Exit, Pursued

 June 10, 2025

Sarah Jordan

“Exit, Pursued” by Dalton Day

Exit, Pursued is a collection unlike any other: in it, Dalton Day presents readers with 41 one-act plays and immediately the reader is asked to confront their own definition of a one-act play. None of the plays in this collection resemble anything close to what most audiences or readers may have seen performed on stage before. Can four lines of dialogue interrupted by one stage direction truly be considered a one-act play? Day’s answer is a resounding yes, and throughout this crossover collection of poem-plays, Day explores the impossibility of stage performance via the impossibility of language. Day pushes these borderline micro plays toward the extreme limit of what readers might imagine a play to be. 

In the opening one-act, readers observe the characters YOU and ME discussing what can or cannot be saved, or what is or is not on fire. The title, “One-Act Play In Which We Float Facedown In The Center Of A Lake, A Position Known As The Dead Man’s Float,” offers a concrete image for readers, audiences, and directors to comprehend. The title sets the stage, with a lake and a pair of characters floating facedown. The sole moment of stage direction, however, flips the script literally: “The entire lake turns over, & now YOU & ME are floating face.” Within the four lines of dialogue exchanged, YOU and ME move from deep disconnect in worldview to affirming their mutual love. Day’s ability to simultaneously economize language while incorporating large scale human concerns is revealed right away in this opening play, and this accomplishment is repeated throughout the collection. Readers can enjoy highbrow philosophical pondering while observing the strange interactions between YOU and ME.

Broadly speaking, Day’s one-acts form themselves as a hybrid, existing in the murky territory between written text and staged performance. Readers engage with their assumptions surrounding the role of audiences and characters—can the audience be a character?—as well as  assumptions surrounding the function of language and dialogue as diegetic notions. The collection explores everything from the impossibility of having an audience perform the play they have come to witness to the impossibility of a play relying solely on an undefined and further unspecified sound. Readers and audiences will experience horrors being brought to stage, birds flying out from baskets, theaters on fire, characters jumping out of boats, and many more moments of impossibility that have been rendered, possibly, in actuality via the fact of their having been written. 

It is clear that Day is interested not only in the language on the page but also in how that language is translated into the heightened realm of theater. This interest leads readers to the thoughtful questioning of both the language and craft decisions on the part of the writer as well as the physicality and limits of performance. In many of these plays, the work moves beyond the page and can perhaps only exist inside a reader’s own imagination. Day cleverly sets up a dichotomy between the characters YOU and ME who inhabit a wide range of emotions and actions as the plays dive further and further into the absurd. Who are these two? At different moments, readers will identify with one or the other (perhaps neither in some cases) and this uncertainty sustains a sense of surprise from beginning to end.

During “One-Act Play In Which No Knives Are Used,” the audience members double as performers, each coming on stage to read successive lines of dialogue—which are “carved into an oak tree onstage.” There are 27 lines of dialogue, after which the play “starts over” and continues until every audience member/performer has had a chance to read a line. The playwright envisions the tree remaining on stage “until it dies, or is chopped down to be made into something else entirely.” As the title clearly communicates, no knives are used in the performance. The imagined use of the knives occurs in preparation and becomes the method of creation for a set designer or stage manager perhaps. But conjuring the knives in the title of the play places the image at the forefront of our thoughts and sets an audience’s expectation. Envisioning this play performed: who has done the carving and why? The knives become fleeting, as line 19 states: “A presence felt & then forgotten.”

This is in stark contrast to “One-Act Play In Which Everything is Intentional,” where the only thing that occurs is a sound, repeated 23 times. The sound is never identified by the writer. This omission is, of course, intentional, and offers readers or directors the space to make their own choice about how to potentially stage the sound. This, too, is deliberate, and allows for intentionality on the part of anyone performing this one-act. Again, a key word from the title functions quite intently on the page and beyond.

In this instance, however, YOU and ME are included in the stage directions. YOU and ME appear to be audience members now, on the verge of speaking but never actually doing so. Day repeats, “A sound is the only thing that occurs in this play” as the first and last lines of stage direction. Readers do not learn what the sound is on the page, and readers do not learn what YOU and ME might have been inspired to speak about.

YOU and ME also act in between character and audience during “One-Act Play In Which Pressure Is The Force Applied Perpendicular To The Surface Of An Object Per Unit Area Over Which That Force Is Distributed.” The opening stage direction is simple to envision but challenging to enact: “Hundreds & hundreds of eggs are falling toward the stage.” These eggs proceed to speak—although, the dialogue is coming from inside the eggs—on morality. The dialogue ranges from, “I have no sense of scale—” to, “I fear death, sure, but not as much as I fear all the things that could kill me—” The premise is simple but the concept is challenging, which is of course Day’s signature style throughout the collection. In this play, YOU and ME are trapped inside some kind of limbo where they are not able to see the falling eggs and presumably are also not able to hear the dialogue. They are present in the play only as the play is read on the page. How can a director insert two characters into a play in which they do not physically appear? If the audience is not able to locate YOU and ME, how can they be performing this play?

Each of these one-act plays offers endless possibilities for human enaction and imagination. They function as plays just as they do poems, pushing the limits of language and physicality. In each of the one-acts, the challenge of staging matches the challenge of emotion. If they can be performed matters less than our desire to have them performed at all.