267 by an accounting of the story by a bhagavata and a conversation between him and an actor, then the appearance of a horse-headed man who plays no direct role in the story part of the play^ All these plays effectively utilize the technique, because the audience is let in on the secret from the beginning. Most audiences, and readers, it would seem do not like to be tricked. The effect has been described by Susanne Langer: "The theatrical illusion, far from being increased, is shattered" (from Feeling and Form^ reprinted in The Header^ Encyclopedia of World Drama^ edited by John Gassner and Edward Quinn, New York: Thomas Yo Crowell, 1969, po 1020)o She goes on to relate a personal experience, which may well illustrate what the effect at least in Song of Deprivation might be: I, too, remember vividly to this day the terrible shock of such a recall to actuality: as a young child I saw Maude Adams in Peter Pan, It was my first visit to the theater, and the illusion was absolute and overwhelming, like something supernatural. At the highest point of the action (Tinkerbell had drunk Peter's poisoned medicine to save him from doing so, and was dying) Peter turned to the spectators and asked them to attest their belief in fairies. Instantly the illusion was gone; there were hundreds of children, sitting in rows, clapping and even calling, while Miss Adams, dressed up as Peter Pan, spoke to us like a teacher coaching us in a play in which she herself was taking the title roICe I did not understand, of course, what had happened; but an acute misery obliterated the rest of the scene, and was not entirely dispelled unti°1 the curtain rose on a new seto The reason for this. Professor Langer states, is "psychical distance," which allows for the "detachment" essential to art and which differentiates it from religion on the one hand, and show business on the other ("though it may occur in the frame of either one," she adds; p. 1021). Since the audience itself is not involved in the breaking of the "illusion" in Nalini^ the effect is not disastrous; but it certainly seems so in Song of Deprivation There is no "theatrical illusion" to break in The Sleepwalkers^ as it starts in a ritualized manner -- with immediate suspension of any sense of realismo In Marriage Poem (see po 157 of this issue) the theatrical illusion, though by no means purely "realistic," is maintained to the endo Yet each of the fou^ plays is an effective expose of reality, of the hollowness people contrive for themselves. In Nalini it involves two young advertising executives who are such simply because they can be nothing elseo They also "are Indian by accident of birth" (po 17), neither fish nor fowl, and reminiscent of Ezekie1"s poem of the Indian figure with the Cezanne slung around his neck. They are unable to cope with a woman as a person, but only as "women" (po 38), and do not really know each other as individuals; their lives " life, perhaps^ as there's little to distinguish between them -- are not only hollow, but repetitious: "Another drink, another girl, another party, another sales conference, another exhibition, another play to be produced with alt those stirring ideas in it, another visit from you and friends like you, another record on the gramophone" (po 47); even their lines are repetitious, as is eminently shown in one character's self-description, first to his friend