Play Time

This past spring semester I needed to fulfill my university honors requirements, so I “contracted” a creative writing class focused on time, by designing an additional curriculum of nine plays that I would read and respond to—all of them dealing with time in some way. Thus, Play Time—nine essays analyzing specific plays, pulling apart the ways the playwrights are using the medium of theatre to manipulate or comment on or distort or theorize about time. The idea wasn’t so much to definitively state What X Play is About, but more to point out what I find interesting in each play, and figure out how the artist—or how theatre as a medium—achieved it.

These are the plays analyzed within this collection:
We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury
Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby by Samuel Beckett
Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill
Dangerous Corner by J.B. Priestley
Time and the Conways by J.B. Priestley
I Have Been Here Before by J.B. Priestley
An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard