According to one source, Samuel Beckett's verrry short
work, Breath, is the shortest play ever written. It lasts a total
of 35 seconds. Typically avant-garde, the curtain opens with a stage covered in trash
while a child (who is never seen) takes its first breath. The play ends barely a
half-minute later with a final breath and a cry--the stage still covered in trash.
Beckett seems to be saying that we are born in a trashy world, live, and then die in the
same world of refuse.
First performed in New York City in
1969, the same year that Beckett won the Nobel Prize for literature,
Breath was directed by Oh! Calcutta's Kenneth
Tynan, who added some nude female bodies among the garbage.
Breath
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... is a stage realization of Pozzo's words in
Waiting for Godot: "They give birth astride of a grave, the light
gleams an instant, then it's night once
more."
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