The Thousandth Night is a one-man show about an actor in Occupied France, who was arrested and has been put on a train for Buchenwald. The train is derailed by saboteurs, the prisoners are herded to the platform of a bombed-out train station. The play begins when the actor, Guy the Bonheur, steps through a door into the train station thinking he can just walk out the station and go home, and finds a roomful of gendarmes, (who guarded the prison trains). This is the audience. He tries to convince them not to put him back out on the freezing platform; not to load him on the new train. He tells us has never done anything subversive against the Germans, he and his company simply act little plays at the Cafe Shaherazad, and he begins performing the plays, playing all the parts himself, in an effort to connect with them, and to stay in the room.

The stories are all comedies from the Arabian Nights, and Guy plays not only all the characters, but his company members playing the characters. He plays 26 characters over the course of the play. We learn that two of them were Jewish, and were shipped off the Poland because Guy refused to lie and say they were not. We learn that two were in the Resistance, and Lisette, whom he adores, was arrested because Guy did not dare to help her.

All of the hard choices of living under an occupation are in the play, and still Guy continues to play for his life. At last Guy realizes, as Lisette told him, “If we submit to them out of fear, we are putting the chains on ourselves.” And Guy reclaims his art, and his soul, and performs the final story in a manner that is truly subversive.

As the train draws into the station behind him, Guy, with pride, agrees, “I am a danger to the Reich. So, this must be my train.” And he goes.