"Repeat Play" Stage Direction Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p.318 Play was performed during December 1976 at the Arena Stage in Washington and the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York along with Footfalls and That Time. Alan Schneider directed the trio. When Schneider's producers threatened to cancel the stage direction to "repeat play" at the end of Play, if the director did not get Beckett's permission for the lines to be said only once much more slowly, he was forced to write to the playwright with the request. Permission was reluctantly granted, but Schneider ultimately regretted his "betrayal" of Beckett. Schneider recounts his experience in his autobiography:  "According to Sam's exact instructions, Play was to be played through twice without interruption and a very fast pace, each time taking no longer than nine minutes. The idea was that whatever references the audience didn't get the first time -- most of them -- would be absorbed the second time around. My producers, all three of them, objected strongly to Sam's ideas. That was all right for less sophisticated audiences  ... I tried to explain that Sam had something very specific in mind when he demanded that repetition. It was not just a matter of additional information; it was a tonal matter, a question of rhythm, of establishing a circular pattern." Schneider, Entrances

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