Two Chairs (a play)

Playwright’s Note

This is the first time I have tried to write a play.

I didn’t sit down and plan it. It came to me. I saw it before my inner eye and knew right away it was not a story. It was not a poem either. It needed bodies. It needed movement. It needed pauses that stretch too long. Silences that only make sense when they are written as a play. That is when I realised what it wanted to be.

It is stripped down to almost nothing. Two chairs. Two voices. Silence. No scenery, no time, no place. Just presence and absence and everything that lives in between.

On a stage a director and two actors would take this skeleton and give it flesh. They would decide how long a silence lasts. They would let the words and the stillness breathe. Reading it here is different. You have to imagine those things yourself.

If you rush, it will look thin. If you read it slowly, it will start to thicken. You might hear the chairs creak. You might feel the silence pressing in. At times it will feel suffocating. That is part of what it is.

I will not call myself a playwright. But this one feels right. And it feels right to share it with you. And I hope you will enjoy this little experiment. It’s not perfect, nothing ever is, but I wanted to give it a try.

So that is what I am going to do. In the next posts the curtain will rise. The lights will dim. And you will be left with two chairs and everything that passes, or does not pass, between them.

The curtain opens in the evening.