By GUILHERME YAZBEK

Upon entering Attack Theatre for the informal showing of Jeanine Durning’s The Play presented in Pittsburgh this past Friday, one is met by a sparse scenic arrangement: two folding chairs, a bucket, a stage cube, a music stand, and a cushion. Nothing immediately suggests narrative development; rather, these everyday objects seem to pulse within the space like anxious potentials awaiting realization. Instead, though, what unfolds moments later is the continual frustration of such expectations. The objects never quite consolidate into stable pathways of meaning or narrative, undergoing only the incessant reconfiguration of their positions and spatial compositions. What initially unfolds with comic lightness gradually reveals a far more demanding temporal experience. Over the course of the evening, speech, movement, and image accumulate with such relentless intensity that the performance slowly transforms from playful experimentation into something closer to perceptual saturation.

Durning’s ongoing research project, nonstopping, serves as the conceptual and compositional engine of the work. The three performers—Erin Kouwe, Miguel Castillo, and Sarah Konner—rarely cease producing action. Speech folds into movement; movement interrupts speech; images—or perhaps tableaux—are sustained for only a few seconds; fragments of narrative emerge only to dissolve into digressions, absurd and playful sentences, repetitions, or abrupt shifts in rhythm and tone. At times, the piece appears fully improvised; at others, its patterns feel unmistakably structured, governed by a score whose rules remain partially opaque to the audience. Rather than progressing toward resolution, The Play accumulates gestures, images, and verbal associations through unceasing recombination. What emerges is less a linear dramaturgy than a continuously self-reorganizing system, one that keeps generating material without ever fully stabilizing into coherence. 

At first, much of this accumulation feels comic—certainly associated with the frenetic rhythm through which the work begins and insists for nearly its entire duration. The three figures onstage possess distinct yet, in some ways, complementary qualities: Castillo’s persona is anxious and constantly peppered with profanity; Konner brings a more philosophical and reflective register to the performance; and Kouwe often appears somewhat adrift, almost moony in her presence. The audience laughs frequently as language spirals into nonsense, images collapse almost as soon as they form, and the performers commit fully to increasingly absurd combinations of movement and speech, operating through a use of space that is, to some extent, deliberately non-hierarchical and resistant to more classical compositional logics of dance, such as the privileging of center stage or equidistant spatial arrangements. Yet as the piece continues, repetition gradually alters the affective experience for both performers and audience members alike. What initially reads as playful excess slowly begins to generate exhaustion. Part of this sensation stems from our instinctive craving for continuity, narrative progression, and resolution—precisely what The Play persistently refuses to provide. The laughter does not disappear, but it becomes increasingly uneasy, even strained, as if the performance’s nonstop production of gestures, words, and situations were beginning to exceed the audience’s capacity to metabolize them. One begins to feel caught inside a structure of accelerated attention in which nothing lasts long enough to settle, yet everything continues relentlessly. In this sense, The Play evokes a distinctly contemporary temporality: one shaped by scrolling, overflow, simultaneity, and the constant pressure of ongoing stimulation.

At the same time, The Play increasingly reveals itself as a work about the unstable labor of scenic construction itself. Throughout the performance, one senses the performers actively grappling with the possibilities of theatrical language across its multiple layers: speech, rhythm, spatial arrangement, image-making, duration, gesture, and affect. Yet no single direction ever fully consolidates. Ideas emerge, proliferate, collide, and dissolve before collective agreement can stabilize them into a sustained compositional trajectory. What the piece stages, then, is not simply improvisation, but a kind of perpetual negotiation marked by interruption, disagreement, and communicative noise. The three performers remain remarkably present within this ongoing play of theatrical creation—an observation that makes the title, The Play, feel particularly precise. The “how” of performance remains constantly active and inventive, while the “what” persistently escapes stabilization. In this sense, the work becomes deeply concerned with duration itself: with how long an atmosphere, image, rhythm, or sonority is sustained before it mutates into something else. But here, this logic is pushed (almost) to the point of excess.

The piece directly evokes Samuel Beckett’s Play, not only through the near-identical title, but also through its triangular structure composed of two women and one man. In Beckett’s play, however, fragmented and accelerated speech emerges from radical physical immobility: the three figures remain trapped inside urns while language circulates obsessively through repetition, interruption, and memory. Durning’s The Play appears to invert this logic entirely. Here, verbal excess unfolds alongside incessant bodily activity, continuous spatial reorganization, and the nonstop production of scenic action. If Beckett stages paralysis, Durning stages overactivation. If Play stages fragmentation through stasis, The Play seems shaped by a distinctly contemporary condition—one defined by acceleration, overstimulation, compulsive productivity, and the near impossibility of stopping.

This incessant proliferation of scenic possibilities recalls what Gilles Deleuze, writing on Beckett, describes as exhaustion—not simple tiredness, but the exhaustion of the possible itself. The performers in The Play do not appear fatigued in any conventional sense; on the contrary, they remain intensely active throughout. What becomes exhausted is the very capacity to stabilize one possibility over another. Gestures, rhythms, images, tonalities, and fragments of narrative emerge in rapid succession, yet the work persistently refuses to privilege or consolidate any of them into a sustained trajectory. Instead, the performance operates through a kind of combinatorial logic, continuously permuting scenic materials without allowing them to settle into hierarchy, continuity, or resolution. The result is not emptiness, but overaccumulation: a theatrical field saturated with potential directions that remain perpetually unresolved.

Amid this excessive production of scenic material, one moment in particular briefly suggests the possibility of realization. At a certain point, Miguel Castillo exits the stage through a door whose opening and closing acquire a striking theatrical weight—likely intensified by the specific material conditions of the performance space itself, where the metal double doors emit a smooth, vacuum-like sliding sound each time they open. When he eventually returns carrying a watering can, the object gains an almost disproportionate scenic potency, as though some form of resolution—or perhaps a kind of postmodern Deus Ex Machina—might finally emerge from within the piece’s fragmentary logic. Yet this realization never arrives. The watering can disappears into the flow of the performance, absorbed into the hyperproductive logic of the scenic device itself. Like so many other images and propositions in The Play, it briefly concentrates expectation only to dissolve once more into incessant rearrangement.

By the end of The Play, one has the impression not of having followed a narrative, but of having inhabited a temporality: one governed by incessant stimulation and perpetual permutation. Durning’s nonstopping practice ultimately feels less like a compositional strategy alone than an acute reflection on contemporary modes of productivity and subjectivity. The clock keeps ticking; the production of material never fully ceases; and we keep watching, listening, processing—perhaps not unlike the endless act of scrolling itself, to which we increasingly seem held captive within our contemporary social media landscape. What The Play offers is not resolution, but exposure: an encounter with a contemporary condition in which the impossibility of stopping begins to resemble a form of exhaustion all its own.

Guilherme is a Brazilian theater practitioner and scholar, currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com]

Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews

Tags: Erin Kouwe, Jeanine Durning’s The Play, Miguel Castillo, Sarah Konner, The Play