suspend the characters' disbelief. "[N]ow when an individual selects to pretend to be rich instead of to be poor indicates a superior level of comprehension of what is essential to obtain intellectual and material fulfillment," our neo-Platonist neophyte explains. "You are the pleasure of your pleasures and the misery of your miseries!" The sheer didacticism of our hero's imagination clobbers the spectator, and, chez Popeye, those revolving stars they see limn the profoundest horizons of their gullibility. Machismo is coerced into cowardice as our hero exhausts the truly heroic perserverence of the ultrarealist, his "lady." But by the time he's realized that not only did he invent the eponymous adage that fuels his zeal, he has invented an "ass class" that entraps his family, his people, his "being and not being." The couple finally snuggle into their bathtub wrapped in an infested old fur, repeat their opening litany of sweet nothings like a flipbook of souvenir postcards from an unspent holiday, and "snobbishly clear their throats in zero seconds." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.