For my show and tell post, I chose the play Botticelli. It was written by Terrence McNally in 1968, and was first produced by Channel 13 in New York City in 1968. I found this play in "Terrance McNally: 15 Short Plays".
The entire plot revolves around two soldiers: Wayne and Stu. They are soldiers holding up in the jungle. Throughout the entire play, they are playing the guessing game "Botticelli." The premise of the game is that you think of a famous person and reveal the first letter of his/her name. The other plays then attempt to guess the person's identity through asking a series of yes/no questions. As a reference point, the individual should be at least as famous as Sandro Botticelli, Italian Renaissance painter. Wayne and Stu are casually playing a game of Botticelli while staking out a man hiding in a tunnel. Eventually, the man exits the tunnel and is shot to death by Wayne and Stu. However, before and after killing this man, Wayne and Stu barely bat an eye at anything unrelated to their game. Even as they leave the man dead in the middle of jungle at the end of the play, they exit in a debate over Wayne's victory.
Two dramaturgical choices in this play that I've found worthy of discussion are its duration and ambiguity.
While design elements would most likely make it very clear very early on that these men are soldiers in the jungle, the tension is not very high. Initially, there is nothing happening for a considerably large amount of time. The part in which the man comes out of the tunnel and is shot to death nearly happens in a flash, taking up almost no stage time. This shows how desensitized we've become to the sheer brutality of war.
There are several instances throughout the play in which you aren't exactly sure whether or not the characters are asking each other questions pertaining to the game or pertaining to real life. I think this was left intentionally ambiguous. It shows how these men are trivializing the gravity of war, murder, loss.
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