DEATH BY CRAB.(death of President Warren Gamaliel Harding)

Kyle Jarrow is twenty-three years old and bears a passing resemblance to Dennis the Menace. He is the kind of person who enjoys provoking people, and who can enlist a piano and a trumpet to get his point across loudly, if he wishes. His usual collaborator is an old Yale classmate, Alex Timbers, who runs a theatre company called Les Freres Corbusier. One project on their drawing board is a Scientology Christmas pageant that will star child actors and raise troubling questions about Gerhard Schroder's Germany. At the moment, however, they are engrossed in a more urgent project: the enshrinement of August 2nd as a national day of mourning.

On that day in 1923, the dashing, dissolute President Warren Gamaliel Harding--the handsomest of all American Presidents, historians concur--died suddenly, in San Francisco. In the rock opera "President Harding Is a Rock Star" (now playing in SoHo), for which Jarrow wrote the music and the lyrics, and which Timbers directed, the twenty-ninth President is subjected to the "Behind the Music" treatment. In 1920, on his fifty-fifth birthday, Harding, a not very bright schoolteacher, newspaperman, and insurance salesman from Marion, Ohio, won the Presidency in a landslide. By his fifty-eighth birthday, he had reportedly staked and lost the White House china in a poker game, his cronies had used the nation's naval oil reserves to line their own pockets (a scrape that became known as Teapot Dome), he had trysted with at least one young woman in the Oval Office, and, worse, he had died. Some say he contracted a fatal case of food poisoning after eating bad crab; others say he suffered a coronary embolism or an aneurysm; still others say he was poisoned by his wife, Flossie, who had had enough of his bad behavior. But, as Flossie did not permit an autopsy, this last theory is mere conjecture.

"The current thinking is, he had an aneurysm or a ...