Following a call to his wife, our British protagonist next phones his
ex-lover from 11 years ago and invites her to the hotel bar in an
attempt to sleep with her. When she leaves, our protagonist
unwittingly purchases a sex toy for his son and returns to his hotel
room. Here he hears the voice of a women. And it's not just that
it's the voice of a woman, it's the voice of the blond chick sitting
on stage, the one that to this point has sat there quietly. He runs
into the hallway knocking on doors attempting to find that voice. On
the final door which he knocks upon, he states his name only to find
that the two young women inside are in town to attend his conference –
and one (Lisa) is that female voice he has been searching for.

The three go back to the hotel bar and our protagonist orders another
of his fancy drinks with 6 or 7 words to explain it that I don't
remember. The Ohio chicks each excitedly order a mojito in what I'm
sure is supposed to be another head nod to how sophisticated LA folks
are compared to everyone else. The ladies explain how they are from
out of town and splurged on the hotel to attend the conference.
Another revealing tidbit comes by way of a freeway reference; southern
Californians reference their roads using “the” such as in “the 405″
and “the 101.” Our Ohio ladies say they arrived by taking “the 71,”
but no one from Ohio would ever call it that. I'm from Pittsburgh
originally, I know people!

Returning to the hotel room with Lisa, our final head nod to LA folks
takes place as she is unaware of turndown service and embarrasses
herself by thinking that our Brit put those slippers by his bed.
Following some bizarre discussion on Lisa's facial deformities and her
last sexual partner of 8 years ago (a 60-year-old married man) the two
have sex. A strange dream sequence follows, where our protagonist is
invited to the hotel manager's office. It is here that the play's
gimmick is rather heavy-handedly revealed to be intentional: the grey
haired dude has read every character in the play aside from our Brit
and Lisa. The hotel manager states that everyone is actually one
person and they're all here to please our protagonist, but he needs to
stay away from Lisa. He wakes up from his dream and asks Lisa to
marry him, but slowly her idiosyncrasies become glaring instead of
cute and here voice becomes a tandem of the blond chick and the grey
haired dude until it's finally just the grey haired dude's voice. Lisa
has lost her “wow” factor and is now another faceless nobody. Our
Brit shuffles through his speech, returns home to a calibration in his
honor where he doesn't recognize anyone, and rereads his “Dear John”
letters from the women who used to mean something to him.

So if Charlie did write this play, he wrote it for the LA audience. I
felt like it was far too straightforward and obvious to be a Kaufman
piece, but I could see him writing it as a sort of experiment. “Hope”
was an amazingly brilliant piece that deserved the name Kaufman
associated with it.

Also, not sure if this had anything to do with the play or not, but a
BMW was “broken down” in the middle of the road on the steeply uphill
exit from the parking structure, causing traffic leaving the play to
be most ridiculous. Given the reality-being-part-of-the-play nature
of “Hope” I thought maybe Charlie scripted this as well.

o_O Wow, very cool. Sirius should've recorded that one, too. If you were there and have another take on things, feel free to drop us a line. And if you mugged Meryl Streep or Tom Noonan and managed to come away with a copy of either script… well, you know where to send it.

Also in attendance at UCLA was John, who sent in a scan of the playbill's contents page:

Neato. I have the playbill from the New York and London shows, too. Maybe I should scan ‘em.