Acrobats and Line
by Israel Horovitz

THE STORIES: Acrobats .

Two acrobats go valiantly through the complexities of their routine, smiling toothily, bowing on cue, and, all the while, conducting a sotto voce but lacerating marital spat.

He threatens to drop her, she vows to leave him—but then the lights come up, the final bows are taken, and, subtly but surely, we are aware that their mutual dependency is still stronger than the tensions that have been so wittily and amusingly exposed.

(1 man, 1 woman.) Line .

One by one a group of unacquainted people come together to form a line for some unnamed, upcoming event.

The first to arrive is a burly, beer-drinking, sweat-shirted “middle American”; then an alienated, voluble, Mozart-loving youth; a taciturn type who brings his own folding stool; and, finally, a shapely, promiscuous girl and her spineless, older husband.

Gradually inexorably, the struggle for first place begins, and as they lie, cheat, wrestle and push to gain the lead spot an extraordinary panorama of human frailty is made explosively and hilariously real.

As, in the end, are the deviousness, the competitiveness, and the pettiness of the small, wasting battles with which we litter our lives.

(4 men, 1 woman.)