Stories Matter: A Dramaturgical Analysis of Will Eno’s Tragedy: A Tragedy
Ross Peter Nelson

Will Eno’s Tragedy: A Tragedy opens with a “live” newscast. The anchor informs us that the outward signs of daily civic life, from industry to school bells, have just been suspended due to a crisis. We are immediately addressed by the field reporter who opines on the grief and suffering that must have been felt by those now experiencing “these dark times.” The cause of the darkness? The sun has set.

This might, at first glance, appear to be a parody of the 24-hour news cycle. More than one reviewer sees the piece that way. “Less of a tragedy and more of a smart satire, this is a timely show about fake news, but not the kind a certain president complains about,” (Levesque) says the Edmonton Journal. The Austin Chronicle sees it similarly, “it's a manifesto of sorts against the news media's tendency to milk a story for all it's worth” (Roberts et al.). However, a solely satirical interpretation is contradicted by Eno himself. In a note on the text, he states, “Which is not to say that this play is meant primarily as a comment on the new media. It is not” (Wellman and Lee, 51). Of course, his qualifying “primarily” leaves us to enjoy the ways in which he does skewer the media but also alerts us that there is something deeper to be found.

It is, in fact, more than satire, as I hope to show. The characters are familiar ones to those who watch television. Four members of a local news team are quickly introduced. They are joined by an archetypal man-in-the-street, who is referred to in the script as The Witness, but who otherwise goes unnamed.

The attention given to the setting of the sun by the reporters sounds more worthy of some great cataclysm, and there are those who treat it that way. In her paper Apocalypse How? Dana Tanner-Kennedy calls the play a staging of “the world’s ineffable end” (Dana Tanner-Kennedy). A London review suggested that “apocalypse may come not in a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder but with a simple putting out of the light” (Gardner). The end of the world, of course, is a subject of some depth, and the apocalyptic analysis can’t be unequivocally refuted. Tanner-Kennedy sees the possibility of a post-modern return to religion, “In these dramas, the voids and holes are God-shaped, suggesting, but not confirming, how God may appear” (Dana Tanner-Kennedy). Certainly there are moments in the play that lend themselves to such a reading, as the characters worry that the sun may never be coming back. Eno himself says, “Without meaning to be coy, I would be pleased if people had strongly diverging views over whether this was really the end or whether it was just a regular night” (D’Souza)

Leaving this open and having a definite intent however, are two different things. Analysis shows that the text of Eno’s play contains very few references to eschatology, or even spirituality of any sort. The Witness, our surrogate in the world of the play, has seen no supernatural omens. Michael notes that no one has gathered at the church he’s reporting from. “Jesus” and “My god” appear only as interjections. The sole concrete example of a religious reference is a father saying grace at dinner, but this is an event appears only in Constance’s imagination as she pictures the family that might have been at the empty house where’s she’s on scene.

I favor the interpretation that the sunset is a literal one, and that Eno has chosen to create a cautionary tale out of the absurdity of an entire seventy minutes devoted to news reports on the onset of twilight. I will outline my reasoning below, though in a production, I would embrace the ambiguity, since theatre that is completely spelled out is far less interesting that theatre where you find your own meaning.

In his book on script analysis, James Thomas notes, “one widespread feature of nonrealistic plays is the comparative insignificance of their events” (Thomas). He uses Beckett’s Happy Days as an example of the absurdist or non-realistic genre. Notably, the NY Times referred to Eno as “A Samuel Beckett for the John Stewart generation” (Isherwood) and Eno himself has said, “I try, I guess, to disable normative modes of perception, so as to try to allow for a revitalized way of seeing and feeling in the audience” (Mulgraw). He also admits to being one of Beckett’s “big fans” (McLaren) and references lines from Waiting for Godot at least twice in Tragedy: A Tragedy. This tells us, I believe, that we’re on the right track in accepting the literal setting of the sun as the inciting incident in the play. Confirming this notion is that the action occurs in no real location. It’s a local news team from Anytown, and while we have about generic governor’s actions at the generic capitol building, there’s nothing to identify a venue. Even the staging erases a sense of place. The reporters are scattered across the stage and are given a spotlight when it’s their turn to speak. Otherwise they exist in electronic limbo. They have no last names; they’re simply identified by their reporting: Frank in the Studio, John in the Field, Constance at the Home, and Michael, Legal Advisor. The world of the play is similarly non-specific. There’s no background story and no distinct references to time or events outside the script. I had originally thought it might be significant that the play had premiered at the dawn of the new millennium, but Eno revealed that it was a piece that had been gestating “for almost 10 years” (D’Souza) before its premier at the London’s Gate Theatre in 2001.

The sequence of events that follows the sunset is an existential absurdist comedy where each reporter attempts to provide some enlightenment, some grand description of the events of the evening and discover that their words are not sufficient to the task. At the same time, the anchor brings them back for more commentary. The fail and must begin anew. To reference Beckett one more time, “ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this. VLADIMIR: That’s what you think” (Beckett).

We can thus identify the external through-action (which happen in “real time”) as a series of attempts to report, and the counter through-action as there being nothing to report. They can’t go on. They must. Unlike Beckett’s two tramps, however, the news reporters do not simply accept their fate and continue to hang around. The pressure to make something extraordinary out of the banal puts them under great strain, and their professional facades begin to crack. They succumb to despair, a violation of both their professionalism and the unwritten moral code. As this happens, they are exposed on live television. Exposed as insufficient, exposed as something other than what they appear to be. That something is different for each, but there is a commonality as well that ties into the play’s theme, which is “stories matter.”

Eno hints at this theme in an interview where he states, “I was thinking about how ancient people had all those incredibly rich stories about what happens at nighttime – a jaguar chases the sun, and it runs across the sky” (D’Souza). In the play itself, this theme is stated most clearly by the character called The Witness. In the closing moments of the script, The Witness contrasts his childhood with the current state of the world. In describing the now, he says “Once there was a world and it had, you know, everything in the world in it. …. Then everyone started to imagine it getting ruined and run down. And that started happening in reality” (Wellman and Lee, 71). He compares that with his youth when his bedtime stories told of “this boy or girl was born that everyone loved due to their beauty” and “a bright white horse showed up” (71). The world where everyone believes in beautiful children versus the one where the world is running down is dependent on the stories you hear. And the stories in which the world is running down are the ones that are broadcast every night on the evening news.

Eno is saying that stories matter because we become who we tell ourselves we are. This theme is illustrated in the arc of each character as well. Frank in the Studio tells us that “To do this job was always my dream. To be trusted and turned to and believed in” (70). This is his story and he alone of the reporters, manages to – almost – maintain his professional demeanor. Only near the end does he give a cri de coeur, “Could one of you please report a little lie for me … Does not one of you realize what it means for me to ask that!?” (68).

Those whose internal stories have not been so positive suffer a bit more, but none more than John in the Field. For him the stress is manifest in physical symptoms. He hyperventilates, he fears he’s having a stroke or a heart attack, he develops a nosebleed. We learn that his internal monologue is about a pet that died. No one knew it was sick. “I know I learned to talk, talking to a dog. A shepherd-collie mix. She was put to sleep … Heartworm the diagnosis” (55). His identification to this story is so strong, he even momentarily believes he has heartworm. John’s attachment to animals is voiced in his first opening lines, and his colleagues display their awareness of it. It even factors into his love life, as he and a date attended an animal rescue event. The constant repetition of this story has turned him into a hypochondriac and someone who feels his heart was broken at birth.

A somewhat similar case is Constance at the House. As the evening wears on, she confesses that as a child, she was always “coming home when there was no one home” (64). That sense of emptiness still haunts her, “No wonder everyone is never home. No wonder it’s just the remains, by the time I always get there. I deserve nothing, and I thank you all for giving me it” (69). Eno re-enforces her narrative by placing her at an empty house for the duration of her reporting. The things she notices often also have that untethered aspect: a hot air balloon in the sky, empty clothes floating on a clothesline, a human pyramid that has collapsed.

The situation of Michael, Legal Advisor also illustrates the theme, though it is through Michael that Eno injects much of the comedic aspects of the play. Michael’s internal story is illustrated when he says, “I am reminded of a favorite uncle. He gave me a dictionary, which I mistook as the long, sad, confusing story of everything” (55). All his life, he has told himself that sense can be made of the world. He’s studied law, he knows some Spanish (which he shows off on occasion), he has the most diverse vocabulary of any of the reporters, even using a term from Homer’s Odyssey, “Cimmerian.” (Naturally, Eno is well aware of the connotations here, the word refers to a tribe that lived in perpetual twilight, near the gates of Hades.) But Michael, in this instance, finds that life is like his attempt to create a narrative from the dictionary, and that “These things have proved to be empty of reliable meaning” (65) and “The fact-finding is over, none having been found” (66).

The humor revolving around Michael derives not only from wordplay and attempts to establish intellectual bona fides, but also because he narrates the story of a character who never sets foot on stage, the governor. The governor’s responses to the ever-darkening skies are a series of press releases that grow increasingly unhinged. While he begins by urging calm, by the end of the play, the governor has advocated complete anarchy, “Let the looting begin … run wild across the world, lovely people, naked and wild, of flesh torn and spirit rash” (58). When we last hear from him, he has slid down a drainpipe and run away from the capitol building proclaiming, “I did some soul-searching but didn’t find anything” (62). We don’t have a backstory for the governor, but Eno uses him to illustrate that institutions and “the comfort of some official language, a smoothly delivered speech from a suntanned man with an easy style and a stunning gold watch” (53) are not going to save us. Salvation must come from within.

The language of the play, too, is indicative. Words alone constantly fail to provide relief, except with respect to the audience, for whom they take the form of comic relief. This is where Eno’s secondary intent is evident, taking aim at the self-inflating non-stop chatter of the 24-hour news cycle. In Eno’s script, these words ricochet and double back on the speaker. For example, when Frank in the Studio asks, “Is the sense of tension palpable?” John in the Field replies, “Absolutely, Frank. You can feel it” (52). When John tries to prompt The Witness for “Some omen? The famous branch against the window or some infamous wild animal howl? … were you struck by anything striking” (53) the answer is a perfunctory, “No.” As the play transitions from the beginning of the newscast to the play’s end, the word show how the energy has drained from the team. Where we first heard “vitality,” “incredible,” and “startling” from the team, the text transitions to words like “fog,” “useless,” “tired,” and “a limp flag in the historical sun” (69).

External events are similarly inadequate. Frank attempts to trigger the Emergency Broadcast System, but nothing happens. Twice, the news team cuts away to the national carrier, but what the audience sees and hears are simply the actions of the reporters: combing their hair, putting in eye drops, taking the moment to prepare for their next “on screen” moment.

As noted earlier, it the The Witness who has alerted us to the play’s theme and the power of story. And it is with The Witness that the play ends, taking us back to that moment in his life, “’Good night, sweet dreams,’ someone is whispering over me, because they loved me and it is nighttime” (71). From this, I think, we can take reassurance that morning will come again. But so will night. And if we are to face that night, we must heed his cautionary tale. Eno’s message is similar to Sondheim’s in Into the Woods. “Careful the things you say. Children will listen” (Sondheim and Lapine). Or to Kurt Vonnegut in the introduction to Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” (Vonnegut). Despite The Witness’s comforting tale, we know that even fairy tales can backfire. And even “Good night, sweet dreams” may not be as warm and cozy as it appears at first glance. To me it evokes Horatio’s benediction of Hamlet, “Good night sweet prince,” possibly because Eno has summoned the ghost of Shakespeare already. As the breakdown of the team is all but complete, even Frank in the Studio has succumbed, and in doing so, paraphrases a line from King Lear, “The flashlight is dead and we are left darkling,” (70) with a modern-day appliance standing in for the Fool’s candle. Lear, too, told himself a story, that he was immune from change, that he could hand over his throne but the kingdom would still be his, and he too, had to face the darkness.

Will Eno doesn’t merely want to entertain us with playful satire. He wants us to be a part of the action, and to consider our own stories. In an interview, he states, “I like audiences. … I guess it’s something of, if you want to question Existence, you have to question your actual simplest existence, right here and now, in the seat you’re sitting in. And then you move from there. I also think the audience is largely left out of theater, these days” (Sola). Eno wants his plays to feel necessary. In order for that to happen, we owe it to him to make sure we don’t stay on the surface of his work, but dive below, for his stories are ones that bear repeating.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (Beckett, Samuel) - Kindle Edition by Samuel Beckett. Literature & Fiction. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019.

Dana Tanner-Kennedy. “Apocalypse How? The World’s End in Will Eno’s TRAGEDY: A Tragedy.” Ecumenica, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018, pp. 45–52.

D’Souza, Karen. “Shy Playwright Goes to the End of the Earth in Search of Laughs.” The Mercury News, 30 Mar. 2008, https://www.mercurynews.com/2008/03/29/shy-playwright-goes-to-the-end-of-the-earth-in-search-of-laughs/.

Gardner, Lyn. “Theatre Review: Tragedy: A Tragedy.” The Guardian, 9 Apr. 2001. www.theguardian.com, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2001/apr/10/theatre.artsfeatures.

Isherwood, Charles. “Life’s a Gift? Quick. Exchange It.” The New York Times, 2 Feb. 2005. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/theater/reviews/lifes-a-gift-quick-exchange-it.html.

Levesque, Roger. Fringe Review: Tragedy, A Tragedy | Edmonton Journal. 19 Aug. 2018, https://edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/festivals/fringe-review-tragedy-a-tragedy.

McLaren, Jamie. “Brooklyn Based Pulitzer Nominated Playwright Will Eno Talks to Run Riot about His Latest Productions at Soho Theatre and The Print Room.” Run Riot, http://www.run-riot.com/articles/blogs/brooklyn-based-pulitzer-nominated-playwright-will-eno-talks-run-riot-about-his-latest. Accessed 15 Feb. 2019.

Mulgraw, Patricia. “An Interview with Will Eno.” Believer Magazine, 1 Oct. 2008, https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-will-eno/.

Roberts, Adam, et al. This Just in: The Sun Didn’t Come up This Morning. Watch the Action News Team’s on-the-Scene Coverage Skewer the Media’s Tendency to Milk a Story for All It’s Worth. https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2013-09-27/tragedy-a-tragedy/. Accessed 14 Feb. 2019.

Sola, Joe. Will Eno by Joe Sola - BOMB Magazine. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/will-eno/. Accessed 14 Feb. 2019.

Sondheim, Stephen, and James Lapine. Into the Woods. Theatre Communications Group, 2014.

Thomas, James. Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers. CRC Press, 2014.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Mother Night. Random House Publishing Group, 2009.

Wellman, Mac, and Young Jean Lee. New Downtown Now: An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York. First edition edition, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2006.