Reichenbach Falls
by Don Nigro

In this powerful, dark, densely packed ten minute play set in 1974, the President sits drinking in the White House on the night before his resignation, talking to a Secret Service Man.

The President has had too much to drink, is in great distress, and is near suicidal.

He strikes up a conversation, reveals things about his life, asks increasingly disturbing, even insulting questions, and tries to convince the Secret Service Man to give him his gun.

All the repressed frustration and rage in the President begins to pour out—his hatred of the Kennedys, and the secrets he seems to know about their murders, his hate and fear of J. Edgar Hoover, his indignation that he should be held accountable for something as trivial as covering up evidence in a burglary.

And in their intense, darkly funny and frightening encounter, we learn that it was not Holmes who survived the plunge over Reichenbach Falls, but Moriarty, and not the people who run America, but the murderers, and not God who runs the world, but the Devil.

See also Nigro's Traitors , and his Grand Cayman for another view of the President and of the dark underside of history.

Published in the collection The Chaplin Plays and Others