In William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola, disguised as a male page, pleads with her mistress Lady Olivia, who has fallen in love with her: “I swear that I am not that I play.” In the mythical kingdom of Illyria, nothing is what it seems, and its people are not who they appear to be.

Words could not save Paul Celan. The Romanian poet drowned himself in the Siene just months before his fiftieth birthday.

If one had to experience Anne Washburn’s Apparition while lying in one’s “own shit and piss,” as one character laments, one would still be eternally grateful to the playwright.