Play is one of the many experimental one-act dramatic presentations written by Samuel Beckett in a career devoted to questioning the conventions and properties of stage drama. Utilizing such standard traditional literary terminology, it is the story of a man, a wife and the “other woman” recalling the period in which the affair was discovered by the wife. That description of the plot—for lack of a better term—becomes practically superfluous in an analysis of Play, however, as the real subject at hand here is theater itself.
Originally premiering at the Ulmer Theater in Germany in 1963, the first appearance on an American stage would take place six months later at the Cherry Lane Theater in early January of the following year. A few months later, the Old Vic in London hosted the British premiere as a sort of short subject attraction staged before a much more traditional production of a tragedy by Sophocles.
Beckett had commenced writing the play in early 1962 and the original completed first draft actually reversed the gendered demographic of the cast by featuring two male characters and one female. By autumn the title had been changed to Play, the gendering reversed and instead of appearing in casket-like white boxes, the central feature of the set design had become the over-sized identical gray burial urns.
As part of his onslaught against audience expectations of dramaturgy, Beckett’s vision of the performance of his play was one in which the lines of dialogue were not only separated from the structure of conversation, but devoid of inflection or tonal meaning. To be spoken in a flat, monotonous attitude, the most significant direction toward character given by the playwright was that there was absolutely no such thing as speaking the lines too slowly. In fact, Beckett’s vision of production and presentation was that the entire play be performed all the way through twice with no interruption and each single performance taking less than ten minutes to complete.
Needless to say, perhaps, not every director of Play has been quick to follow this particular vision, especially in light of the tremendous pressure which such an artistic vision has placed upon actors to pull off and audiences to sit through.
