The ghost in this machine (a man known only by the letter R) tells a pair of stories, one of which is itself a pair of stories, about rebuilding a psyche and a soul in the wake of injury. What injury? Call it the shock wave of the onslaught of the 21st century; Call it the assault of modernity. Two boys journey out across the suburbs of Pennsylvania and the streets of New York City in search of their vanished homes (in this instance, quite literally, vanished homes). These are two journeys across an unstable, shattered America. This is an America of forgotten brothers, loved strangers, superheroes, ghosts, architectural wonders that fall from the sky and a moment of spontaneous art called The Festival of American Unity. Meanwhile, Len Cortez has temporal lobe seizures, which are characterized a fugue of intense spiritual deluge or God experience. For Len this means his consciousness synchronizing with the lyrics of the John Lennon song Imagine while his soul teeters on losing cohesion in a vast, roiling ocean of God’s love. His hip, nonconformist nature struggles to reconcile this seizure-induced love for all God’s creation with his outsider ways. And there’s no heaven, no possessions and no countries. Plus, inconveniently, this is show night. The Jubilant Players (an underground theater group operating out of an abandoned drug store) are debuting their production a new play and during the course of the evening Len is expected to be Dan the social worker, Henry the father, Grandpa Pepper plus miscellaneous bit players. THE JUBILANT PLAYERS combines elements of memoir, children’s fiction and literary fiction to create a hallucinatory rendering of this baffling new century.
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