The End Feeling

Did you know that even if you’re not really a theater person, you still have an innate sense of when a play should End? I’ve felt it so many times: I’m watching a play with some 30-200 strangers, some regular theater goers, some not, and towards The End of the play, there is the feeling of, well, The End. We can all actually feel it coming. There’s what we perceive to be the penultimate scene — the crescendo — and then there better be The End, or we get restless, our attention drifts, we feel sort of lied to, as we were made to feel like it was The End, and yet these people keep emoting, talking too much with their hands. Since humans have this inborn sense of story, it’s then the playwright’s job to make sure the play Ends just a moment right before or after it feels like it should, subverting that End feeling ever so slightly. I say this mostly to myself, as a typical Bekah play Ends for approximately 30 to 57  minutes.

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