Overview

Imprisoned deep in the dungeon of the Chateau D'If, Edmond Dantes is tortured by memories of his beloved, the beautiful Mercedes, and of the cruel injustice of his punishment. He is both comforted and tormented by his hallucinations, and is tortured and interrogated endlessly with increasingly absurd questions (How many virgins have you deflowered? When did you first swear allegiance to Satan? Where does God end and the Devil begin? What do you like on your waffles? Does this make me look fat?). But gradually he begins to discover that he is perhaps not imprisoned in the Chateau D'If at all, that in fact he and Mercedes are prisoners in a much larger nightmare, a really dreadful novel by the demented egomaniac Alexandre Dumas and his resentful assistant and literary drudge, Maquet, who play all the other roles in the story which they are composing as the play goes along. In this wildly surreal tale, Dumas' novel is twisted back upon itself to form a dark reflection of the imaginary Count of Monte Cristo's relationship to a possibly imaginary deity who is in fact Alexandre Dumas trying to write a best selling potboiler. As Mercedes and Dantes claw their way towards the truth, Edmond accepts his role as the Count but vows to take his revenge not only upon the cardboard villains in the novel, but upon the real author of all his suffering and humiliation, the demented god of his universe, Alexandre Dumas himself.

Keywords

• Betrayal
• Love
• Memory
• Not Applicable