Listening, a play with more substance, cohesiveness, and bite [than Counting the Ways], concerns three characters who meet in a garden to exchange insights, reminiscences, and insults until one of them, who is insane, commits suicide. Although sounding some echoes of The Zoo Story (an apparently insane person elicits truth from an apparently sane one and then dies), Listening slowly, painstakingly, and with some surprises uncovers powerful and revealing relationships while playing with the nuance and pretense of language. Indeed, it is the play's emphasis on language that creates both its strengths and its weaknesses.
Listening begins with the extended, solitary musings of a man who wonders about the garden's history, purpose, and effect, thereby suggesting that the setting has some significance. Once the "trimmed and clipped" setting for flirtations and assignations, now a quiet refuge at an institution, it will become the site for the exploration of three souls. The opening speech, however, due to its repetitiveness of phrase and rhythm, seems contrived, and this sense of contrivance straining for significance increases as the characters repeat certain lines, echoing, reiterating, magnifying meaning. But the lines are ordinary (the most repeated is "You're not listening") and their meaning obvious. Thus, although their repetition suggests pregnant significance about to give birth to symbol, that significance never appears.
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