The play begins. Onstage is an actress from Noel Coward's Private Lives waiting to be joined by George. Music plays. She waits. Suddenly, George is thrown onstage in a Hamlet costume, holding a skull.
George doesn't know any of his lines, although he bravely fakes "To be or not to be," but only gets that far. The actress keeps feeing him lines, but he hasn't a clue. Finally, the Stage Mananger, thinly disguised as a maid, enters to dust off the railing (and the skull) and whispers his lines to him.
After the rest of the scene from Private Lives, George is left onstage for a moment, until an actor arrives. From his speech, George realizes that this actor must be playing Horatio, and NOW he is Hamlet.
Neither Horatio nor Gertrude stay long, and he is left onstage alone again. He realizes that, "Sometimes people in Shakespeare have soliloquies," and decides to wait for somone else to come onstage. Suddenly, the down center spot comes on and all the other lights go off--and he is called on to fake his way through a soliloquy. He does snippets of Shakespeare, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Act of Contrition. He tells us how he almost joined the monastery out of high school. And he keeps calling, "Line!" in the hopes of getting the Stage Manager to provide him with another line. He is then interrupted by Winnie, from Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, who brings out two garbage cans, getting in one and indicating that he get in the other. He does so, and discover he is kneeling in muck. She goes through a series of actions: "Pause. Pause. Wiggles ears. Tries to touch tongue to nose. Pause."
An announcement by Meg the Stage Manager, informs the audience--and George--that the play is now switching to A Man For All Seasons, and that George will be playing Sir Thomas More. Suddenly the full lights return, and Lady Alice and Lady Margaret rush to him, visiting him in prison before he is executed. Enter the Executioner.
They hustle him to the chopping block, and wait for him to deliver the final lines: "Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God." He keeps trying to wake up, or change plays ("Whose yacht do you think that is out there?") Finally, the Stage Manager enters with the script, and reads him the lines.
He decides that you can never dream your own death, and delivers the lines. In darkness, the Executioner brings down the axe, and Winnie gives us a postscript--followed by a rousing curtain call, as they all applaud the headless body of George.