Ride the Cyclone: The Musical

RIDE THE CYCLONE 

Synopsis 

McCarter play synopsis are provided to help inform the curious and/or potential audience members about the story content of our plays in production. Each are fairly detailed in the description of the play’s events. Some may want to read the overview of the story of the musical Ride the Cyclone below before the performance, while others may skip the synopsis to avoid the revelation of plot points before experiencing the play in performance. 

The choice is up to you! 

In a dark, dilapidated warehouse the detritus and debris of a once thriving amusement park is stored. It is an aging, rusting assortment of material and memory:  rides; midway booths; marquees; a bandshell; an entry gate; the massive broken iron girder of a roller coaster, the “Cyclone.” 

A faint beam of moonlightilluminates a figure, a woman, who sings of the never-ending “Dream of Life” and then magically disappears. A moment later, the Amazing KARNAK, a circa 1920’s penny-arcade mechanical fortune-telling machine is revealed. He introduces himself, andtheominous purposefor his design: To predict the exact cause, time, and place of a person’s death. He adds that his powers of prognostication also include his ability to predict his own demise, which he offers— without spoiler alert—will happen in a little over an hour. Then he introduces his “executioner, “that is, a rat named Virgil, who’s also the leader and bass player of the warehouse house band, VIRGIL & THE UNDERWORLDS. 

Karnak nextpresents the Saint Cassian Chamber Choir of Uranium City, Saskatchewan, Canada. Thefive teenagers, seen in flashback at the Kiwanis International singing competition, sing a song about their hometown of “Uranium” in the midst of which Karnak tells the tale of previously predicting the choir’s death by roller coaster. He confides that, in fact, it was his suggestion that they ride the Cyclone. Their very demise is depicted in dance and song. 

Karnak greets them and announces that it’s “time to play!” The very bewildered, now deadchoir members—OCEAN, CONSTANCE, NOEL, MISCHA, and RICKY—not sure where they are or why, are introduced by nameand compelled by Karnak to declare their signature catchphrases.When the inquisitive and assertive Ocean asks if they are there to play a game, her question unexpectedly and inadvertently results in the activation of “game mode.” Karnakshares no details on what the game is, how it is to be played, and who or what decides the winner, but he does offer that the contest’s momentous grand prize is that one worthy player will get to live again. He also imparts this mysterious prophecy: “The one who wants to win it the most shall redeem the loser—in order to complete the whole.”  

Just before the game officially begins, Karnak introduces a mystery contestant: JANE DOE, a haunting figure who moves like a marionette with broken strings and carries a headless doll. Jane creepily shares with the freaked-out choir members that after the Cyclone accident her body was found but not her head, which is the reason for her anonymity—she’s not even sure of her own identity or the details of her life before the accident. 

The game at lastcommences with Karnak’s announcement that Oceanwill be the first competitor. She tries to defer going first to Constance—her reputed BFF, whom she seems to easily manipulate—but Karnak prevents the swap and Ocean approaches the enigmatic machineto have her fortune read. She pulls the lever on the side of Karnak’sbooth, and he shares, in the style of a beauty pageant announcer, a minibiography of Ocean’s upbringing and personality that is played out as a montage: Capricorn;ambitious nature;born into a family of humanists; the white sheep of her family; high school president; straight-A student; and the most successful girl in town.Ocean takes her allotted time to (not so) humblebrag aboutthe long laundry list of things that make her the best among her classmates, but then takes a defiant stance that if this is how each contestant’s worth is tobe measured then she will not take part in the game. Karnak accepts Ocean’sstance as ceding the game entirelyand is poised to move on when she capitulates and sings a smarmy song “What the World Needs is People Like Me,” in which she celebrates her superiority—“I’m the mover, I’m the shaker, I’m the headline maker”—andhighlights and slights every one of her choirmates as “born to lose.”  

At the end of Ocean’s anthem to herself, Karnak discloses that the person to be brought back to life will be decided by unanimous vote from every member of the choir. Ocean tries to backpedal from the insolent sentiments expressed in her song; she approaches individually each of her targetsto affirm that she loves them, but even her attempts to compliment and connect withMischa, Ricky, and Noel are undercutting. As a last-ditch effort, she tries to reframe her songas a cautionary tale of hubris, but her appeal falls flat. 

Noel is next up. The passionate Piscean, who has already revealed himself to be the only gay guy in his school, pulls the lever and the details of hislife to date,personality, and signature style are presented:a penchant for nihilism, performance, and French accents; his irreverent and iconoclastic tendencies; and his most-romantic-boy-in-town status—a truth known only to him. Noel confesses his frustrations of growing up in culturally-stunted Uranium, as well as his high-flownfantasies for bad love, dissipation, and a future life as a sexual provocateur and novelist àla Jean Genet. His soul bearing to the group is cut short whenKarnak “outs” Noel as a Taco Bell mega-mall food court worker, the antithesis of his romanticized dream-self and the only cruel and ironic means by whichthe teen can earn enough money to escape Uranium. For his song, he strips away the façade of Noel Gruber, as well as most of his clothes, to reveal himselfin the role of his dreams and fantasies, “That F#@&ed Up Girl,” a cabaret study on a Post-War France prostitute with a heart “of charcoal.”  

When Ocean balks at Noel’s song’s expletive-rich chorus and its lack of a moral or lesson, Karnack comments, “Not every story has a lesson, Ocean.” This sends her insistently into “Every Story’s Got a Lesson,”a song followed by a not so impromptu improv performed with Constance on the theme of unlocking the power of the positive. Constance uncharacteristically rebels against Ocean’s prescribed scenario by undermining its ending and asserting her own less positive and funnier ending, much to Ocean’s surprise and dismay. 

Next to compete is Mischa, whose immigrant origin story is detailed by Karnak: born outside Odessa in Ukraine; son of a woman who worked on the Chernobyl cleanup crew; adopted out as a teen to a Canadian couple who thought they were adopting a toddler; emotional inattention gives rise to the angriest boy in town who finds solace, strength, and a creative outlet in commercialized hiphop. The beatboxing Mischa declares himself as the best rapper in all of North Eastern Saskatchewan, who, when he feels rage—and he’s feeling the rage now—raps about money. His rapper’s delight and skilz aredisplayed in “This Song is Awesome,” a highly auto-tuned hip-hop fantasy adventure, describing an abundance of material possessions, a celebrity-sized nightlife, and the purchase of a Lear jet for a triumphant return home to the Ukraine. With Mischa’s rage having subsided through song, he exposes a more vulnerable side in a folkloric dream ballet “Talia” that fantasizesa first meeting and wedding scene with his Kyivan fiancé, whom he connected with via his YouTube comment wall but has never met in three dimensions.  

At the end of the song, Mischa is overcome with sadness and comforted by the choir. Ocean remarks on the moment of bonding, and considers that they all,having perished in their youth, have died virgins, a statement that compels Karnak to call on Constance—a spotlight immediately finds her. She responds to Karnak’s prompt with anuneasy, “What?” to which Karnak replies, “Just thought this seemed like the perfect segue…not ready to divulge that information just yet?” Constance demurs the attentionand tries to literally shift the spotlight back to Ocean. 

Mischa calls on Ricky to go next to express his “truth and wisdom,” but Ricky offers instead to tell everyone about his experience as a superhero sex god on a cat planet; he shares his alter ego as “a rival prophet from the Zolarian Starcluster.” He pulls the lever on Karnak’s booth, which starts the montage of his life. Images of Ricky become superimposed by classic origin scenes from comic books—Superman. Spider-Man, Batman, and Silver Surfer. Karnak tells the details of Ricky’s own origin story: born with a rare degenerative disease; lost his power of speech; family takes vow of silence, interacting largely over comic books and their fourteen cats; indifference of others toward himleads to development of his own super-sized imagination and an elaborate, and rather kinky, fantasy life. In the fantasia of Richard Potts, Ricky, the “Space Age Bachelor Man,” weaves a tale about being called upon as the chosen one to help save the galaxy by using his “powers” to repopulate the cat planet of Zolar. The choir members remark on the transformation of Ricky in the afterlife—a multitalented phenom, no longer help prisoner by body or mind. He assures them that he is the same person he was when alive on earth, but no one ever listened to him. 

Jane Doe, the only unidentified body of the Cyclone disaster, steps forward as the game’s fifth out of six contestants. When she pulls Karnak’s lever nothing happens. He reports that no one in Uranium could recall who she might be, though there were rumors of a girl who joined the choir shortly before the accident; Karnak never read her fortune. In “The Ballad of Jane Doe,”Jane laments and shares her lingering fear that because of her anonymity her death will go unmourned and she will be eternally forgotten. In an attempt to comfort Jane, the members of the choir, lead by Ocean, create a celebration and “The New Birthday Song” for her. Jane asks how they know that it is her birthday and Ricky kindly retorts, “How do we know it’s not your birthday,” and he submits to her that she can name herselfin the moment and suggests a new special name for her, which she accepts.  

Meanwhile, other moments of choir-member bonding occur. Noel shares in a birthday toast of vodka with Mischa, and for the first time feels seen and understood. Constance compliments Ocean on her kindness toward Jane, who they both agree has the saddest story. Ocean queries Constance, “You’re not thinking of voting for her, are you?” Constance assures her Ocean that she is voting for Ocean and then inquires if Ocean would ever consider voting for her. Predictably, Ocean makes the moment all about herself and in afit of uncharacteristic pique Constance punches Ocean.  

Constance’s lashing out cures Karnak to announce her into the competition—a secret-natured Scorpio. She pulls the lever and he offers the most meager of bios: thrice voted the nicest girl in homeroom, an award she secretly threw away; holder of a yearbook filled with evidence of her own anonymity and invisibility, despite unquestionably being the nicest girl in town. Constance, in counterpoint, begins her presentation of self by disclosing that she lost her virginity to a carnie in a port-o-potty three hours before their fateful ride on the Cyclone. With that off of her chest, she shares the history of her family in Uranium and their pride in the town, a pride that Constance held in common with them until she entered high school, where hometown pride was viewed as stupid. She explainshow her high-school experience likewise skewed her feelings about herself and her perspective on her parents and their worth; she became poisoned with anger and shame.She then describes the Cyclone accident, not as a scary or violent experience, but as a weightlessness, an unlocking, and a welling up of love for everything around her—all of the sweet, simple details of her beautiful, safe small-town life passing before her eyes. The postmortem Constance asserts there being no shame in loving Uranium, adding that only good things happened to her there, and it is only through the accident that she came to realize this. She illustrates in song her change in perspective, beginning with “Jawbreaker,” her premortem assessment of life—sweet at first, but the more you suck the more tasteless and heartbreaking it becomes—which segues into “Sugar Cloud,” Constance’s acceptance of her own apotheosis as the nicest girl in town. At the end of Constance’s turn, Ocean approaches her and truly sees Constance for the first time; she holds Constance’s hand and whispers an apology. 

With competition complete, Karnak announces that it is time for the final vote. 

Spoiler alert! If you would like to read what happens next in the story and how the play ends, continue reading. 

Karnak calls on Ocean and informs her that it has been decided that she will solely have the final vote over who lives or dies. She pushes back that he told them they all would have a vote. He counters that he has decided that the final vote would go to the person with the highest grade point average, addingthat time is growing short and his death at the hands—or teeth—of Virgil is imminent. Ocean considers that if she votes for herself, then the moral of the story is that “humans suck.” She pushes back demanding that he honor the original agreement. And then he shows her asmoky and light-filled view of the other side, dangling the carrot ofan easy return to life—one merely walks in and moves toward the light.   

Feeling the pressure, Ocean repeats Karnak’s prophecy: “The one who wants to win it the most shall redeem the loser—in order to complete the whole.”She suddenly realizes, given herprevious righteous position that every story has a moral and a lesson, that she cannot chose herself. Ocean looks at Constance, who in turn looks to Jane; Ocean agrees. Noting that though they died young, she, Constance, Noel, Mischa, and Ricky had lives and experiences, while Jane can’t remember the life and experiences that she had, Ocean casts the vote for Jane to return. 

Karnak confirms the vote, but Jane is confused. The other choir members urge her toward the lights of the other side. As she enters the smoky other side, she is transformed. Karnak then identifies her as “Penny Lamb, born April 7th. Aries, the lucky nature.” A montage of Penny’s entire life—from her birth to death as an elderly lady—plays at a dizzying speed for the choir as they lookon and sings “It’s Not a Game.” The choir sings about the ride of life and its unpredictability, its joy and pain. Suddenly a countdown, reminiscent of cinematic Super-8 leader threaded through a projector, begins. Karnak, experiencing mechanical failure, struggles to share his final insights about the remaining choir members’ fate. Karnak dies. The choir members, who have huddled together in the midst of Karnak’s death-throes, realize that they are still in some realm of existence—they are both thrilled and terrified. What’s next for them “Sailing Through Space” together? They are not sure. However, one thing they are certain of in what might be an existential eternity is the nature of life; and that is that “It’s Just a Ride.”