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That's my head you're talking about!

You remember that scene in "It's A Wonderful Life" where Lionel Barrymore tells Jimmy Stewart that he's worth more dead than alive? I've always thought it would be pretty terrible to know one's value to the world in cold, hard currency.

Turns out mine is $20,000.

At least, that's according to the creators of "Bring Me the Head of Dominic Papatola," a Minnesota Fringe Festival show that continues its life with a run the next three weekends at the Bryant-Lake Bowl.

In the Pigs Eye Theatre Company production, the price (really rather insultingly low, when you get down to it) on my head is fixed by a local actress. That character, I am reliably informed, is based loosely on an actual performer who feels I have been less than charitable to her over the years and to whom, on one occasion, I recall having attributed "overblown and annoying characterizations."

The actor playing the guy who initially agrees to do the hatchet job was in a play in last year's Fringe to which I responded, in part: "It's so heinously written, so painfully performed that, sitting there, I felt my organs shutting down from the production's sheer, toxic awfulness." What these people have against me, I have no idea.

Kally, the fictional actress, raises the price on my head through standard nonprofit procedures. She solicits contributions from those who would benefit from the project — namely, the misunderstood and underappreciated pool of Twin Cities theater people. And she gets a grant.

Reviewing this show was an unusual experience for me, and having me review it was probably an unusual experience for those in the cast. I'm accustomed to sitting quietly in my aisle seat, spewing my poison in relative anonymity. They're used to hurling invectives at critics in muttered, half-drunken tones in the corner booth at Leaning Tower of Pizza.

Compounding this surreal scene was the fact that a half-dozen members of my perversely loyal family decided to attend opening night. My brother-in-law hooted in what I can only describe as a decidedly nonsupportive manner. My 73-year-old mother went through the whole endeavor with a glassy-eyed smile. My guess is that, in a long theater-going life, she has never seen a play in which a guy bends down to kiss a woman's leather-booted foot as he's whacked with his own belt and told to "—— me, bitch."

But when you get down to it, the play wasn't really about me at all. True, quotes from some of my more — um — constructive reviews were stenciled all over the set ("You didn't really write all of those, did you?" a fellow critic queried me at a subsequent Fringe show. I assured him I had. "Jeez, you're vicious," he said.

But the critic-killing was merely a device to advance the plot about the woolly, wacky world of theater people. The show could as easily have been called "Bring Me the Head of Rohan Preston" or "Bring Me the Head of Ben Brantley," though I immodestly confess that neither of those titles comes off the tongue quite so trippingly.

Still, that is my personal demise they're discussing. The decapitated cranium that Kally wants to treat with such animalistic disrespect is mine. The mouth that the barrel of the handgun is crammed into belongs to yours truly (well, not really, but I don't want to give away a plot point). So, how did it feel to watch people discuss my violent, terribly premature demise?

Pretty cool, actually.

I love to preach about how good theater criticism should be a dialogue among the critic, artists and audiences. I try to encourage that dialogue however possible.

And while I guess I wouldn't have expected the talkback to take the form of a play that advocates my grisly murder, the mere fact that theater people would even try to pull a stunt like this proves that either (a) they're a lot braver than one would expect or that (b) I've somehow created the impression that I can take it as well as I can dish it out.

I hope both those things are true. But just in case they're not, I'm planning on walking around with a Kevlar-coated neckbrace for the next, oh, year or so.