Smoke and Mirrors — Edward Nagel

SMOKE and MIRRORS is a two act play where two lawyers,father and son, both fall in love with a runner-up Miss Universe. The father wants to marry her but she turns him down and marries the son. The father dies of cancer and on his gravestone he puts,"When a man has a son he ought to have the decency to die." With his wife eight months pregnant, he becomes obsessed trying to find out what his father meant by that quote. With an ancient Jungian analyst they had used in court, he plunges back into the "smoke and mirrors" past, finds out there is a method to his fathers madness, and after the shock wears off he transmutes the universal truth to true manhood and tolerance for his wife:the ultimate soap opera love/erotic neurosis rises to a high side archetypal healing Eros.