Three Identical Grey Urns
The three characters on stage exist as only heads inside a funeral urns, each identical to the other and colored a drab gray. The urns are symbols indicating that the three characters are dead, obviously, but that they all look exactly alike symbolizes the meaningless of the individual. What one does in life is merely play that will lose all meaning to anyone upon one’s death.
Dialogue
The dialogue spoken in the play is not really dialogue in the technical sense. The heads in the urns are not speaking to each other but describing their relationship in snippets of monologue completely disconnected from the other. This fragmentation of memory and event from the cohesive story of life being told becomes a symbol for how the life of one who has died become fragmented echoes of memory of the past to the living.
The Love Triangle
The story which is being told piecemeal by the man and two women in the urns is story about love triangle. The husband cheated on his wife and the wife found out and confronted the other woman. Not only is there nothing that makes this particular love triangle stand out, but as a plot device it is does not stand out. The love triangle ranks among the oldest dramatic plots around and it was chosen for just that purpose: revealing the meaningless of a life which “plays out” as more or less no differently than countless billions of lives have played out before.
The Spotlight
It is not emotion which stimulates each character to say their lines, but rather the appearance of a spotlight illuminating their face. When the spotlight moves to one of the other two, it is the signal for that person to speak their lines. Lines which are delivered without emotion, but in a monotone as swiftly as possible. The spotlight becomes a symbol of the metaphorical spotlight during life: we can only give our lives meaning when the attention is on us. When the attention is elsewhere, we fade into darkness of the background along with our the meaning we have attached to our existence.
The Repeat Performance
The stage instructions call for the entire play to be repeated all the way through upon completion of the first performance. This repetitions symbolizes the repetitiveness of living, the repetition of lives over generation and the repetition of the memories of those lives as eternally disintegrating echoes among the living.
