Collected Shorter Plays

by Samuel Beckett

'Beckett reduces life, perception, and writing to barest minimums: a few dimly seen, struggling torsos; a hopeless intelligence compulsively seeking to come to terms, in rudimentary yet endlessly varied language, with the human condition they represent. Within these extraordinary limitations, Beckett's verbal ability nonetheless generates great intensity.'--Library Journal

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Classics, Irish Literature, 20th Century

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.

Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.

People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.

People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".

In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.

Reviews

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acknowledgements

--All That Fall
--Act Without Words I
--Act Without Words II
--Krapp's Last Tape
--Rough for Theatre I
--Rough for Theatre II
--Embers
--Rough for Radio I
--Rough for Radio II
--Words and Music
--Cascando
--Play
--Film
--The Old Tune
--Come and Go
--Eh Joe
--Breath
--Not I
--That Time
--Footfalls
--Ghost Trio
--... but the clouds ...
--A Piece of Monologue
--Rockaby
--Ohio Impromptu
--Quad
--Catastrophe
--Nacht und Träume
--What Where

[Talie · Rating 5 out of 5]

بالاخره آدم باید برای تولدش کار خاصی بکند. فیلمی خاصی ببیند، قطعه موسیقی خاصی گوش کند، چیز خاصی بنویسد، کتاب خاصی بخواند یا بخرد. هرچند ایوب وار بر روز و شبی که در آن به دنیا آمده لعنت بفرستد، که این هم خود کار خاصی است. من امسال کتاب دوازه قطعه‌ ی کوتاه بکت و چند کتاب دیگر  را خریدم. وقتی به طرح جلدش نگاه کردم فکر کردم که چقدر شبیه کارت دعوت به مراسم ترحیم است. چه کادویی بهتر از کارت مراسم ترحیم برای تولدم! هدف مترجم اجرا بوده. من هم این قطعه ها را اجرا کردم. البته بدون نور صحنه که بر من کم و زیاد شود و تاریکی صحنه که در آن فرو روم. خواندم و خواندم تا به این واژه ها رسیدم:
"تولد مرگ او بود. دوباره. واژه ها کم‌اند. مردن هم. تولد مرگ او بود. از آن زمان به طرز وحشتناک در حال پوزخند زدن. تا در پوش از بالا سر برسد. در گهواره و تختخواب بچه. در حال مک زدن اولین شکست. با اولین تلو تلو خوردن ها."

[Zadignose]

ALL THAT FALL:
The adventure of a train delay. A radio play with all of Beckett's trademark playfulness, bitterness, and absurdity. A story with a zinger. A late-arriving character, the blind (maybe) Mr. Rooney, is the life of the party and the motive of the not particularly motive play.

"... On the other hand, I said, there are the horrors of home life, the dusting, sweeping, airing, scrubbing, waxing, waning, washing, mangling, drying, mowing, clipping, raking, rolling, scuffling, shovelling, grinding, tearing, pounding, banging and slamming. And the brats, the happy little healthy little howling neighbours' brats. Of all this and much more the week-end, the Saturday intermission and then the day of rest, have given you some idea. But what must it be like on a working-day? A Wednesday? A Friday? What must it be like on a Friday! And I fell to thinking of my silent, backstreet, basement office, with its obliterated plate, rest-couch and velvet hangings, and what it means to be buried there alive, if only from ten to five, with convenient to one hand a bottle of light pale ale and to the other a long ice-cold fillet of hake. Nothing, I said, not even fully certified death, can ever take the place of that."

ACT WITHOUT WORDS I
A solo pantomime of a sap tormented in the desert by rope, shade-giving and shade-denying tree limbs, cubes, and dangling water, as he attempts to outwit the tortures of Tantalus, and then turns catatonic. Catatonia may, in fact, be the most intelligent response. He's figured it out!

ACT WITHOUT WORDS II
A pantomime for two characters of opposite temperament, one fast, one slow, enacting a cyclically repeating and apparently pointless ritual of daily living. They live in sacks.

KRAPP'S LAST TAPE
Short, sad, poignant. Remembrance of remembrance.

ROUGH FOR THEATER I
An exchange of kindness for unkindness between two differently-abled individuals, both alone.

ROUGH FOR THEATER II
An investigation into the condition of a man's hopelessness. Or is it only near-hopelessness?:

"...hope not dead of living to see the extermination of the species... literary aspirations incompletely stifled..."

He's just another poor sap with "a pathological horror of songbirds," and "congenital timidity," who is "morbidly sensitive to the opinion of others..."

EMBERS

A haunting radio play which is--almost--in no way related to Kafka's Judgement. Except in this one thing: It has the horror of the father. Dad is bad. So are guilt and inferiority. And loss.

ROUGH FOR RADIO I

Something rather abstract and odd, with something to do with radio. Something about a voice and music either being together or not being together. I didn't realize it at the time, but now this seems a forerunner/foreshadow of the similarly abstract play "Words and Music" which is coming up soon!

ROUGH FOR RADIO II

A sort of torture-interrogation of someone named Fox, or perhaps a Fox, with a silent brute who whips him on command, an interrogator who is known, for some reason, as "animator," and a stenographer. Flirtation/harassment. Neither the interrogation subject nor the interrogator seem to know what information is being sought. Something odd that sounds like male pregnancy, or at least having someone within oneself. Generally odd.

WORDS AND MUSIC

A compelled performance between a speaker and music... sometimes together, sometimes apart, sometimes one leads the other. A disgusted master compels the performance, and doesn't seem satisfied. Abstract. As mentioned above, it seems a continuation of an idea initiated in Rough For Radio I.

CASCANDO

More words and music, thus appearing to complete a tetralogy with the three preceeding. This one is more clearly and overtly about the creative process, with an anarchic and constantly productive creative voice which is not easily given form or direction. An "opener" can free or silence the voice, and music can lend it some semblance of form, but the voice cannot necessarily be impelled to reach its conclusion or to form a complete thought.

Admittedly, I'm not entirely loving these process-plays, but I'll grant they are original and unlike anything I've encountered before.

PLAY

In Limbo, a reflection (under the interrogating gaze of a spotlight) upon infidelity. Is there any out? This is the first time I've seen a play to include such an instruction as:

[Repeat play.]

Three souls eternally entwined in the same drama reflect entirely independently, each individually alone.

It was somewhat of a relief for me to see theater going in another direction again, out of the trap of the the voice and music plays.

FILM

A conceptual silent film about self observing self and the threat of being observed. I really ought to see a film of this! Does it exist (will check Youtube sometime later.)?

THE OLD TUNE

An excellent dialog going nowhere in particular between two old-timers with a rich history and somewhat unreliable memory. Lots of fun!

More plays to come... stay tuned!

COME AND GO

Something short, slight, symmetric, and cyclical. Reciprocal gossip.

EH JOE

A rotten bum meditates on what a stinker he is. Possibly haunted. In a way, a sequel to Embers.

BREATH

Aptly named. It is what it is. A breath. There is garbage involved. I don't usually understand why people call Beckett a "minimalist" and I often suspect this is an inapt label, but here it fits.

NOT I

An excellent rambling bit of madness, inner turmoil, and self-denial, perhaps at the end of all, perhaps in another eternal limbo.

THAT TIME

I didn't take any notes on this one for some reason. Kind of longish. I didn't connect with it. Three voices take over for one another mid-ramble, and are basically three channels or threads of the same person's thoughts. Maybe.

FOOTFALLS

Compulsive, ritualistic pacing.

Will you never have done?... Will you never have done... revolving it all?

GHOST TRIO

A television play that is not very readable, and almost certainly needs to be seen to get what's going on here.

...BUT THE CLOUDS...

Ritual living for a memory, and a prayer of sorts to hear the ghostly voice of one lost, which may speak once or twice for a hundred iterations, as the forlorn one carries on.

A PIECE OF MONOLOGUE

A monologue of lovelessness and loss. Death of course, death from the moment of birth.

Never two matters. Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. They dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone.

ROCKABYE

A woman in a rocking chair give up and admits her defeat by life without glimpsing another soul. Predominantly inner monologue reflecting on her own condition.

OHIO IMPROMPTU

A self-referential tale of a reader sent to comfort a listener perhaps for the last time, though time may have stopped.

QUAD

A well-conceived and entertaining to watch (not so much to read) balletic arrangement of various combinations and permutations of one to four compulsive pacers tracing a fixed course around a square, each with his or her own percussive musical accompaniment.

CATASTROPHE

Theater about theater. Making a spectacle of a man's decrepitude.

NACHT UND TRAUME

A pantomime. Dude dreams of caring hands.

WHAT WHERE

Torturers torture one another fruitlessly. Bam, Bem, Bim, and Bom by name.

----------------------
OVERALL: There are gems in here. Some works don't work for me. Many do. I'm not as thoroughly enamored of some as I am of his novels, and the works are not as overtly comic and playful in their oddness as some of his prose, though there are thematic connections and consistency enough to say that this is all very unmistakably the work of the one and only Beckett.

I enjoyed watching videos of some, even one of NOT I which, like all filmic presentations of NOT I, is not entirely faithful to the play as conceived since it omits the reacting, miming figure that would appear on the stage beside the mouth. As for productions of Eh Joe, I'm not sure... actors want to do actorly things with this, to show how the can give expression to the silent thoughts of Joe, yet as I read it I imagined the words carrying most of the load, with the actor more blank and expressionless. Well, anyway, see NOT I and QUAD below:

NOT I
QUAD

[John Dishwasher John Dishwasher · Rating 4 out of 5]

We live in an illusion of communion. Really we are alone. Even in our most intimate encounters with other humans our minds are irrevocably detached not only from theirs, but also from the rest of the universe. I read three of the plays in this volume wondering if I might discern, in a small sampling, some single undercurrent in Beckett’s work. A commonality running through these three plays was the brutality of human aloneness.

He shows this through a woman lost inside her head due to some sudden unknown trauma (Not I). Three individuals encased in urns as they confess the intrigues of a love triangle (Play). And a man recording some reflections on his life, even as he listens to earlier recordings he’s made reflecting on his life (Krapp’s Last Tape.) I also found productions of these on YouTube and watched them. Contiguous themes were turbulence of mind, the tormented quality of the human condition, a longing for reason, and the peace which will come with death. Beckett does not deny the possibility of sweetness in human life. Krapp, in fact, feels nostalgic for one particular moment he lived with a woman, which was perhaps the highest moment of his life. Ironically, that moment occurred at the END of the remembered relationship.

Facing these harsh truths about ourselves is useful, I guess. It helps us to remember that the person sitting next to us on the bus is suffering as much as we are; which maybe encourages us to not make things worse for them.

I recently saw an article that listed Beckett’s seven most important plays. When I saw that three of them were in a book I owned, and that they were very short, I took on this little weekend experiment. The others listed were Endgame, Happy Days, Rockaby and Waiting for Godot. Here are links to the productions I watched:

Not I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LDw...
Krapp’s Last Tape https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuq2e...
Play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qONcB...

[Mohammad Hanifeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

یه چیزهایی می‌خواستم بنویسم؛ ولی کلاً که چی؟!

- چرا سرت رو نمی‌ذاری بمیری؟
+ بهش فکر کرده‌م.
- (ناراحت) ولی انجامش ندادی!
+ هنوز به اندازهٔ کافی بدبخت نیستم. (مکث) بدیختیم همیشه بوده، ولی به اندازهٔ کافی بدبخت نیستم.
(مکث)
- ولی بالاخره باید هر روز یه‌خرده بیشتر شده باشی یا نه!
+ (با خشونت) هنوز به اندازهٔ کافی بدبخت نیستم.

(پیش‌نویس تئاتر ۱)

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look. Dig it. Wait with it. Retrace you steps to it. Find yourself haunted by it. Beckett's work – here, his shorter and lesser known drama – may be part of an eternal and endless palinode, but it's at times a beautiful and cutting, hopeless and uplifting one. Read past Waiting for Godot, Endgame & Act Without Words, and Krapp's Last Tape, please! You're worth it, and so too is Sam Beckett.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

[Erika · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read several of these plays for my Modern Drama course and quite frankly, I did not understand what was happening in the majority of them; however, I am excited to hear what my professor has to say about them. I also have a feeling that I will go back and change my rating for these plays once I have a more thorough understanding of what Beckett was trying to accomplish throughout these pieces.

Plays read: Play, Not I, Rockaby, Krapp's Last Tape, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Come and Go, Breath, Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, and What Where

[Parisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

- یه وقتایی صدای پاهایی رو می‌شنوم.
صداها. به خودم میگم اونا دارن برمی‌گردن، یه عده‌شون برمیگردن، تا سعی کنن و دوباره جا و مکان بگیرن، یا دنبال یه چیزی بگردن که پشت سر جا گذاشته‌ن، یا دنبال کسی‌ان که پشت سر جا گذاشته‌ن.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Twenty-nine very short, very depressing plays, written between 1957 and 1984, in chronological order. None were much over ten pages long; some were written in English, others translated from French. They are mainly absurdist pieces, about the meaninglessness of life. The best known is probably Krapp's Last Tape. The most interesting was a filmscript with the generic title Film, which played with the idea of esse est percipi. The same ideas were repeated through most of the plays, which mainly had generic titles like Play or Theater -- old age, death, meaninglessness. They were very much in the spirit of the 1950's, when the earlier ones were written, and I'm sure it was a fresh approach then, but the repetitiousness made the collection somewhat tedious as well as did I say very depressing? Read for a challenge on Goodreads.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my goodness. The shorter his plays, the more crazed they are. Ohio Impromptu is one of the most depressing things I have ever seen or read. So is Not I. Beckett bends everything way beyond its limits here. The end results are prescient, untraceable, and at times almost profound. That;s about as much as I can intelligibly say.

[Yasemin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Düşünür,duraklar tekrar düşünür .Durur yana döner,düşünür...

[Mahtab · Rating 4 out of 5]

بکت هم واقعاً کسخل جالبیه. :))

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neke su mnogo dobre, neke su mnogo bizarne i sve su vrlo čudne

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in February 2002.

Beckett has a reputation as one of the most difficult twentieth century writers, many finding even his most accessible and most famous play, Waiting for Godot, impenetrable. As a follower of Joyce, there is certainly something in this, as is perhaps particularly apparent in the thirty or so short dramtic pieces collected here, which actually make up the bulk of his output.

They stretch the meaning of the word "play" somewhat; originally written for radio, film and TV as well as the stage, they include mimed pieces and pieces without action as well as ones where what is spoken is not in itself important in a traditional way. Some are extremely short (Breath, for example, lasting only seconds), while the longest is about an hour (radio play All That Fall).

What they share, in spite of the diversity of form, are the themes which are common to all Beckett's writing. These are also all present in Waiting for Godot, which can really be seen as the essential Beckett play. These themes are meaninglessness, decrepitude and ageing, guilt, lack of identity, and death. In some plays, this forbidding list is leavened by a Joycean fascination with language. (In fact, the precision of Beckett's use of words - and his prescription of performance practice - are among the most interesting aspects of his work, given his obsession with non-meaning. He clearly found it necessary to specify things exactly in order to get what he wanted.) One cannot help admiring Beckett's cleverness, and many of the pieces come to life in performance, but they could never be described as cheerful.

[Joseph Mirabelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

In particular, the plays containing both words and directions for music were haunting. Rarely have entries so short, taking just minutes to read, left me needing so much mental digestion. Very worth it, particularly the plays "Cascando" and "Embers."

[Kristianne]

Small doses necessary. Brilliant man, but too much, too fast may cause madness.

[Mandel]

(Part of my current project of reading everything Beckett published in precise chronological order.)

After Beckett's first two complete longer plays - Waiting for Godot and Endgame - become international blockbusters, Beckett continued to write for the theater until his late old age. However, the vast majority of his subsequent plays (with the sole exception of Happy Days) were much shorter. The longer plays get most of the attention, but I prefer the leaner, starker pieces found here. This volume contains all twenty-nine short works that Beckett composed for theater, radio, TV, and film from 1956-1983. It's hard to survey them without writing at greater length, so all I'll say here is that reading slowly through this collection over the past few months has given me a much greater appreciation for Beckett the playwright.

Previous to this, I'd often say to friends that I greatly prefer his prose to his theater. That's still true to a large extent. However, now that I've read his entire body of work, I realize that it's harder to draw a sharp line between his prose and his theater. For me, they blend into one another. On the one hand, many of his short prose pieces seem to demand being read out loud. Many of them have narrators who deliver constant stage-direction-like imperatives - as if Beckett had originally conceived them as theater pieces, but morphed them into prose once he figured out that they would be impossible to stage. Conversely, in their sense of space and their stark minimalism, many of his theater pieces are continuous in their concerns with his prose. In both cases, Beckett showed us just how much artists can accomplish when they pare things down, allow themselves fewer resources rather than grabbing for more. He was a genius at mining the riches of shockingly constrained scenarios - e.g., a single mouth against a black background (Not I), three nearly identical women gossiping on a bench (Come and Go), four figures silently walking the edges and diagonals of a square (Quad).

Let me add that if you read through this volume, you should really try to watch or listen to performances of each piece to complement your reading. And, you should watch Film alongside your reading of Beckett's screenplay. It's well worth getting your hands on Beckett on Film, the BBC's mostly excellent film adaptations of twenty of Beckett's short theatrical pieces. Further, the pieces that Beckett produced for TV and radio are easily available on YouTube. And, when you read and watch Film, I'd strongly recommend you also watch Notfilm, Ross Lipman's excellent documentary about the fascinating and difficult process of making it.

[Arun Singh · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a little confusing. I enjoyed reading all of the plays but there are some which are just too confusing. Will have to read it again some time later.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

My recent reading of Beckett's plays included Happy Days, Embers, and Not I, the last two of which are included in this excellent collection of his shorter plays. The length of these plays does not diminish their brilliance or depth of meaning.
In these short plays Beckett focused even more tightly on the inner experience of humanity. In Embers, a play written for the radio Beckett presents a man named Henry who shares his thoughts, both through attempting to tell a story and through memories of his past. With creation of characters his imagination presents these others, including his family, with an intensity that makes them seem alive. Yet it is their ghostly and ephemeral character that takes precedence. In the background the sound of the sea provides an ostinato that is haunting. Henry's imagination, however, weakens over the course of the short play. We first experience this as his story is interrupted more than once, yet he returns to it only with more and more difficulty.
The memories of his past include scenes with his daughter and his wife, who may be present although her weak monotone voice suggests otherwise. "Not a sound" is a recurring phrase; but more important is the sound of dying embers. Henry tries to make us hear this but cannot project it:
"not a sound, only the fire, no flames now, embers. (Pause.) Embers. (Pause.) Shifting, lapsing, furtive like, a dreadful sound" (90). It is a sound (the title of the play) that we are denied. It represents death and extinction and to give it sound would be to give it life.
Beckett's prose has a serene, almost poetic quality and must have been extremely effective on a radio broadcast.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

of all the authors i have read, i find Beckett to be the most challenging by far... in much the same way as reading textbooks and scholarly works (meaning books meant to teach first and foremost and not to entertain or take one's mind off the day or transport you to another world/time/perspective), reading Beckett forces you to pay full attention to every single word... you can't skim Beckett, or if you do, then you are not reading Beckett at all, for by skipping or eliding or jumping ahead you miss the point... the words, the cadences, the repetitions, the minimalism, the circularity, the now-ness... Beckett demands your attention and immersion, or maybe he just expects it... why else read? why words? why? i won't get into reviewing each specific text in any Beckett book as i find that defeatist, or maybe beyond my ken... often its merely words on the page given meaning by how the reader interprets/intuits/internalizes them... i say Beckett is unequaled, unmatched, unsurpassed, but that is but one opinion... still, i say read him, often, and again...

[Svetlana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Знаешь, я немного в задумчивости. Действительно, интересный и оригинальный автор, но его пьесы, по крайней мере те, которые я прочитала предназначены не для прочтения – они для просмотра. Поэтому многое не удалось понять, оценить и принять.

Из всех мне особенно запомнилась «Последняя лента Крепа» - про старика, который в течение жизни записывал на пленку свои впечатления о жизни. На свой очередной день рождения он слушает ту, что записал когда-то, и говорит: «Только что прослушал кретина, каким выставлялся тридцать лет назад, даже не верится, что я когда-то был такой идиот. Слава Богу, с этим со всем покончено». Затем берет новую ленту, и… не может удержаться от тех воспоминаний, которые его захлестнули… «Я лежал ничком, зарывшись лицом в ее груди, и одной рукой я ее обнимал. Мы лежали не шевелясь. Но все шевелилось под нами, и нас нежно качало - вверх-вниз, из стороны в сторону». «Возможно, мои лучшие годы прошли. Когда была еще надежда на счастье. Но я бы не хотел их вернуть. Нет. Теперь, когда во мне этот пламень. Нет, я бы не хотел их вернуть».

Да уж…

[Teah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beckett's later short plays explore the ways in which people become physically and emotionally exiled. Characters find themselves in increasingly restricted poses (stuck in an urn, rocking chair, park bench.... His women are haunting. You have to watch "Not I" to get the full experience. Youtube has the Billie Whitelaw version which Beckett directed.

[David Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Usefully, this compiles 29 short plays. (Now how much would you pay?) "All That Fall," "Krapp's Last Tape" and "The Old Tune" are particularly good. Some of the rest might be improved by seeing them live. Some, which consist almost entirely of diagrams and stage and lighting directions, barely exist.

[Tasniem Sami · Rating 4 out of 5]

يتخذ مسرح اللامعقول والعبث -خلافا لمعناهم المألوف - عند بيكيت زمانا من اللازمان واللامكان فس صورة كزنية للزمان والمكان حتى بالنسبة للشخصيات التي تنتمي للمدينة العالمية وتظهر الفروق الواضحة بين طرق معالجة كل من كامي وسارتر لنفس الموضوعات ولكن بطريقة تقليدية او كلايكية غل حد ما ولكنها اكثر فلسفة ...حيث يتخذ بيكيت من اللامعقول وسيلة ليعالج بها اللامعقول ذاته

[Mallory · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to feed your existentialist fire, these well written, literary plays by Beckett are the way to go. Some are better than others, (my favorite by a long shot was "This Time") but most of them are pretty spectacular pieces of modernism, and should be consumed by lovers of the genre. Now on to Waiting for Godot...

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read Krapp's Last Tape - solid Beckett - though the monologue format made it harder initially to engage with the plot. I wonder, though, how much additional value I get from reading more of Beckett's work beyond Waiting for Godot. Law of diminishing returns?

[Robleywelliver]

Oh man, this guy's a freak! You call this drama? You call this writing? Well, that said, his plays are actually quite good if your prepared to spend a lot of time with them - and if you have a good internet connection that will allow you decent access to youtube.

[Rasmus Skovdal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating based on 'Not I', 'Footfalls', 'Rockaby', 'All That Fall' (the most immediately accesible of the five pieces I read) and 'A Piece of Monologue' (the most interesting of the five pieces I read).

[Jessica Hatch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mystifying and oh so post-modern. I especially loved discovering "Play" and "That Time," which are both monologues in the round.

My only wish is that the book came with some back matter to help contextualize the plays so that the reader could make more analytical sense of them.