Lunar Follies

PETAVIUS

The New Cincinnati Opera House in New Petavius, Bingo County, presents the citizens of Viejo Laredo, Gulf City of Southern Texas, in a series of tasteful romantic tableaux, staged in a replica of the Grand Ballroom of the Walnut Street Theatre, the last true bastion of Philadelphia’s stinking rich. The cast will be ably assisted by the clientele of San Francisco’s newly chic Bagel Atelier, each person of which will represent a “humor” or “sight” or “odor,” as these are traditionally portrayed on the stages of the fabled Komische Oper in Wien, the Old Bouwerie in New York, and the Oakland Melodeon, previously the Royal Chinese Theater in San Francisco, which wonderful old house slid into the bay during last winter’s refreshing rains. The staged reading of “Burning of the Brooklyn Theatre at the Washington Street Entrance,” justly admired for its celebration of general priapism among the British aristocracy, will be the coda to the Opera House’s first “act”; it will be followed, after a brief intermission for refreshments — among which will be, of course, Ohio’s inimitable chocolate-mushroom casserole bites and autumn straw-juice — by an offering of improvisational sketches based on themes drawn from “Scenes from Bismarck, North Dakota,” and “Exhalations of the Evening Sky above the Wall where Marcellus Expired,” two compelling scenarios of love, lust, and desire, passion and the wheat harvest: primeval and undeniable forces that “urge us,” as Captain William Westie wrote so pungently, “to get one’s still-warm ashes hauled but good.”

[Photographs, bibelots, postcards, blotters, bricks, posters, mugs, lanterns, pens, pencils, letter openers, baseball caps, tents, sweatshirts, and genuine mahogany veneer wall plaques with gold-leaf trim that bear the likenesses of Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Barbra Streisand, Rimbaud, Einstein, and Leonard Bernstein chatting with Woody Allen will be on sale in the lobby and in selected fine-foods markets throughout Cincinnati, and in midwestern states to be named.]