The Illusion is a play full of false impressions, and not only demands but relies upon the assumptive power of its audience. From the start, the play endeavors to be disorienting, misleading and even ambiguous; it struggles to maintain a sound façade of false realities until the very last scene in the play, where it chooses to reveal the enveloping framework for its tales.
The anecdotes within the play are stacked, almost like nesting dolls, within and on top of one another. As the play progresses, the tales become darker, the stakes are continually raised, and the “facts” harder to accept. The environment in which the drama unfolds fully embraces these ideas in a number of ways. The largest story to be staged occurs within a toneless cave, which is represented through an ambiguous but vast installation that includes actor and audience alike. The pervasiveness of this set is important since the final lesson is learned not by any character, but by the audience members themselves.
Each story, or illusion, created within this cave-framework appears like as a fractured reality, a bubble of life contained within its own boundary that does not interact or lend color to the grotto or its inhabitants. Each successive illusion grows in size, as if Kushner were zooming out in a photograph, slowly allowing his spectators to glimpse more of a riddle. As the play advances, traveling through the illusion also becomes more complex, reflecting the fact that the subject matter becomes more difficult to watch, particularly for Pridamant. The illusions advance simply, but intricately, similar to the design of a cuckoo clock: time progresses and the mechanisms fulfill more complicated tasks, until finally the strain becomes too much, time stops ticking and the illusions are broken.
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