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Woman’s stories of her sexual caper in India and her alleged rape by her physical education teacher when she was a young schoolgirl. In the absence of love and understanding, only desire is left as the embodiment of physicality, and their conversation merely serves to uncover the loneliness, boredom and futility of their lives.
    The dialogues between Man and Woman, invariably short, non-expressive and generally indicative of an indifference towards each other, are interrupted by the characters’ monologues narrated in the second (Man) or the third person (Woman). These digressions evince a move away from the drama between the two characters, who then become the objects of observation, evaluation and commentary by their own alienated selves. At times the monologues, as in the moment of “sudden enlightenment” in Zen Buddhism, serve to expose the truth of the predicaments in which the characters are trapped, but they also further neutralize their relationship. Even though the plot is dependent on the presence of Man and Woman, it is even more dependent on the absence of interaction between them. Communication is only one-way, from the narrating self to the experiencing self, not between the characters, as each is preoccupied in their own cocooned world.
    At the end of the first half, the non-communication eventually leads to boredom and a bizarre game of sexual perversion, in which Man and Woman stab each other to death. As in The Other Shore , language inevitably alienates and ushers in violence. In the second half, communication remains impossible between the kindred spirits, for in most cases, the ghosts of Man and Woman are not talking to each other but to their own dead bodies or to the other’s head lying on the stage floor. At this time, even sexual desire, which was the only channel of interaction in the first half, has lost its attractiveness. Man keeps looking for a door to escape from his predicament even though he knows that there is nothing behind that door, and Woman is preoccupied with reminiscences of the violence and suffering in her life, striving fruitlessly to ascertain her existence by the production of discourse. They are like dancing partners who nonetheless insist on being distanced from each other and shy away from any direct emotional contact. In the end, words have lost their referential function and the game of free association, with its occasional and accidental overlaps of meaning, is the only hint of their participation in a dialogue and of their existence. The irony is that both Man and Woman are already dead, their physical being already taken away from them by their nonsensical game of desire, which was meant to verify their being alive in the first place. Their deaths have prevented them from talking to each other—only their souls are talking to their bodies. [0-41] All that remains in language is a “crack,” the ever-increasing communication gap between humans. At the end of the play Man and Woman have become crawling worms; the reification of their human selves signifies a regression, or a recognition of their true identities and the true nature of human existence.
    Witnessing and punctuating this drama of futility is the Monk and his acrobatic tricks. Like Man and Woman, he is also enwrapped in his own world and he makes no effort to communicate, or as Gao Xingjian puts it, there seems to be an invisible wall between the Monk and the other two characters. In one sense he is a foil, for while the acting of Man and Woman is naturalistic, his is highly ritualistic, and when they are hysterical and metamorphosed in the realm of the dead, he is composed, indifferent and above all, wordless, in sharp contrast to their rambling, meaningless verbosity. Even though he remains unfazed from beginning to end, he is not beyond laughing at himself. His attempts at a one-finger headstand, standing an egg on a stick and other antics are illustrations of the futility and frustrations of human