The Fifth Chair

 THE FIFTH CHAIR

or, Jung and Adler Meet Vladimir and Estragon While Waiting for Godot

A Play in Two Acts, with a Coda

“Godot is not late. You are simply early for your own life.”

CHARACTERS

CARL GUSTAV JUNG — A physician of the soul, past sixty, silver-bearded, moving with the unhurried authority of a man who has stopped being surprised by the psyche. He carries a leather notebook he rarely opens. He is fascinated by symbols, dreams, archetypes, and the shadow, and treats coincidence as a language rather than an accident.

ALFRED ADLER — A physician of the human spirit, compact, energetic, a working-class Viennese pragmatism beneath his courtesy. He is convinced that human beings are shaped by inferiority, striving, purpose, and their relation to the community of others. He distrusts mysticism the way a bricklayer distrusts fog.

VLADIMIR — A man who remembers that he has forgotten something, and has built a life around the forgetting.

ESTRAGON — A man who forgets what he remembers, and is, in this way, the freer of the two.

THE BOY — A messenger who may or may not be real, and who is, in either case, entirely reliable.

GODOT — Never necessarily seen. Possibly never necessarily absent, either.

THE FIFTH CHAIR — Not a character. A small, plain wooden chair set slightly apart from the other four, beneath the tree, throughout the entire play. No one sits in it. No one ever quite stops looking at it.

THE GUITARIST, THE HARPIST, and THE FLUTIST — Three musicians, seated upstage with their instruments, present for the entire evening. They do not play. Not once, in either act. They are, in this respect, the most disciplined performers in the production.

A NOTE ON STAGING

The stage should be bare enough to feel like a waiting room and open enough to feel like the end of the world — these are not, the director should understand, two different places. A single tree stands slightly off-center, leafless at the start of Act I. Beneath it, five chairs: four arranged in a loose half-circle, occupied at the beginning by no one, and a fifth — smaller, plainer, set a little apart — which must never be moved, never be sat in, and never be explained. A door is painted on the rear wall, flush with the surface, without a visible handle. The audience should, for most of the evening, half-forget it is there. So should the actors.

Upstage, in a shallow pool of light that never fully brightens and never fully dims, sit three musicians: a guitarist, a harpist, a flutist, each with an instrument, none of them ever playing it. They are not stagehands and they are not furniture; they should be cast and directed as carefully as any speaking role. Their stillness is the performance. They may shift, breathe, watch the action, tune an instrument they will never sound — but no note, from any of the three, should be heard until the single moment specified at the very end of the play, and even then, whether the audience actually hears anything is a question the production should not answer for them.

Light should behave the way memory behaves: it should linger a beat longer than the eye expects, and change without anyone noticing the exact moment it changed.

ACT I

THE WAITING ROOM WITHOUT WALLS

Late afternoon, the light already thinking about leaving. VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON sit beneath the tree, in two of the four chairs. The fifth, smaller chair sits empty and apart, as it will all evening. Upstage, already in place, already still, sit THE GUITARIST, THE HARPIST, and THE FLUTIST, instruments resting in their hands like unopened letters. ESTRAGON is working, without much conviction, at the removal of a boot.

ESTRAGON

My feet hurt.

VLADIMIR

You said that yesterday.

ESTRAGON

Yesterday my feet hurt.

VLADIMIR

And today?

ESTRAGON

Today they remember yesterday. The feet are more faithful than the mind.

He gives up on the boot. Silence, of the particular density found only in places where people are waiting for something they cannot name.

VLADIMIR

We are waiting.

ESTRAGON

Yes.

VLADIMIR

For Godot.

ESTRAGON

Yes.

VLADIMIR

He is coming.

ESTRAGON

He said he was coming.

VLADIMIR

Did he?

ESTRAGON

You said he did.

VLADIMIR

Then he did. Somebody has to have said it first.

They look toward the road, which the audience cannot see and which may not, strictly, exist.

ESTRAGON

Nothing.

VLADIMIR

Nothing yet.

ESTRAGON

Perhaps nothing is coming.

VLADIMIR

Perhaps nothing is exactly what is coming.

ESTRAGON

Then why are we waiting?

VLADIMIR

Because we are waiting. It is the one thing we are still good at.

Pause. ESTRAGON eyes the empty fifth chair.

ESTRAGON

Whose chair is that?

VLADIMIR

I don’t know. It was here before we were.

ESTRAGON

Perhaps it’s for Godot.

VLADIMIR

Godot doesn’t sit. Godot arrives, or he doesn’t. Sitting would commit him to something.

ESTRAGON

Then whose is it?

VLADIMIR

Perhaps it’s for whoever finally stops waiting.

This lands strangely on both of them. Neither looks at the chair again for some time. Enter JUNG and ADLER from the opposite side, in the middle of a conversation that has clearly been going on for years and will clearly continue for the rest of their lives. JUNG carries a notebook he does not open. ADLER carries a small walking stick he does not need. They stop when they see the two men under the tree.

ADLER

There they are.

JUNG

Who?

ADLER

The patients.

JUNG

They do not appear to have asked for treatment.

ADLER

That is generally how patients appear. The ones who ask are already halfway cured.

VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON regard the newcomers with the wary hope of men who have been disappointed by every previous arrival but have not yet learned to stop hoping regardless.

VLADIMIR

Are you doctors?

ADLER

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Can you cure feet?

ADLER

Feet are rarely the real problem.

ESTRAGON

Then you are definitely doctors.

JUNG

What are you waiting for?

VLADIMIR

Godot.

JUNG

Interesting.

ADLER

Who is Godot?

VLADIMIR

Someone who is coming.

ADLER

When?

ESTRAGON

Tomorrow.

VLADIMIR

Or today.

ESTRAGON

Possibly yesterday. We have not ruled it out.

ADLER

You do not know.

VLADIMIR

That is why we wait. Certainty would be the end of the appointment.

JUNG

Perhaps Godot is not a person.

ESTRAGON

Perhaps he is a person who does not know he is a person.

JUNG

That is more interesting.

ADLER

Or less useful. A man cannot pay his rent with an archetype.

JUNG

A man cannot pay his rent at all if he does not know what he is working for.

JUNG walks slowly to the tree and examines it, the way a man examines something he suspects of being alive.

JUNG

A tree.

ADLER

Obviously.

JUNG

Nothing is obvious. Obviousness is simply a truth the unconscious has stopped bothering to argue about.

ADLER

A tree is a tree.

JUNG

To consciousness, perhaps. To the unconscious, it may be the axis of the world — the place where above and below still speak to one another.

ESTRAGON

Does the world have an axis?

JUNG

Every human being constructs one. Most spend their lives pretending they found it lying in the road.

ADLER

And every human being eventually discovers he is not standing at the center of it. That discovery is called growing up. Most people fail the course twice.

VLADIMIR

Then what are we?

ADLER

That depends entirely on what you are trying to become.

VLADIMIR

We are trying to meet Godot.

ADLER

Exactly.

JUNG

No. Not exactly.

He turns to VLADIMIR with the calm of a man about to say something the listener will spend the rest of his life resenting him for.

JUNG

You are waiting for Godot because you believe something outside yourself will complete something inside yourself.

VLADIMIR

How do you know?

JUNG

Because I have spent my life listening to people who believed exactly that, in a hundred different vocabularies.

ESTRAGON

Did any of them meet Godot?

JUNG

Some called him God. Some called him love. Some called him success, or history, or death — death is a very popular Godot, he is at least reliably punctual.

ADLER

And some called him the approval of their fathers. That one never arrives on any schedule at all.

ESTRAGON

Did that work? Waiting for the father’s approval?

ADLER

No.

ESTRAGON

Then why do people keep doing it?

ADLER

Because the human being is extraordinarily inventive when the task is avoiding himself. Give him a lifetime and no real problem, and he will construct a cathedral of excuses with flying buttresses.

Silence. A bird, unseen, tries something and thinks better of it.

VLADIMIR

What is the self?

JUNG

Ah.

ADLER

There. We have arrived at the dangerous question, and it is not even dark yet.

JUNG

The Self is larger than the ego.

ADLER

And the ego is smaller than it imagines, which is the single fact it will fight hardest to disprove.

ESTRAGON

I don’t like either of them.

JUNG

Most people don’t. That is generally the first sign they have met one.

VLADIMIR

What is the difference?

JUNG

The ego says, “I am.”

ADLER

The community asks, “What are you doing?”

JUNG

And the Self asks, quietly, usually at three in the morning, “Who might you yet become?”

ESTRAGON

I would prefer lunch.

ADLER

There is nothing wrong with lunch. Even Diogenes ate.

JUNG

Indeed. The soul does not become profound merely by becoming hungry — though a great many artists have built entire careers on the confusion.

ESTRAGON

At last, a doctor I understand.

They sit — JUNG and ADLER taking the two remaining chairs of the four. No one approaches the fifth.

ADLER

Let us consider the matter scientifically.

JUNG

You mean psychologically.

ADLER

Which is scientific enough for an afternoon under a tree.

JUNG

If you insist.

ADLER

These two men are waiting because waiting gives them a structure their lives would otherwise lack.

VLADIMIR

A structure?

ADLER

Yes. Without Godot, the day would have no purpose, and a day without purpose is, for most men, unbearable.

ESTRAGON

The day already has no purpose.

ADLER

Precisely — and see how well the waiting disguises it.

JUNG

But there is something deeper here. Their waiting has become a ritual, and ritual is how the psyche keeps faith with what it cannot yet understand.

ADLER

Purpose.

JUNG

Symbol.

ADLER

Compensation.

JUNG

Archetype.

ADLER

Social interest.

JUNG

Individuation.

ESTRAGON

Can either of you explain why my shoe is too tight?

A long pause, in which two schools of psychology confront a boot and find themselves, for once, in perfect agreement about their limits.

ADLER

No.

JUNG

Perhaps your shoe represents confinement.

ESTRAGON

It represents a bad shoe.

ADLER

He may have a point.

JUNG

He usually does. That is the moral hazard of waiting rooms — the man with the simplest complaint is often the only honest one in it.

The tree trembles slightly, though there is no wind to account for it. Upstage, THE GUITARIST’s hand tightens against the strings, almost enough to sound them. Almost.

VLADIMIR

Did you see that?

ESTRAGON

The tree?

VLADIMIR

It moved.

JUNG

Everything moves.

ADLER

Including the unconscious, apparently, which has never once in its history knocked before entering.

JUNG

Especially the unconscious.

ESTRAGON

Perhaps Godot is hiding behind it.

They all look. Nothing. Not even a shadow that shouldn’t be there — though ESTRAGON glances, briefly, at the fifth chair.

VLADIMIR

Nothing.

ESTRAGON

He is very good at hiding.

JUNG

Or perhaps you are very good at projecting.

ESTRAGON

Projecting what?

JUNG

Your expectation.

ADLER

And your fear.

VLADIMIR

Why would we fear Godot?

JUNG

Because fulfillment is more frightening than disappointment. Disappointment asks nothing further of you. Fulfillment sends the bill.

ADLER

And because if Godot actually arrived, you would lose the one respectable excuse you have left for remaining exactly as you are.

Silence, longer this time, and colder.

VLADIMIR

I don’t understand.

ADLER

You understand perfectly.

ESTRAGON

I don’t.

ADLER

You understand emotionally.

ESTRAGON

That is worse. The mind can be argued with. The stomach has already made up its mind before you’ve finished the sentence.

Dusk has nearly closed. THE BOY enters, barefoot, unhurried, as if he has walked this same distance every evening of an unrecorded number of years.

BOY

Mr. Godot sent me.

Everyone turns at once, with an eagerness none of them will later admit to.

VLADIMIR

Godot!

BOY

He is not coming today.

ESTRAGON

Again?

BOY

He will come tomorrow.

VLADIMIR

Are you sure?

BOY

Yes.

JUNG

Did he tell you why?

BOY

No.

ADLER

Does he ever tell anyone why?

BOY

No.

JUNG

Have you seen him?

BOY

Yes.

JUNG

What does he look like?

BOY

I don’t know.

ADLER

You have seen him but do not know what he looks like?

BOY

Yes.

ADLER

Interesting.

JUNG

Very. It is, if you think about it, the precise description everyone eventually gives of themselves.

BOY

I have to go.

VLADIMIR

Wait.

BOY

Yes?

VLADIMIR

Does Godot know we are here?

BOY

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Does he know why?

BOY

No.

THE BOY exits the way he came, without looking back, as messengers in this sort of play never do. THE HARPIST’s fingers hover a moment over the strings, and settle again, empty-handed, in her lap. Long silence. The tree is now a black shape against a violet sky.

ADLER

Well.

JUNG

Yes.

ADLER

Tomorrow.

JUNG

Tomorrow. The most reliable word in the language, and the least trustworthy.

ESTRAGON

We could leave.

VLADIMIR

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Should we?

VLADIMIR

Yes.

Neither moves. No one sits in the fifth chair. It is now fully dark, and the chair is nonetheless, somehow, still visible.

JUNG

You see?

ADLER

What?

JUNG

The entire human condition, in one gesture and its refusal.

Lights fade slowly, the way a diagnosis does — not all at once, but by the time it is finished, entirely.

ACT II

THE PERSON WE ARE WAITING FOR

Dawn, thin and grey at first, warming as the act proceeds. The same tree — but look again: there is, unmistakably, the faintest green at the tips of the branches. The four men are exactly where they were. The fifth chair has not moved an inch, and is, if anything, more noticeable in daylight than it was in the dark.

ESTRAGON

We stayed.

VLADIMIR

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Why?

VLADIMIR

Because we were waiting.

ESTRAGON

For Godot?

VLADIMIR

For Godot.

ESTRAGON

I had a dream.

JUNG

Tell us. Dreams are the one message the psyche sends without postage due.

ESTRAGON

There was a house.

JUNG

Whose house?

ESTRAGON

Mine.

JUNG

What happened?

ESTRAGON

I entered.

JUNG

And?

ESTRAGON

There was nobody there.

JUNG

How did you feel?

ESTRAGON

Relieved.

JUNG smiles — the first full smile of the play.

ADLER

That is important.

ESTRAGON

Why?

JUNG

Because the empty house was not necessarily emptiness.

ESTRAGON

What was it, then?

JUNG

Possibility. A house with no one home is also a house with no one to answer to.

ADLER

Or loneliness.

JUNG

The two often resemble one another closely enough to be mistaken for each other by everyone, including the dreamer.

ADLER

But they lead in entirely different directions.

VLADIMIR

How?

ADLER

Loneliness asks, “Who will rescue me?”

JUNG

Possibility asks, “What shall I do, now that no one is watching?”

ESTRAGON

And what did I do?

JUNG

You woke up.

ESTRAGON

That doesn’t seem like much.

JUNG

It is everything. It is, in fact, the only part of the dream that was entirely up to you.

Pause. A cool morning wind moves through the young leaves — the first sound of the day that isn’t a voice.

VLADIMIR

I had a dream too.

ADLER

What was it?

VLADIMIR

I was standing before a crowd.

ADLER

And they applauded?

VLADIMIR

Yes.

ADLER

How did you feel?

VLADIMIR

Afraid.

ADLER

Why?

VLADIMIR

Because I knew they would stop.

JUNG

There is your inferiority.

ADLER

And there is your shadow — for once we are pointing at the same animal from two sides of the fence.

VLADIMIR

What does that mean?

ADLER

You seek superiority because underneath it you fear insignificance.

JUNG

And you fear insignificance because some part of yourself has never once been acknowledged — not by the crowd, not by the father, not by anyone whose approval you have spent your life auditioning for.

VLADIMIR

By whom, then, should it have been acknowledged?

JUNG

By you.

Silence. Even ESTRAGON does not fill it.

VLADIMIR

So we are our own judges?

ADLER

Often.

JUNG

And sometimes our own executioners — though rarely, I have noticed, our own advocates. That role we tend to leave permanently vacant.

ESTRAGON

Can we resign?

ADLER

From what?

ESTRAGON

From ourselves.

JUNG

No.

ESTRAGON

Why not?

JUNG

Because even the attempt to abandon the self is carried out by the self. There is no letter of resignation that does not require your own signature.

Silence, but a different quality of silence — not empty, exactly. Working.

ADLER

The question is not how to escape being human.

JUNG

The question is how to become human, which most people postpone their entire lives, mistaking the postponement itself for patience.

VLADIMIR

Isn’t that the same thing — escaping and becoming?

JUNG

No. One is a door closing. The other is a door opening. They can sound, from outside, exactly alike.

ADLER

A man may spend his whole life escaping himself with great energy and never once, not for a single afternoon, become himself.

ESTRAGON

How does one become oneself?

JUNG

By confronting what one has refused to know.

ADLER

By accepting responsibility for what one is actually able to change, and grieving, cleanly, what one is not.

JUNG

By integrating the shadow rather than exiling it.

ADLER

By developing the courage to be imperfect.

JUNG

By discovering, or more honestly constructing, a meaning large enough to live inside of.

ADLER

By contributing something to people who did not ask you to.

ESTRAGON

That sounds like work.

ADLER

It is. It is, in fact, the only work that was ever actually assigned to you. Everything else is a subcontract.

ESTRAGON

Then perhaps Godot is coming to do it for us.

JUNG

That is the oldest dream of mankind, and its most expensive one.

VLADIMIR

A savior?

JUNG

A savior, a king, a revolution, a machine, an ideology, an empire, a lover, a prophet — the mask changes, century to century. The hope underneath it has never once been renovated.

ADLER

Or a government.

JUNG

Yes.

ADLER

Human beings repeatedly construct something larger than themselves, and then ask it, very politely, to relieve them of the burden of being human.

VLADIMIR

And does it?

ADLER

For a while. Long enough to sign the lease.

JUNG

Never forever. Sooner or later the invoice for the postponement always arrives, and it is always addressed, in the end, to the self that did the postponing.

The wind rises. The leaves — there are more of them now — turn all at once, showing their paler undersides, like a held breath let go.

ESTRAGON

The tree has leaves.

They look. It is undeniable. Upstage, THE FLUTIST lifts the flute halfway to her lips — a reflex, nothing more — and then, noticing her own hand, lowers it again.

VLADIMIR

It didn’t have leaves yesterday.

JUNG

Time is not merely what happens to us.

ADLER

It is what we do with what happens to us. The tree did not wait for permission to bud. It simply continued being a tree, faithfully, in the dark, while we argued.

ESTRAGON

Perhaps the tree has been waiting too.

JUNG

For what?

ESTRAGON

Spring.

Pause. Even ADLER, who does not care for pauses, allows this one.

VLADIMIR

Then perhaps we have been waiting for the wrong thing.

ADLER

Perhaps.

JUNG

Or perhaps you have mistaken the messenger for the meaning.

VLADIMIR

What do you mean?

JUNG

Godot may simply be the name you have given to the future — a very old habit of the human mind, naming what has not yet happened, so as to have something to blame for its own delay.

ADLER

And the future cannot arrive until the present is actually lived in. It will not be rushed by an appointment it never agreed to keep.

THE BOY appears again, in full daylight this time, which somehow makes him no less strange.

BOY

Mr. Godot sent me.

All four stare at him — and, for the first time, three of them glance, unconsciously, at the fifth chair.

VLADIMIR

Is he coming?

BOY

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Today?

BOY

Yes.

VLADIMIR

When?

BOY

I don’t know.

ADLER

Does he know we are here?

BOY

Yes.

JUNG

Does he know why we are here?

BOY

Yes.

JUNG

What did he say?

BOY

He said you should stop waiting.

Silence — the kind that has weight, that a man could lean against.

VLADIMIR

Stop waiting?

BOY

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Then what are we supposed to do?

BOY

Go.

VLADIMIR

Where?

BOY

Anywhere.

ADLER

And Godot?

BOY

He will find you. He was never coming to this chair. He was coming to wherever you finally are.

THE BOY exits. The four men remain motionless a long while, as though the sentence itself needed time to finish arriving.

ESTRAGON

I don’t like this.

VLADIMIR

Neither do I.

ESTRAGON

We have waited so long.

VLADIMIR

Yes.

ESTRAGON

If we leave now, what was the point of all of it?

ADLER

That is the trap, and it is the oldest one in the profession.

ESTRAGON

What trap?

ADLER

Believing that suffering becomes meaningful merely because it lasted a long time. Duration is not the same currency as meaning, though it is very often passed off as one.

ESTRAGON looks at him for a long moment, something in him quietly rearranging.

ESTRAGON

Then all those years —

ADLER

Were years.

JUNG

Nothing more.

ADLER

Nothing less, either. They were not wasted for having been years. They were simply years — which is quite enough for any of them to have been.

JUNG rises and walks toward the painted door, which no one has approached in either act until this moment.

JUNG

There is a door.

VLADIMIR

There has always been a door.

JUNG

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Why didn’t we open it?

ADLER

Because there is no handle.

JUNG

Perhaps we have been looking on the wrong side. Every door that matters opens from within.

He touches the door. It opens inward, without resistance, as though it had been waiting — patiently, and for a very long time — to be tried. Everyone freezes. Upstage, for the first time all evening, THE GUITARIST, THE HARPIST, and THE FLUTIST turn together to look at it. Nothing more. They do not play.

VLADIMIR

Where does it lead?

JUNG

Inside.

ESTRAGON

Inside where?

JUNG

That depends entirely on who enters.

ADLER

And whether he is willing, once inside, to actually see himself — which is a different and much harder thing than merely going in.

ADLER steps toward the door, pausing at the threshold.

VLADIMIR

Are you leaving?

ADLER

I am beginning.

ESTRAGON

Beginning what?

ADLER

The rest of my life. It has, apparently, been waiting for me on the other side of a door with no handle. Which is, in its way, exactly where I would have hidden it.

He exits. JUNG follows, then pauses at the threshold himself, and turns back — not to VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON, but to the fifth chair.

JUNG

The journey toward the Self does not lead away from the world.

He looks, for the first time all evening, directly at the empty chair.

JUNG

It leads back to it.

He exits. VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON remain, alone now beneath the leafing tree, the door standing open behind them like a held breath, the fifth chair between them and it.

ESTRAGON

Do you think they know where they are going?

VLADIMIR

No.

ESTRAGON

Then they are just like us.

VLADIMIR

Perhaps that is what being human means — going, without the map, in the general direction of becoming.

ESTRAGON looks at the tree.

ESTRAGON

It has leaves.

VLADIMIR

Yes.

ESTRAGON

Maybe Godot came.

VLADIMIR

When?

ESTRAGON

While we were looking somewhere else. That is, I suspect, the only way he ever arrives.

Silence.

VLADIMIR

Shall we go?

ESTRAGON

Yes.

They do not move.

VLADIMIR

Why aren’t we moving?

ESTRAGON

I don’t know.

Long silence. The wind again, gentler now, moving the leaves like a hand smoothing a page.

VLADIMIR

Perhaps we are still waiting.

ESTRAGON

For Godot?

VLADIMIR

No.

ESTRAGON

For what, then?

VLADIMIR

For courage.

ESTRAGON slowly rises — the first time in the entire play he has stood without being asked twice.

ESTRAGON

Then let us not wait for that either.

VLADIMIR

What shall we do instead?

ESTRAGON

Use what we have.

VLADIMIR

Which is?

ESTRAGON

Each other. It was never going to be more complicated than that, and we have spent a great many years making certain it was.

They walk together toward the open door, passing the fifth chair without sitting in it — but VLADIMIR, at the last moment, reaches out and turns it very slightly, so that it faces the door instead of the road. At the threshold, he stops.

VLADIMIR

Estragon.

ESTRAGON

Yes?

VLADIMIR

Do you think there is a Godot?

ESTRAGON considers the question with more care than he has given anything all evening.

ESTRAGON

Perhaps.

VLADIMIR

And if there isn’t?

ESTRAGON

Then we had better live anyway. It would be a poor excuse for a life, built entirely on the character of a stranger who never showed up to defend it.

They exit through the door. It does not close behind them.

CODA

THE CHAIR

The stage is empty but for the tree, now fully in leaf, and the five chairs — four of them empty in the ordinary way that furniture is empty, and the fifth, still turned toward the open door, empty in a way that feels, somehow, deliberate. A long moment. Then, from somewhere beyond the stage — not from the door, and not from the road, but from a direction the audience cannot quite place — a voice, unhurried, almost gentle.

GODOT

I was never late.

A pause, in which the audience is invited to decide for itself whether the voice belongs to a man, a memory, or simply the sound a life makes when it is finally lived in the present tense.

GODOT

You were simply early for your own arrival.

The wind moves through the tree once more. The leaves show their pale undersides, and are still. The fifth chair remains, facing the open door, waiting for no one in particular. Upstage, THE HARPIST’s finger grazes a single string — whether by accident, by permission, or because a whole evening of restraint has finally, quietly, run out, the production need never decide. If there is a sound, it is very small, and nothing in the play acknowledges having heard it. THE GUITARIST and THE FLUTIST do not move. Blackout.

END