Audiences experience drama through captivity. Unlike readers of written literature, spectators cannot control the conditions unfolding before them. Drama demands completion. However the playwright chooses to manipulate time, its presentation is intrinsically diachronic from start to finish.
Time features centrally in both of the following dramas. “In the River” depicts the aimless floating of a body down the Vardar. Though three groups of people encounter the corpse, nobody removes it from the river. Rather, each exploits the body, reducing it to a caricature upon which to project their prejudices. With each successive washing ashore, the dead man in the river suggests the repetitive ironies circumscribing both himself and his living companions.
“Age of Innocence” also plays with our casual acceptance of time. It offers neither a definite beginning nor a determinative end. Instead it progresses from the excitement and anguish of the present into an increasingly convoluted past. Our understandings of the central characters evolve as we travel backward with them in time, compelling us to reconsider the judgments we formed when ignorant of their histories.
Now sit back, relax, and captivate your time.