So, to briefly memorialize the show for now: it’s a play about a play–a construction called, thanks again to ‘kipedia, a “mise en abyme”–about Edgar Alan Poe.
I’m sure I’m not alone in suspecting that, on occasion, those perfectly-overheard quotes reported in the “Verbatim” column of this paper are fabricated. It’s easy to imagine the editors sitting around a table, perhaps aided by humor-inducing beverages, cracking jokes until the quotes have written themselves.
Given that “human,” in a biological sense, is just one step in some grander evolutionary process, Arthur C. Clarke wondered whether we might one day ditch our corporeal forms entirely and “live” forever as non-physical entities. One day, maybe, but not soon enough for the idea’s originator – Clarke is dead at the age of ninety.