SOURCE: “Dreaming the Music,” in Fields of Play in Modern Drama, Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 79-101.

[In the following essay, Whitaker compares the musical elements of The Three Sisters with George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House and Paul Claudel's Break of Noon. ]

You seem wide awake tonight as you settle into your seats and begin to scan the program, but you must be dreaming—for what director in his right mind would dare to run these three talky plays together in repertory? Yet there they are, spelled out in black on green: Three Sisters, Heartbreak House, and Break of Noon. And your ticket-stubs—M 12 and 13, just left of center—are matched by two untorn pairs in your pocket.

“Why?” you ask her. “What can be on his mind?”

“Maybe the music,” she says, without looking up. But what music could link the wistful stammering of Chekhov's military and provincial gentry, the paradoxical rhetoric of those Shavian puppets who converge upon Shotover's landlocked ship, and the lyric tirades of Claudel's impassioned souls somewhere in the Far East? In your memory these scripts are separate worlds—tacitly acknowledging each other's greatness, perhaps, across thousands of miles of emptiness.

Not that Three Sisters hasn't seemed disturbingly close to your own life. A painfully amusing world, where affable and weak-willed people are slowly overwhelmed by the triviality and malignity of others. And why? Because a host of pressures and distractions conspire to demand that resolute action be taken just at the moment of extreme fatigue or even paralysis. You recall how Irina, having fended off the ludicrously sinister Solyony, must then face Natasha's demand that she give up her own room. How Olga, worn out from helping the victims of the fire, is unable to cope with Natasha's move to usurp all household authority. How Chebutykin, after collapsing in self-disgust, can only withdraw behind a mask of indifference as Tusenbach goes to that fatal duel. “A comedy,” Chekhov had declared—and with reason. Stanislavsky, of course, believed these people to be seeking “gaiety, laughter, animation” and freeing themselves inwardly from the banal. The far-off happiness of which Vershinin talks must therefore be present now—in aspiration or prophecy. And Soviet critics have since agreed. But how can they give so much weight to the mere words of these ineffective people? At most, you think, their closing speeches may sound a note of hope in a context that invites despair. As Chekhov said, art provides no answers: it states the problem—though this final dissonance, like the circular form of the entire play, seems to state a problem that defies solution. “Nothing matters,” says Chebutykin. And Olga: “If only we knew, if only we knew.” Not far, after all, from Chekhov to Beckett. Next year in Moscow? “Let's go,” says one lonely voice to another. And they don't move.

Shaw's own world of heartbreak has seemed very different—despite his calling it a fantasia in the Russian manner. No impressionistic naturalism here, no iridescent and translucent surfaces, no disclosure of time's eroding of the will. Instead, a rhetorical farce—the accelerated education of Ellie in a Shavian wonderland where each puppet wears a mask or two grotesquely at odds with his own face. You recall Hector Hushabye, the romantic hero as kept man, reformer manqué, and part-time raisonneur, declaring: “In this house we know all the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose.” And Boss Mangan, self-made man and mama's boy, crying out like some ridiculous Lear: “Let's all strip stark naked.” And Ellie Dunn, hardened by her final discovery that Shotover's seventh degree of concentration is only rum, agreeing with that more terribly absurd Lear that true happiness can come only when you are “stripped of everything, even of hope.” Now, she says, “I want nothing.” A much darker play than Shaw ever admitted—the probing of an emptiness about the heart. Some critics, of course, have seen purgation and renewal in that final explosion which destroys Mangan, the burglar, and the rectory. And Ellie, they say, survives heartbreak. But why then does she echo Hesione's wish for another bombing raid, another “glorious experience”? Stripped of hope, this Cordelia lusts for destruction. And what other end, you ask, does the play's own erratic but self-cancelling dialectic permit? If the Prozorov sisters in 1901 are already waiting for Godot, Shaw's chessmen in 1916 are playing out an endgame. Shotover may say that Hector's business as an Englishman is navigation—“learn it and live; or leave it and be damned”—but this ship is foundering in the void.

No doubt Break of Noon also moves toward a dark nothingness, but its self-stripping dialectic has seemed to you finally less rhetorical than erotic. The tragic world of Racine transformed into a post-Wagnerian quartet? In which that bourgeois Tristan, the priggish Mesa, must move from his shipboard encounter with Ysé at break of noon through his decision to commit adultery (and, in effect, murder) during the solar eclipse and on to his acceptance of suffering and death at break of midnight. Partage de minuit … which sheds a paradoxical light of reunion. To break is to share? An absurdity here beyond Chekhov or Shaw: foolishness to the Greeks and the moderns. But Christians, too, have doubted Claudel's extreme theology of liberty and grace. Etiam peccata—even sin serves—in the phrase from Augustine that Claudel used as epigraph for The Satin Slipper. Shall I therefore sin boldly, and so construct my own cross—from which I can then address the God whose priest I once thought to become? A doubtful cure for the ego's religious pretensions. And the 1905 version of the play, which suffuses Mesa's late speeches with pathos and exaltation, seems especially self-deceptive on that score. But that is the version most generally praised, even by those who attack its ethics or theology, for it's easy to dismiss Claudel's late and pathetic attempts to strip the lyricism from Act 3 when with Jean-Louis Barrault's collaboration he was preparing the play for production in 1948. Attempts that Barrault himself sometimes found hard to take: after all, didn't he refuse to give up the “Cantique de Mesa” that he'd already rehearsed? And didn't he also cling to Mesa's last burst of eloquence—“moi-même / La forte flamme fulminante dans la gloire de Dieu …”? But the definitive text would cancel that speech, too. Now, just before the time-bomb explodes, a wounded Mesa must painfully and silently reach for the light—encouraged by a flippant Ysé. Did Claudel's long dialogue between Animus and Anima have to come to that?

Which reminds you of her own rather flip reply: “Maybe the music.” Did she mean Chekhov's counterpoint? Claudel's fascination with Wagner? Shaw's claim to have been a “pupil of Mozart”? Or something more obvious—like the receding strains of the military band at the end of Three Sisters, the “splendid drumming” in the sky near the end of Heartbreak House (“By thunder …” exclaims Ellie, “it is Beethoven”), and that other Beethovenish muttering in the sky near the end of Break of Noon … the sound of the stars?

“Maybe what music?”

But she puts her finger to her lips: the lights are going down.

Immediately the three of them: dark-blue, white, and black. Olga speaking. Olga in her teacher's uniform, moving about the drawing room with nervous lassitude, school-exercises in hand, wide awake but as if in a dream: “Father died just a year ago today. …” Speaking to whom? Expecting no answer from Irina, that shimmer of white lost in thought by the sunny window. Not even glancing toward Masha—your foreground figure, blackly ensconced in a downstage chair, hat on her lap, absorbed in a book. “… very cold and it was snowing. It seemed to me I would never live through it; and you were lying there quite still. …” Behind the upstage columns, just beyond your focus of attention, a maid beginning to lay the table in the ball-room. “And now—a year's gone by, and we talk about it so easily. …” We? Irina still not answering, Masha not looking up. Then the clock striking. You listen: how many of you listen? “The clock struck twelve then, too.” Silence—in which you can almost hear … And now Olga recalling (for whom?) how the band played as they carried father to the cemetery.

“Why must we bring up all those memories?” Irina now speaking: part of a we that had been silently shared, after all, but resisted? Masha still rather firmly not looking up. Refusing to? Behind the columns, nearly inaudible to you, three men now chatting. Olga turning to the window, exclaiming over the spring warmth but at once going back to the past—to the spring now eleven years ago when they left Moscow. This morning her heart leapt with joy: she wanted so much to go home again. “Go home to Moscow!” And a smile now playing over Irina's face. From upstage, fragments of talk: “Small chance of that!” “Of course, it's nonsense.” Masha suddenly whistling a snatch of yearning melody. A sharp reproof from Olga. Masha silent, rigid. And now Olga recalling defensively her headaches, her gloom, her weakness, day by day for the past four years.

As you follow this increasingly intricate counterpoint of echoes and reversals, abortive talk and shared silence, you recall Gorky's verdict after a performance by the Moscow Art Theater: “This is music—not acting.” But it's a music, you now begin to realize, that is itself a mode of action—and one that is already unfolding its own meaning. Seldom confronting each other directly, these people are always exchanging oblique responses, unacknowledged echoes, tacit resistances. Solitude is certainly not—as some have called it—their essential condition. Don't they allow a chronic inadvertence to distort or disrupt the silent reciprocity of which they are all fitfully aware? (They? But aren't they almost we—for you who sit silently with them?) Even in turning away, they don't listen only to themselves. They want to be aware of their distance from others, to hear themselves being absent from just this continuous music of existence in which you find them immersed. Stanislavsky must have been wrong: they don't want gaiety. They want to want gaiety. They want to remain within some poignant dream of the past or of the merely possible. But you were wrong, too: they aren't weak-willed. Lost in thought, or addressing the air, or suddenly whistling, they fix themselves in subtle opposition to the present. And yet, even the absence they seek has a consoling mutuality: “It seemed to me I would never live through it,” Olga had said; “and you had fainted and were lying there quite still, just as if you were dead.” Don't they want somehow to hear themselves being absent together?

But in this resistance to a living present, what various life! There is Masha—remaining aloof even after the men come downstage, but radiating a blocked vitality that now speaks in those haunting lines from Pushkin: “A green oak grows by a curving shore, / And round that oak hangs a golden chain.” And Chebutykin—now coyly giving Irina that most inappropriate samovar because he is still carrying on a fantasied romance with her dead mother. And Solyony—ostentatiously playing Lermontov or the sinister boor because of his painful shyness. (Just as the shy Natasha who is soon to enter will learn to play the domestic tyrant? What irrelevant moralism tempted you to think that pathetic pair more willful or malign than anyone else? Don't they simply escape into a different dream?) And there is the competent but glib Vershinin—now meeting the sisters, joking about the distant past or future, spinning out charming words so that he won't think of that histrionically suicidal wife who is a painful image of their shared condition, and increasingly glancing toward Masha. (And, yes, Masha has reversed her decision to leave the party. Won't the affair toward which they are already drifting—as she tries not to think of her histrionically pedantic husband—be their own dream of shared absence, a dream as hypnotic as those lines from Pushkin?) And now Andrey, the capable brother who has “such a bad habit”—as Olga has just told Vershinin—“always walking away.” (For just that reason, Natasha's embarrassed running away from the luncheon table will soon easily trap him into proposing a domestic flight into shared absence.) And finally Kulygin—the leaden chain about Masha's green oak, maintaining himself precariously in the pompous academic dream toward which he had once tempted her schoolgirl romanticism. (And yet when he almost relaxes don't you glimpse through the mask an ironically compassionate eye?)

As the group moves into the ball-room for luncheon, leaving Irina behind with Tusenbach, you realize that you have neglected to place that ugly little lieutenant within this unfolding panorama of compulsive inadvertence. Is that because he seems the most genuinely attentive person in this drawing-room—ready enough to join in with Vershinin's philosophizing, but ready also, as his remark to Irina now makes explicit, to understand even the Solyony who taunts him and will one day kill him? Surely Tusenbach doesn't want merely to want gaiety? But listen more closely as he now plays the perennially rejected lover: “Oh, I long so passionately for life, to work and aspire, and all this longing is part of my love for you, Irina.” No, he hasn't even heard her say a moment ago that she doesn't want to hear such talk. Though aware of his own absurdity, he too wants to hear himself being absent—with her.

Now they have all gone behind the upstage columns, leaving the drawing-room appropriately empty. Fragments of talk reach you. Two lieutenants enter and take pictures of the various company. And is this, then, Chekhov's picture of our necessary condition? Can he do nothing but smilingly lament, with that Dr. Dorn in The Sea Gull: “But what can I do … Tell me, what can I do?” Many have said so—and you have agreed. Tolstoy, you recall, couldn't read many pages of Three Sisters. “Where does it all lead us?” he asked. But the script isn't the play, and the play is more than a picture. Hasn't it been inviting and requiring of you, through its increasingly panoramic focus and its developing counterpoint of disjunctive speeches and gestures, exactly what these people resist: that you open yourself to the full music of our existence in mutuality? In Rosmersholm, where you spy upon spying characters, the dramatic structure tempts you to join them in trying to possess the field of play as an intellectual object. But Three Sisters frustrates any such analytic observation—and even seems to empty you of that possessive “me.” Detective work here would only distract from the revelatory pattern of present trivia. What happens instead? A widening of your peripheral attention, a listening in quiet alertness to the jagged texture of this music—and to the harmonies produced by the gestures through which these people construct for themselves a dream of shared need.

The play's style has been leading you into an alternative mode of witnessing—a norm rendered more subtly and immediately than if it were consigned to a raisonneur like Krouschov in The Wood Demon. And witnessing, as you have seen, is itself a fundamental action. Josiah Royce said somewhere, “Finite beings are always such as they are in virtue of an inattention which at present blinds them to their actual relations to God and to one another.” Leaving “God” aside, as it seems, Three Sisters explores something like that intuition. In their willed inattention, its people experience one another as distant or nonexistent. They experience space as constriction or separation, time as a not-yet or a slipping-away, the world itself as the constant threat of nothingness. But through you the play has been disclosing time and space as an expanding now, a moving yet simultaneous apprehension of these variously self-closed subjective worlds which are really one.

And yet, have you really been an empty alertness to the “now?” Haven't you limited your attention to a poignantly realistic fiction, to what you call the “people” in that drawing-room? But those “people” are living masks for the actors, whose attention to your present field has alerted you to the more abortive reciprocity that they are playing—and so enabling you indirectly to play. At this moment Andrey and Natasha seem lost in their awkward embrace, unaware of the newly arrived officers who stare in amusement. But the actors are sharing with you that quietly farcical closing tableau, in which years of pain are ironically implicit. Stanislavsky knew very well the great importance of “public solitude” as a technique for the Chekhovian actor. And he also knew that the actor must sustain, while “penetrating into the most secret places” of his character's heart, an “unbroken flow” of communion with his stage partners, with objects, and with the audience. Only a style founded upon such communion can enable the cast of Three Sisters to present, within and beyond these masks of distraction and self-obsession, our mutual immanence.

Of course, for the actors and for you, the play's apparent realism combines its intimate penetration with a clarifying distance. Could you hear this music if immersed in it as Tusenbach must be? But then isn't your own point of view itself an absurd fiction, the contemplative equivalent of what the characters more damagingly seek? If so, you must now be experiencing your own version of the play's “spine” or objective: to hear ourselves being absent from the silent music of presence. You stop short. Does Three Sisters ask you to abandon the theater—in order to become genuinely present to your own life? “I saw a wonderful play last night,” says Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard. “It was so funny.” To which Lyubov retorts: “It probably wasn't funny at all. Instead of going to plays, you should take a good look at yourself. …” Advice, certainly, which that histrionic lady might better take than give!

But despite such ambivalences in Chekhov's homeopathic art, which seeks to cure illusion through illusion, your own life is nowhere but here for the moment. And this performance is now inviting you to open yourself more fully. In the second act, Andrey will tell Natasha that there's nothing to talk about and will then confess his disappointment to the deaf Ferapont. Masha and Vershinin will exchange flattering complaints about tedious men and complaining wives. Tusenbach, who dreams of work, will chatter of his patience to an Irina who thinks only of the exhaustion to which her own dream of work has led. Vershinin will pretend to debate Tusenbach about the existence of happiness, and Chebutykin will squabble with Solyony about whether a roast is a roast or an onion is an onion. And, after Tusenbach has got drunk to prepare for a night of trashy piano-playing that Natasha has already vetoed, after Solyony has forced words of love and Natasha words of maternal anxiety upon the perturbed Irina, Olga will bring to the tired and frustrated company a splitting headache and the report that the whole town is talking of Andrey. But you? You will have to listen closely to the counterpoint between all this inattentive loquacity and the action of performance itself.

Through an evasive complaining or yearning that nourishes the very predicaments on which it feeds, the characters will increasingly justify their sense of being helpless victims of circumstance. But the actors, by rendering the nuances of this subtext with such affectionate realism, will utterly transform each instance of self-closure—from Natasha's and Andrey's non-conversation to the final moments in which Irina ignores Kulygin, who ignores Vershinin, who ignores Olga, who ignores everyone. As the characters confirm their prisons, sometimes thinking of an illusory key called “tomorrow,” the actors will be leading you to understand from the inside—in all their tempting ease or seeming necessity—those momentary maneuvers of turning off or away that enable us gradually to construct some trap of habit, addiction, or catastrophic role-playing from which no ordinary act of attention can then free us. And won't your own painful exhilaration, as the second act sputters to its close, indicate that you will have doubly shared the spectrum of self-isolating moods generated here by such maneuvers: the self-pity of Andrey and Chebutykin, the fatuous if self-ironic verbosity of Vershinin, Tusenbach, and Kulygin, the cruel petulance of Natasha and Solyony, the hysterical indecisiveness of Masha, the sick anxiety of Olga, and the numb exhaustion of Irina?

You will then be prepared to act and witness, in the context appropriately provided by a disastrous fire of unknown origin, some yet more painful consequences of that willed and often quite lucid inattention. Most obviously, of course, in the generous but weary Olga—who will withdraw from Natasha's rude attack into a near faint, leave the room to avoid the spectacle of the drunken Chebutykin, block out Masha's literary confession of love by insisting from behind a night-screen that she can't hear, and finally utter no word at all from behind that screen as Andrey makes his defiant confession of guilt. But the despairing Irina, too, will now be merely curt with Chebutykin, won't notice for some time that Tusenbach has fallen asleep, and will say nothing in response to either Masha's confession or Andrey's. And even Masha, who so eagerly answers Vershinin's snatch of song, will then dismiss Tusenbach and Kulygin in bored irritation, sit in silence as Olga consoles Irina, confess her love in phrases intended mainly for her own ears, and walk out (again answering Vershinin's music) just as Andrey proposes a family conference. Won't Irina's pleading curtain-line sum up for you then, not just her desire to escape from their shared predicament, but also the interior action that has repeatedly constituted that predicament? “Let's go!”

The last act, of course, will bring that performed action full circle—to an unresolved dissonance. The military band will play, Chebutykin will hum, and the sisters will utter their various cries, as ex-lieutenant Tusenbach is now carried to the cemetery. But the action of performance, far from being circular, will have moved through an expanding present to disclose all that was implicit in the play's opening scene. And suddenly you foresee, just before the end, a moment of harmony between the music so imperfectly known by the dramatis personae and that being disclosed through the play's total form of acting and witnessing. Thanks to Solyony's catastrophic role-playing, thanks also to the repeatedly endorsed decorum of evasion that lets affairs of “honor” as well as “love” proceed as if unnoticed, death is now imminent. And amid a conversation designed mainly to hide from each other and from themselves their full awareness of such a possibility, Tusenbach will turn to Irina—and he who plays Tusenbach will turn to her who plays Irina—and say: “Really, I feel fine. I feel as if I were seeing those pine trees and maples and birches for the first time in my life. They all seem to be looking at me, waiting for something.” And they are. They are waiting for Tusenbach to wake up from your daily sleepwalking. They are inviting you to listen. …

And you turn to her: “The music of silence?”

A skillful feint with that teetering tray of empty bottles—a near crash?—and then in a brisk stage-Irish: “God bless us! Sorry to wake you, miss, I'm sure … but you are a stranger to me. What might you be waiting here for now?”

And the pert ingénue, a disarming life roused beneath her polite indignation: “Waiting for somebody to show some signs of knowing that I have been invited here.”

Who answers whom? Though Ellie Dunn seems to have waked with a start as Nurse Guinness was breezing past with those rum-bottles, she may still be dreaming. The playing style, a cheerful burlesque of drawing-room comedy, offers no clue—but at least it's inviting you into the game. And the set—a crazy part-house, part-ship, beams jutting askew, against a backdrop that might be sky or earth or void—tells you that Shaw's fairly realistic specifications have been jettisoned in favor of a design more appropriate to the script. This is leaky architecture that has become aggressive rhetoric that has become its own symbol. This “silly house,” Ellie will call it, “this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations.” Already you know that it isn't just a Sussex country house, or the nineteenth-century British tradition on the rocks, or the whole of Europe on the edge of doom. It is Shaw's house—and yours. Where does this possible dream take place? In the theater. And it will be no leisurely prelude but a self-questioning scherzo.

From every part of the stage, the Shavian ventriloquism begins to shape your world. But as you enter that sequence of duels or duets you recall from the script—Hesione Hushabye's sweetly condescending chat with Ellie about a British Othello who is really Hector on the make, Captain Shotover's brusque attempts to persuade Boss Mangan that he's much too old for Ellie, Hector's knowingly empty flirtation with that dangerously conventional woman who likes to be called Lady Utterword, and then his shrewdly mad conversation with Shotover about human vermin, vampire women, and every decent man's need to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill—the action now seems radically changed by the sheer fact of performance. These rhetorical puppets, though certainly not Chekhovian “people” whose depths you might penetrate, have nonetheless a surprisingly rich vitality. How had Shaw put it? The puppet is the actor in his primitive form. Its symbolic costume … its unchanging stare … the mimicry by which it suggests human gesture in unearthly caricature—these give to its performance an intensity to which few actors can pretend. But on this all too human stage, of course, each actor is in fact playing several puppets—for the characters of Heartbreak House are schizoid embodiments of theatricality itself: stock-company “lines” who are also operatic parts, dream figures, semi-allegorical personages, and occasional voices of what may pass for Shavian wisdom. … my plays require a special technique of acting, … in particular great virtuosity in sudden transitions of mood that seem to the ordinary actor to be transitions from one“line” of character to another. On such a stage a heartbroken adolescent can instantly become a cynic on the prowl, a maternal confidante can also be a seductive hostess and an emasculating wife, a philandering lapdog can be a shrewd judge of character and an offstage hero, and a mad hatter can be a mad Lear and a mad Shaw.

Nor are these merely the masks of a clowning playwright. Each actor is grounding a brittle and ironic multiplicity of roles in his or her own protean life—and in yours. Isn't that the initial meaning of this play's cheerfully heartbreaking invitation? Through the knowing poses of Hushabye bohemianism, the deadpan bombast of Shotover's apocalyptic or merely defensive joking, and the grotesquely abrupt stages of Ellie's breakdown and self-transcendence, the actors are inviting you to join them in the kaleidoscopic theater of your shared conditioning. Each puppet-role cries out in the voice of its temporary host: “Look! Play me now! Haven't you done so long enough without admitting it?” But as one piece after another is added to the game, as you delightedly expose your own Hectoring romanticism, your capitalist Bossism, your Mazzini idealism—where are you going? “Is it quite understood,” says Lady Utterword with a superb smile, “that we are only playing?” “Quite,” responds Hector on the instant. “I am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer worthlessness.” Do puppets, characters, and actors there speak for you all? …the play began with an atmosphere and does not contain one word that was foreseen before it was written. … You can almost believe it—despite the ghost of a double plot that will take Ellie on the rebound from Hector to Mangan to Shotover while Ariadne, shadowed by her brother-in-law, toys with Hector. And certainly this bouyant improvisation is not, like Three Sisters, unfolding some silent richness of meaning already implicit in its opening moments. Isn't its agitation disturbingly static? Isn't the play itself a landlocked yet foundering dreamship?

But wait: … it is not in the nature of things possible for a person to take in a play fully until he is in complete possession of its themes. … And that Shavian principle applies even to this unpremeditated music. Don't you already hear in the romantic, political, and moral directionlessness of your playing an anxious search for direction? A desire to find the necessary limits of your own lively negation? As each character helps to strip the others in the game that Hector will define, won't actors and witnesses be implicitly trying to exhaust what challenges and entertains? What puppet-role can't be exposed or exploded? What ship or house might constitute a true image of the private and public thing—a truly moral economy? Surely the performed action, in its indirect search for direction, will be almost at one with the action of performance. These dramatis personae constitute a many-layered mask for a playful heart—a protean life not Shaw's alone—that has committed itself to words, to ideas, to power, and has become profoundly uneasy. Pressing back on yourself now in negation after negation, exposing the ironic impotence of each bold critique, delighting in the emptiness of each attack upon your own false solidities, you must follow an unpredictable path. In Three Sisters the pattern of resonating coincidences had a formal inevitability, but here the most necessary consequences must be strange leaps. Nothing is certain but the gradually deepening darkness—in which you play the leaps.

Doesn't this become boldly explicit at the end of Act 1, when the conversation suddenly transforms itself? Shotover raises a strange wail in the darkness: “What a house! What a daughter!” Hesione raves: “What a father!” And Hector echoes in mockery: “What a husband!” Then Shotover bellows: “Is there no thunder in heaven?” And Hector—playing with that lofty Shakespearean mode: “Is there no beauty, no bravery on earth?” And Hesione: “What do men want? …” Their grotesque litany or mock-tragic chorus then modulates into a weird chant which Shotover begins—“I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors thereof, / That men might come for their choosing, and their betters spring from their love”—and which Hector and Hesione pick up and complete in a neatly rhymed stanza. The abrupt shift into half-parodied lyricism has betrayed and partly expressed an uneasiness about your previous path through self-negating but self-delighting rhetoric. Isn't the darkness really deeper than that? Another shift into the flat sardonic—Ariadne calls and Shotover comments: “The cat is on the tiles”—and you suddenly feel in this play an eerie depth that no character or player seems likely to plumb. Hector goes into the hall: “Shall I turn up the lights for you?” And Shotover declaims madly—for all of you: “No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.” The comic inadequacy of that aphorism increases your feeling that what's now in question is a darkness that may be quite literally unspeakable.

An end to words—amid this linguistic exuberance? But what else? Early in the second act the speechifying Boss Mangan, who has exposed his rascality in an effort to make Ellie break off their engagement, finds himself reduced by her hypnotic powers to a mutely listening fat body. After overhearing talk that greatly disturbs his precious “I,” he is roused from that semi-trance only to be reduced to childish tears by Hesione. Then, during a farcical interlude, a fake burglar so plays upon the inauthentic liberalism of the propertied classes that he reduces everyone to an awkward if momentary silence. And soon even Shotover's pretensions to Shavian wisdom are punctured by Ellie: “Now I have found you out,” she says. “You pretend to be busy, and think of fine things to say, and run in and out to surprise people by saying them, and get away before they can answer you.” Whereupon she proceeds more gently to hypnotize him toward a spiritual marriage. By the end of this act, the once imperturbable Randall Utterword has himself been reduced by Ariadne's verbal whirlwind to foaming madness and tears. At least female words are now overcoming male words—as if in some bitter expansion of that final moment in Man and Superman when Ann Whitefield tells the revolutionist Tanner whom she has ensnared, “Keep on talking, dear”—to the accompaniment of “universal laughter.”

But the next leap? Mustn't this play answer Ellie, too? “… I feel now as if there was nothing I could not do,” she has said to Shotover, “because I want nothing.” But as she then proclaimed the self-sufficiency of one stripped of everything, even of hope, you saw her almost unconsciously grip the old man's hand in hers. Finally, of course, it is not a question of sexual superiority. You know that in the third act, having exploded all male pretensions, the Eternal Woman will herself call for more bombs. Haven't we found ourselves out? Through whatever mask, we enact the same predicament. Appalled by the futility of our commitment to words, ideas, and power, we remain hypnotized by our own verbal agitation. Puppets of ourselves, we keep on talking. Trying to talk each other into silence. To talk ourselves into silence.

A moonless night. It is Act 3. Your comic masks, rather the worse for wear, appear in the garden. Somewhere in the darkness a voice that once was Boss Mangan's begins to whimper. “Silence!” orders Captain Shotover, fortissimo. “I say, let the heart break in silence!” Yes. And that moment, so refreshing in its evident absurdity, can't be negated, you think, by anything to come. Not by the “splendid drumming” in the sky, or the explosion of the dynamite that Shotover has saved to “blow up the human race if it goes too far,” or the brightness blazing from the windows of the house as Hector, like some spirit of Enlightenment gone berserk, races through the rooms tearing down curtains and lighting lamps. The noisy brilliance of our self-cancelling rhetoric now points only to what it tries to hide—the dark silence of heartbreak.

You can understand why Bernard Dukore has called this play a panorama of “existential damnation.” And why Charles Berst has said that its “Tolstoyan, Christian, Shavian judgment” is colored by “the playwright's profound agony at his own insignificance and powerlessness.” You can even understand why Maurice Valency has read it as a “masochist” fantasy that derives “its romantic charm and all its cogency as drama” from “the death wish.” But such judgments surely result from the hasty abstraction of dark notes in the performed action that could never in themselves account for the full music of your shared action of performance. Was Francis Fergusson closer to the mark? Is this a play of “sharply rationalizing” and “fully awake” characters, set forth by a playwright who has virtually become an “inspired clown” with a “disinterested vision of action as a rationalizing in the void”? No: these Shavian puppets remain locked in their Hushabye dreamhouse, and the action of performance is no external relation between a clowning Shaw and yourselves. Actors and witnesses, only a bit more wakeful than the puppets they play, are here becoming alert to their shared dreams. This present action, no rationalizing in the void, is an undoing of your masks of competence and sophistication—an undoing shaped by a playful awareness of what such refreshingly “self”-destructive laughter allows you to celebrate.

A teetering play of empty puppets—a near crash—and an unpremeditated feat of balance. As if in playing the nothingness of your words of power—and chiefly, perhaps, of the “I” that calls up the entire dream of heartbreak—you are awakened to … some sign of being invited? Why else could Shaw, years later, let King Charles answer George Fox's attack on “mummery, whether in playhouse or steeplehouse,” with that dry question: “Have you considered, Pastor, that the playhouse is a place where two or three are gathered together?”

“Shaw was right,” you whisper before the lights come up, “to call this his greatest play. It answers all his words.”

It is already late in Act 3. It is dark. After prelude and scherzo, now a swift finale? In this half-destroyed Confucian temple where a time-bomb will soon end everything—no, in what was that temple before its battered walls dissolved a few moments ago, opening the action to the starry night—a man, propped in a large and shabby armchair, faces you. Almost, as if glimpsed in some distorting and revealing mirror, the actor's double and yours? For you have been sharing his conversation with the silence, and with the low muttering of the stars that sometimes articulates the silence. Suddenly he senses behind him—don't you hear the breath being held?—that other to whom he had refused to give himself and who had then abandoned him. Is he awake? Dreaming? Her lineaments gradually disengage themselves from the darkness. And then she speaks.

During this conversation, this hesitant reunion of Mesa and Ysé, the entire play seems to draw together, not merely on stage but among you and within you. For the action here is dissolving your common-sense distinctions between “outer” and “inner” space. More definitely than Three Sisters, Break of Noon has been unfolding the meaning of a silence implicit in its opening moments. And more firmly than Heartbreak House, this play has been seeking the limits of its own inadequate verbalism. It's as if your shared playing has moved, through an intersubjectivity that is now painfully beginning to understand its incarnate condition, its confinement within reciprocally dependent centers of perception, toward an end that calls through the silence. Is that why the performed action and the action of performance here compose neither a counterpoint of opposites, as in Three Sisters, nor a vexed identity, as in Heartbreak House, but a gradual convergence?

The performed action itself has obviously converged toward the Omega, the love-trap and death-trap, that you have seen with increasing clarity in the ship of Act 1, the Chinese tomb of Act 2, and this armchair of Act 3 where Ysé is now sitting with a Mesa who finds it strangely unnecessary to look at her. (“The end of the world,” he had once said half-believingly, “is always imminent.”) At break of noon the ship held four homeless and light-struck passengers, each fleeing the disillusionments of the past, each seeking a satisfaction that meant the risk of death. “All of us dead and buried next year, my little friends,” said Amalric then, as they passed Suez. “There is no place where we could stop if we wanted to,” said Mesa. And yet, impelled by a restless passion within their various kinds of adventuring, what could they really want but that impossible end? Amalric with a masculine bravado that needs repeatedly to prove itself, de Ciz with a feminine deviousness that hides his commercial appetite, Mesa with a self-righteous diffidence that defends his ego, and Ysé with all the contradictoriness of a Philistine femme fatale who desires both mastery and subjection, solid goods and an unattainable ecstasy—each of the four was ready in self-blinded pursuit to exploit and abandon the others. But because Mesa and Ysé could hear, through what seemed most opposite, withheld, forbidden, the silent call of their identity, they would meet again between the claws of the Chinese tomb, during the eclipse. Stripping themselves of name and responsibility, sending de Ciz to his death (though with his wry acquiescence), they knew the perversity of their death-longing, but not that it might become a moment in the self-transcending dialectic of their passion. Now, after mutual betrayal and consequent suffering, aware of the nothingness that insists on possessing the world, they are discovering through each other their true names. They sometimes speak, of course, with a childish petulance and pride that you find rather embarrassing, for this performance is following the “definitive” text of 1949. But isn't this frank recognition of the still clinging self preferable, after all, to the magniloquence Claudel had once allowed his alter-ego—which he must have cancelled as he listened more closely to the end that now seems to have evoked this entire play as response?

Claudel's severe pruning of his own elevated rhetoric was surely consonant—whatever his literary admirers may say—with the larger collaborative process that transformed his monological closet drama of 1905 into a genuine theatrical event. Thanks to the gradually self-transcending playing-style that Claudel worked out with Barrault, the action of performance has been converging with the performed action toward the same silent end. Like the dramatis personae, the actors and witnesses seem also to have been stripping away the accidents of time and space and the resistances of self-will as they discover their essential mutuality. In Act 1, when the four characters confronted one another in enigmatically distanced intimacy—looking at each other's faces, said Amalric, “as if we were playing poker and the cards are dealt”—you too were distanced from them and from each other by the appearances of an “external” space and time. Beginning and ending with a frozen tableau like an old photograph, Act 1 was a framed image of the past in memory, which moved from its opening at four bells through a center of mutual recognition at six bells (“What is there between you and me?” “Mesa, I am Ysé”) to its conclusion at eight bells or noon. And just as two of those four characters hesitantly began to communicate through the external appearances—most notably in that long exchange through the eyes that reduced Mesa to an embarrassed and angry stammering before Ysé—so the playing style allowed the lyric tirades to filter only hesitantly through a “bourgeois realism” of everyday gestures, establishing a fragmentary musical communication from actors to witnesses of nuances that ordinary talk must leave to the gaps between words. In effect, didn't you then share Mesa's position, as Amalric described it? “Rather than looking directly at you, he seems to be looking at you somewhere else in a mirror. He listens to you from somewhere else—from where your voice resounds.” It was strange how the “realism” that usually claims to signify immediacy could there provide the distance, the set of baffles, separating you from one another—as if you were essentially more than any “realistic” surfaces could disclose, beings to whom only a poetic reality could adequately respond. You began to understand why Claudel—as Barrault had said—was interested during revision and production “not only in his text but in the smallest gestures, concerning which he is full of ideas.” His highly verbal and egocentric text was moving, through this encounter with the medium of theatrical reciprocity, toward an actualizing of its own full meaning.

As Act 2 began to move beyond that “realism,” it took the performed action a step closer to your field of play. Opening with Mesa's long soliloquy while waiting for Ysé in the center of the tomb, it seemed no image of the past but a present reality: more immediate yet more boldly stylized. Gestures and utterances now began to compose a coherent music. All bodily expression tended to become, at least during the solar eclipse, a vehicle for a silent invisibility. You recall the long moment of Mesa's approach to Ysé from behind, his hands going delicately all over her body without touching her. “Someone is behind me whom I can't see,” said Ysé, “and who has come to me from I don't know where.” And that other moment at mid-eclipse—“There is no tomorrow,” said Mesa—when with clasped hands the two almost danced their twistingly mutual approach. At such moments the reciprocal play of actor and actress for the witnesses was no less evident than the reciprocity between Mesa and Ysé. But as if such immediacy were possible only in darkness, the act then moved back toward a more distancing “realism” in the oblique conversation with de Ciz—and so to its ironic curtain gesture: the backslapping embrace of betrayal offered by Mesa.

Though Act 3 began with a rather similar evening conversation between Ysé and Amalric, in their doomed domesticity amid the ruins of the besieged temple, it has swiftly moved beyond all but the barest indications of “realism” toward this darkness illuminated by points of light, this living space in which you now participate: neither “external” nor “internal” but a shared vision almost out of time. (For now it has become true: there is no tomorrow.) That swift transformation of style was assisted, during Amalric's temporary absence from the stage, by Mesa's first long address to the seemingly unresponsive Ysé. Speaking again from behind her, he recapitulated and re-enacted his year of suffering in her absence. (“She is close by, and yet she isn't. She is here but she is not here. … Like someone who knows and says with her lips, ‘be silent!’”) For you as for Mesa, time and space there became aspects of a present dialogue with silence. And after the fight with Amalric—during which Ysé already began to move in spirit back toward the Mesa whom she was abandoning—and after Amalric and Ysé had propped him in this chair, the ruined walls could quite easily dissolve to enable you to share a dialogue with a vaster and yet more responsive silence. (For while pruning the rhetoric of Act 3, Claudel also introduced the articulate sound of the stars. Why? In Beethoven, as he insisted to Barrault, there is always the music that speaks and the music that listens. And so in each of us, for our experience is essentially dialogical. More clearly heard, the operatic “Cantique de Mesa” had therefore to be transformed from a monologue, in which a potentially self-deceptive communication with “silence” might seem to Mesa sufficient, into an authentic dialogue with that Other who transcends any empirical consciousness. Hence the “stellar kettle” has muttered, for you also, “The others … the others. …”) Nevertheless, those theatrical transitions would have been impossible gimmicks if they had not been in harmony with the self-transforming style of playing. Speech in this Act has been yet more clearly silence-filled, and more resonant. The recurrent patterns of gesture that so interested Claudel—the exchange of gazes, the address to the silent partner, the attitude of expectancy, the silent lip-speech, the joined and slowly raised hands—are now unfolding their full meaning. It's as if you and the dramatis personae could now participate openly in a previously hidden music. You recall Claudel's interest in the Nō, where each rhythmic gesture discloses a meaning. For actors and witnesses, Claudel said in his Journal, “Nō is a school of patience, of tension, and of attention.” And suddenly that sentence from Ecclesiasticus comes to mind—his real motto: Ne impedias musicam. Don't hinder the music.

Let it play through you—toward what end? Toward a dramatic actualizing of our mutual immanence, of what Charles Williams called our co-inherence, as we approach that strangely absent Presence … “someone who in myself may be more truly myself than I.” At this moment in a play that has increasingly seemed an implicit celebration of Tenebrae, you don't need to recall Mesa's agonized talk in Act 1 about a Witness who “never leaves me for a minute's peace,” or Ysé's less self-involved remark in Act 3: “Yes, Amalric, when we walk, our foot makes a sound. It's as if you are walking in the night and you can't see clearly. But there is a wall on the right somewhere.” Hasn't the play itself, through its shared and convergent patterns of gesture, gone very far indeed toward rendering the strictly undramatizable presence of a silent Host in your midst, with whom you are essentially in dialogue? As Mesa has recognized the silence that speaks through the other who holds the clue to his being, so Ysé has recognized in her return to Mesa the life-in-death that she has always sought. And so, opening yourselves to your assigned roles as actors and witnesses, listening to what speaks in this situation, you too have been led by a seemingly unpremeditated but increasingly graceful playing to understand the ominous line now spoken through Ysé: “You could die by my hand.”

Slowly she stands up behind Mesa, raising her arm by easing successively each joint and finally the hand. And she asks for the stars. “I can't unhook them for you,” says Mesa. And she: “It's easy. Just stretch out your hand.” He is still a miser. Are they forbidden? Take them. Give them to me. … Childish requests? A still possessive Ysé? No: the play's recognition that light-struck beings in time can experience no moment of satisfied arrival but only a continued participation in the necessary breaking. …

“It's easy. Just stretch out your hand. Get up.” Taking his hand, she forces him painfully to stand erect, to lift his hand yet higher. Against the darkness they shape with their raised and joined hands the sign of the end that has drawn them here. “Be quiet,” he says. But she answers, sinking down at his feet, “Remember me for one moment in this darkness. I was once your vine.” Now you can see only a luminous raised hand. And now the curtain drops like lightning.

It is still quite dark—but that's no stellar kettle muttering in the distance. The five-O'clock train, it must be, clanking across the bridge over the river. Reminding you somehow of that journey of discovery taken by protagonist and reader in Butor's Modification. And must you now awake from this dream of performance to write a fiction about three talky plays, three pieces of music, three ways of listening to the silence? Though you can't see her face, there in the darkness, wouldn't she smile at the thought? You—to play?