In Le Ping-Pong an electric pinball machine holds the diverse strands of the action together. Arthur and Victor, the play's protagonists, waste their lives planning and executing improvements on it. The machine is not, however, a symbol of the complexity of the social system. Rather, it is a source of conversation…. It elicits religious, aesthetic, philosophic, and social response from all those who come in contact with it. The machine is, above all, however, a sexual fetish. Indeed, its magnetic attraction for all the characters in the play has clearly marked sexual overtones. The language with which they discuss its operation, its rods, corridors, flippers, bumpers, the ecstasy of winning, the despair of losing, is a coded language instantly decipherable to the spectator. It is a game which all must play—artist, professional, schoolgirl, old or young, willing or not.

Because the machine is there, the characters in...