It’s startling, morbid, eerie—and it happens again and again. The play keeps lavishing lapidary attention on the most mundane details of people’s lives, only to be undercut by the Stage Manager’s asides about their deaths. Other times, he goes on odd tangents about the vastness of the universe, or the breadth of recorded history, against which this relatively tiny drama, and these individual people, barely register. The play keeps toggling our focus between the everyday and the cosmic. Those lives, and everything we see happen in that town, come to feel both infinitely rich and infinitely
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