There is much to ache through in Will Arbery's 2019 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, which is masterfully directed by Craig Baldwin and superbly performed.

Intermission at the Seymour Centre, a little over an hour deep into Will Arbery’s 2019, Pulitzer-nominated play. Mutterings in the seat behind me affirmed what I also felt: there was no clear arc or ideological thrust. No sense of a map to follow. No cues to follow for prefabricated conclusions, no position for a mind (left-leaning or right) to fall righteously, comfortably into. Arbery’s presence felt far away, even as his flesh-clad creations thrust and cut and spewed and keened his language of pain. 

The effect was one of creeping, destabilising awe, culminating another hour later, in a shattering final scene which left me shaken and close to tears. And I’m still – after all that talk, all that philosophical and theological threshing out that we had witnessed – in the gloaming of how to integrate this play into my feelings and thoughts. 

“I think I’m after a fugue,”‘ Arbery wrote in his note on...

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