THE STORY: One by one a group of unacquainted people come together to form a line for some unnamed, upcoming event. The first to arrive is a burly, beer-drinking, sweat-shirted “middle American"; then an alienated, voluble, Mozart-loving youth; a taciturn type who brings his own folding stool; and, finally, a shapely, promiscuous girl and her spineless, older husband. Gradually inexorably, the struggle for first place begins, and as they lie, cheat, wrestle and push to gain the lead spot an extraordinary panorama of human frailty is made explosively and hilariously real. As, in the end, are the deviousness, the competitiveness, and the pettiness of the small, wasting battles with which we litter our lives.
Hailed as a masterpiece of the new theatre (in tandem with
Acrobats) this strikingly original and perceptive allegory brilliantly evokes the humor, pathos, mistrust and vulnerability of the human condition in the casual circumstance of a group of disparate people waiting in line for some unspecified event.
“Brilliantly imagined executed with wit and an almost inexhaustible inventiveness.” —The New York Times.
