Dialogue
In this play, dialogue is imagery. All that dialogue. Every single word that is spoken by the three characters is imagery in the service of the play’s thematic consideration of the ineffectiveness of language as a means of communication between people. The play is structured so that it seems to be a dialogue between three people. It is not discourse, however, because it is really three separate monologues by people who seem to be aware of the other’s proximity, but are in no way engaging with them.
Bizarre Love Triangle
The “story” at the center of the “plot” is one of the oldest and tritest in the history of drama: the love triangle. Nothing about the affair sticks out as particular worthy of dramatic recreation. Its very ordinariness—its tawdry ordinariness—serves as useful symbolic imagery for the real “story” and the real “plot” of the play, which is the tawdry ordinariness of existence for all those people who are emotionally alienated and socially isolated from actual meaning interaction.
Funeral Urns
The staging is sparse, but striking, dominated entirely by three-feet-tall funeral urns in which only the face of the three characters is visible. Stripped of nothing but the literal and symbolic “face” of human consciousness, the urns are images of the spiritual and emotional void of life in general, but specifically in the socially manufactured relationships between men and women. Put to the extreme, the urns can even be said to act as symbolic images of the death of marriage as a viable social construct that defines relationships between men and women.
The Spotlight
Not only are the faces inside the urns not engaged in actual conversational dialogue with each other, they are not stimulated to voice their interior monologues as vocal expressions like normal humans. Each character is signaled when to speak and when to stop speaking by a single spotlight moving from face to face. On cue, each character speaks—in an emotionless monotone—when the spotlight shines on them and to stop when the spotlight moves away. The thematic effect of the repetition of this technique eventually coalesces into imagery underscoring the essential negation of the self and the dehumanizing effect on every individual when the focus of attention is shifted onto another.
