A Game

Three men (or women) accept an invitation to take part in an experiment—a game in which a small room is divided into three equal areas—one for each person. At intervals they recite a slogan: "This is my land. It is mine. It is beautiful, and it is mine." As the game progresses, we see the drive that makes each human want to possess more than his neighbors—a drive that causes hatred ... and starts wars. When this play was published, Dennis E. Noble was a Shubert Playwriting Fellow and Ph. D. candidate at the University of Colorado. Noble had this to say about his play: "A Game begins as farce and ends in deadly earnest. I realize that it is unusual to shift from one mood completely to its opposite, but it was in this move from comic to the serious that I hoped to keep the characters simple in order to hinder emotional identification with them. The characters exist in this play in the service of an idea, and I wished that the dramatization of that idea would strike the viewer hard. And it is in the violent impact of the ending that I hoped the viewer would share Dr. Henning's confusion, and complain as does he: 'But it's only a game!' And it is a game, this playing with nationalism. But it is a deadly game—it kills." In this script—which can be staged simply or with multimedia effects—Noble has combined fantastical elements of the "theatre of the absurd" with realistic aspects of the traditional theatre to produce a play with a powerful impact.