also reached the end. Buddy makes a remark about what will
happen “tomorrow,” and Sally, seeing the morning light in the
window, says “Oh, my God, it istomorrow.” Book time has no
future apart from the desolation they feel now.
Ben cries out for help from Phyllis. She and the other two
get him back on his feet, and the four leave the theatre, go out
into the street. They are being watched by their younger selves,
standing to the side of the stage. Do the younger selves see
what their lives will become? That question is never answered.
It is enlarged instead, not answered but brought across to the
audience, for we see the young watching their older selves fade
into disrepair and misery, but then the young start into a reprise
of the show’s opening number. “Hey, up there,” the young
Buddy and Ben are calling to their chorus-girl sweethearts.
They are starting over! Theyhave numbers left to perform, the
same numbers we have seen. Repetition for the young, into the
street for the old.
Think of the audience at this point. The back wall of the
Weissman theatre has disappeared, according to the stage di-
rections. We are now seeing the back wall of the theatre in
which we sit, the Winter Garden Theatre in 1971, let us say. In
the original production, part of the street outside the Winter
Garden was supposed to be visible through a window.^10 Ben
and the others have gone out there. We will be going out there
in a minute. The space of vulnerability includes the older selves,
the younger selves, and ourselves. This is mirroring without an
actual mirror. We are being brought around to ourselves and
our own theatre, not yet rubble, not yet haunted with ghosts,
although these things will come in time. Yet the reprise is tak-
ing place. This is desolate and beautiful, the ending of Follies.
The reprise asserts itself as though the show could not help
going on, but for the people going out into the morning light,
the show is over.
WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 195
(^10) Again, I follow the original production of 1971. The 2001 edition, re-
flecting the London revision, omitted the directions specifying the removal of
the rear wall of the Weisman theatre and calling for a street view out the win-
dow. The Broadway revival of 2001, directed by Matthew Warchus, was staged
in the decaying Belasco Theatre, where rubble was left lying about.