Hackner was a short, shifty-eyed, devious little man with an odd sense of humor. In addition to targeting Haydn's record for quantity, he was fascinated by Schoenberg's affinity for producing pain. He would customarily count coughs during a concert as a gage of just how boring a piece was, and sought to write the type of music that would create a cacophony of coughing, regarding it as a form of audience participation.Mozart's last (41st) symphony was nicknamed, "Jupiter" because of its jollity. Hackner's Symphony No. 14 was nicknamed "VIX," not because the Roman numerals total 14, but because jars of ointment were handed out to the audience afterwards to soothe their chests, which were sore from coughing."More boring than baroque" was his credo. In fact, the composer took it as a personal challenge to make each new piece he wrote more musically, mentally, and physically exhausting than the last one. Of his early works, the composer wrote, "I like to try to keep musical phrases one or two notes short of a melody. When a sequence of notes begins to lead a listener to believe he is hearing the start of an interesting musical phrase, I stop the sequence and start a new one that is completely unrelated. That usually startles the listener, and creates bitter disappointment. While one might expect the listener to stop listening and go do something else, I find that never happens. Listeners have been conditioned by my predecessors to believe that if they are fatigued by music, they must not be sensitive to the art, or too low browed to grasp the significance of the piece. The listener takes this as a personal challenge, and becomes only more determined to persevere, submitting willfully to a form of torture." And so begins this season's classical music series at the town's concert hall. Hackner is a local composer who, as you might surmise, is interested more in quantity rather than quality-as well as an affront to the senses. In that regard, he fits right in, for in the town of Idiotville, effrontery is to be applauded, political correctness is supported to the detriment of the population, and childhood creativity with explosives is understood for what it is: an outward expression of creativity, intelligence, and inner pain manifesting in explosive demonstrations in the physical world.The beginning of what will turn out to be the most historic period in the town's existence is innocent enough. The mayor, in need of having some insect-infested trees marked with yellow x's removed from the grounds, hires his brother-in-law Charlie, a beer-drinking ex-con-associating ne'er-do-well whose first chance to work for the mayor should have been his last. But with a soft spot for Charlie (or in his own head), the mayor hires him to rid the town of the infected trees-at the same time as the Tie-a-Yellow-Ribbon-to-Support-the-War program begins. Soon enough, the treeless town finds itself careening from one disaster to the next.From the Church of Bob to a really poor use of a time machine, from the operation of the police department to the economy, from entertainment to politics and energy, the daily lives of the town's inhabitants are examined in not-so-great detail, sparing no one and nothing in a shocking exposé of the goings-on in a typical American town. But for reasons that no one-not even the mayor-can figure out, things just seem to go from bad to worse until a re-booting the town's nuclear reactor just might lead to the greatest triumph the town has ever seen.A raucous, riotous, and altogether politically incorrect sojourn from the absurd to the ridiculous, Robert Kral's debut is a searing indictment of American culture, society, and overall values. Teaching that burying your head in the sand only leads to suffocation, Idiotville is a hysterical reminder that we are all idiots in one way or another, but only a true idiot refuses to recognize bad decisions and learn from them.