“Well,” he said, “first of all, you got to maintain the intensity level…” It was as if my question had pumped adrenaline into an otherwise sluggish metabolism. At once he shifted into overdrive, and like an excitable kid suddenly aware that all the wonders of the world were open before him, he went on and on, talking in wrinkles about elective energy, postinternalization, sub-textual environments, private moments, the arc of character, pivotal pressures, submerged configurations, the identity of opposites, the parabola of change, the negation of the negation, the contribution of the deconstructionists at Yale, and the importance of getting down on all fours and looking at it from the audience’s point of view. He was wired on words, a diarrhea of words, evacuated, incredibly, by a man whose mode of expression had never been speech. His cosmic insights about acting were neither plausible nor convincing, yet Val and Abdul listened like figures on a frieze, slaves to his shallow enchantment. Perhaps it was the way he did it: Derek took his glitter very seriously, pausing at times to rivet his eyes on some blazing but spectral manifestation of quintessential truth, carving the air with ill-defined, semaphoric gestures, punctuating his sentences with a cigarette before inhaling it (as if he were indeed onstage, up to his ass in Noel Coward), and then going still all over, as if to the beckoning call of a distant trumpet, as he posed for Mount Rushmore.

His monologue made a few things incontrovertible: Derek obviously derived a kind of spiritual uplift from his “real” work; he was deeply stimulated by the self-evident, so long as it was couched in a specialist vocabulary—he seemed to think that his blather clarified some elegant and abstruse scientific law; he could throughout his cumbersome recital scarcely disguise his pity for anyone so unfortunate as not to be a performer.

“And what you got to realize,” he rattled on, “is that the basic symbol, what you call the prototype, of our culture, is the actor. We tell you people how to conduct yourselves, how to respond to the phases and stages of life and death, how to express courage and fear, how to care, how to make love and make jokes and make good. We are ‘the engineers of the human soul’—Joseph Stalin said that.” It was good to know he was quoting a man who had never been wrong in his whole life.

The insolence of this pygmy. His very insignificance blinded him to the comprehension of his drive toward acting—the chance to lead many lives, with each incarnation infinitely richer, more exciting, more fulfilling than his own.

“And another thing,” he was saying, his voice shrill with messianic fervor, “we have the responsibility of bringing culture to the people. To bring something of value to their drab lives.”