Pearl: I, They, Contributory
Pearl: I, They, Contributory is an avant garde play written by David Hasselhoff (under the nom de plume Charles 'The Dick' Dickens). Its reception was luke warm, at best, but nonetheless has gone down in history as one of the most ambitious works of art ever. It was first performed near the old Reichstag building in Berlin.
The play's brevity, brutality and nudity got it noticed. Critics hailed the play's opaque meaning as a direct attack on German society. Audiences stayed away. It was Hasselhoff's first and last play. It had three performances.
Curtains open to an empty, dark stage
A stiletto shoe is flung from right offstage
Long pause
A dirty white tennis shoe is thrown from left offstage to land beside the high heal shoe
A naked dwarf is lowered from the ceiling into the shoes
Dwarf: I was born...
Long pause
Dwarf: ... like this. Falls...the Berlin Wall.
A naked, masked woman walks on stage.
Woman: I am the Casual model. I have been brutally randomised.
Dwarf: What you say is falsifiable. Exogenously so.
Woman: Association, intervention and counterfactuals. I am Judea Pearl's Meta Model.
Dwarf: Let's ask him.
Enter Judea Pearl.
Pearl: I, They, Contributory.
Woman: Death!
Dwarf: Death!
Pearl: As I die, as do we all. Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference. Just buy my books.
Curtain falls.
Interpretation[edit]
Students considered the play's key point to be its message — sum-product message-passing. If you ignored the dwarf and the masked woman, you were left with Judea Pearl. That would lead to Artificial Intelligence taking over and humanity taking its final plunge into extinction. For these reasons alone, the play Pearl: I, They, Contributory is considered to be so important. The surprise was that it needed the genius of an actor/singer from Hollywood to write it.