Price of Admission

A man known simply as Joe visits a movie theater, as he has innumerable times in the past. But this time something rather strange happens:
He has to decide, after having felt for the tacky gum left by him or someone else, where to open himself so that the tiredness can flow out.... Over the steps, where there are steps, the two streams flowed apart and then together. Finally they come together beyond the seats in a space where there is nothing between front seats and the raised place on which the large silver screen stands. The blood collects there and stops.
So begins Joe's metaphysical journey in Sam Eisenstein's Price of Admission, a trip based loosely on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, infused with equal doses of Sartre's No Exit and the popular television series, "The Twilight Zone." A homegrown surrealist in a society where surreality has been largely received, Eisenstein sends his protagonist careening through an urban underworld of dead-pan delivered illogic and sublime visions, in a mysterious (and often humorous) confrontation with his own mortality.