The way they trip over words or tennis balls gives the piece a feel of impulsiveness and naturalness, and of humanity, too, just as Wallace snuck surprising and genuine (and surprising for being so genuine) emotion into even the most erudite analyses. Sometimes they’ll take the text in turns, sometimes in a roundelay. Sometimes an actor will speak solo sometimes all four will speak in unison. Whatever they hear they have to voice, though Fish sometimes accelerates the text to almost an inarticulable pace. Then Fish, visible in the first row of the audience, begins to transmit selections from various stories and essays into their ears. To achieve this same mix of rigour and spontaneity, Fish sends his four actors on to a stage inundated with tennis balls and has them slip on bulky black headphones. But no matter his subject – lobsters, porn, tennis, a cruise – his jittery, generous, quick-fire consciousness sprawls all over his prose, deliberately and helplessly. Concatenations of clauses seem to flout all rules of grammar, until they resolve effortlessly. Syntactical loop-de-loops swoop and spiral with practiced agility. Foster Wallace’s writing – still shocking in its exuberant precision – combines superb craft with seeming artlessness.
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