in tracy letts’ the stretch, a horse race becomes an existential soliloquy.
In Tracy Letts’ The Stretch, the actor performs a monologue in the role of a horserace announcer. Written by Letts and screened online as part of Steppenwolf’s “Three short plays by Tracy Letts” digital program, the play is just fifteen minutes long, but it is more than enough time to work its magic. Letts begins in a comical mode, announcing funny horse names such as “My Enormous Ego,” but the horses and the soliloquy itself soon go right past the photo finish into more existential territory. Letts’ face and voice take on great and greater depths—more frazzled, more pained, more confessional—as he meditates not only on horses, but on the mysteries of life.
I once watched Letts almost ruin a Steppenwolf production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by blowing the other actors off the stage in what is a quintessential ensemble work, so monologue perhaps better suits his style. By the last stretch of this mesmerizing short online play, it’s as if Letts’ race has only just begun and one wants to listen more, maybe until the end of time.