Note: This article is satirical.

In a special, one-night-only showing last Tuesday, the Colorado State University Theater Department previewed their latest effort: an original, three-hour-long dramatization of the birth of CSU President Tony Frank. The play, written by local lighthouse dweller Summers Cooper, was met with a standing ovation from critics, audience members and still-on-stage performers alike.

“In many ways, this production is about America,” said Cooper, shortly after the final curtain. “Also, the first few rows may get wet.”

“Tony Frank: A Love Story” is structured as three interlocking one-act plays. The first one-act play is a condensed history of the universe, presenting everything that happened before Tony Frank as nothing but meaningless chaos leading inevitably to his birth.

In the second one-act play, Tony Frank’s troubled, violent birth by Cam the Ram in the office of a confused veterinarian is depicted. The third one-act play is completely silent, comprised entirely of two janitors cleaning up and attempting to communicate their creeping existential dread through erratic tap dance.

“The play is wonderful,” said director Catharine Hemly, midway through the second one-act play. “Cooper really has written the definitive American three-interlocking-one-act-plays play.”

She went on to praise the cast, which included a guy in a Cam the Ram costume portraying Frank’s birthing surrogate, Cameron Theodore Ramsworth, Stacy Steepenwood as a nurse grappling with multiple-personality disorder and Jacob Kutateladze as a mysterious character known only as “X.”

“Of course, we’re most excited about Tony Frank’s decision to to play himself,” Hemly said.

“There’s a moment late in the play when Tony Frank emerges fully formed from the uterus of Cam the Ram as an Opera singer belts out the climactic notes to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, and then gets up, wipes himself off and starts sobbing as the nurses surrounding him break out into song and dance,” Hemly said. “That really made me remember why I got into theater in the first place.”

Several audience members described the three-interlocking-one-act-plays play as being truly transcendent.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” audience member Craig Phillips said. “I was in tears by the end of the first one-act play, which was 59 minutes of the lights slowly fading in on the empty stage, followed by 60 seconds of freeform jazz and actors dressed as dinosaurs, historical figures and celebrities ramming into each other. After that I was like, ‘Wow, I’m definitely going to go home and divorce my wife.’”

The play, which is set to open in May, is an early contender for the 2014 Tony’s Tony Award Awards, which is a ceremony run out of Tony Frank’s basement in which Tony Frank awards the Tony Frank Award for the play that he would be most likely to award a Tony Award to if he were in a position to award such an award.

The Hall Monitor-Herald is written by Niles Hachmeister, Patrick Hoehne, Chris Vanjonack and Andrew Walker. If you are interested in writing for us, please send us an email at thehallmonitorherald@gmail.com.