Mel Says to Give You His Best

Carver, a struggling writer, is awakened in the middle of the night to find Rapp, a young black man, at his door. Rapp claims that a mutual friend," Mel Coppersmith (whom Carver can't recall), told him that he would find a welcome at Carver's any time, day or night, so he blithely invites himself to stay

Thereafter, in a sequence of sometimes funny, sometimes disquieting scenes, punctuated by a disembodied voice which booms "Please maintain your focus," Rapp insinuates himself ever more insidiously into Carver's life

He talks of finding a job, but nothing is suitable; he promises not to interfere with Carver's work, and then proceeds to do so; he taunts and menaces Carver; he brings in a mute black girl to share the already crowded apartment; and, before long, he suggests that Carver should be the one to leave

Ultimately the shaken Carver, after having come close to violence, conceives the means to rid himself of Rapp - whereupon the doorbell rings again, this time disclosing a young white man with a pretty blonde girl at his side: friends of Mel Coppersmith's, looking for a place to crash!

A remarkable original and innovative "black comedy," which makes deft use of absurdist techniques to illuminate the shadowed recesses between what is real and what is imagined