Of course, the ART's version ofEndgame will not single-handedly banish the original to rare manuscript archives. Yet Brustein is wrong to say, as he has, that the original of a play exists only in the manuscript. It also exists in the general kind of staging which made the play a classic: sometimes it is preserved on celluloid, other times it becomes a Platonic form of a performance of that play. With Endgame, it is a timeless, barren interior of grey lighting. That aspect of the play could be 'lost' if it became popularly believed that Beckett's Endgame should be staged in some ornate, bizarre interior. This danger of losing the original is especially great with a minimalist play where there is no clear historical context to make losing the original staging difficult. When an aspect of the play is lost, some of its value as an artifact of a historical period is lost. So, too, is some of the meaning.

This danger appears in subtle ways. When one student called the ART box office to ask what Endgame was about, she was told that it was a play about the life of survivors after a nuclear war. Now, that may be true. But nothing in the playwright's stage directions would have told you that, and Beckett clearly meant to make a more universal statement on life.

The point is not that the ART was billing Endgame as a play about nuclear war survivors. They were not. The point is when you stage the play in a set depicting a deserted, gutted subway, the original hint about the possible fate of the characters becomes, for many,the single intended background. One of the important uncertainties about Endgame is forgotten or lost. A play which might hav emade people think about their own existence is removed from shame; it becomes, as it impressed a box office worker, a play about nuclear war survivors.

Of course, we have an interest in making cultural objects meaningful for the present, of using them this way to become sensitive to both the present and the past. Seven Against Therbes could be used to tell a culture about the dangers of civil strife, Perhaps Endgame should be adopted in to a new play: an existential version of The Day After or a theatric reminder that the war on poverty was just at unsuccessful as the debacle in Vietnam.

But we must also recognize our interest in maintaining cultural objects in their original form and that the most recognizable way to show both of them was by ART's production its an adaptation. ART refused to do this, defending their rights as performing artist. Some have speculated that also refused because Beckett's name sells tickets So does controversy.

Justin Hughes is a second-year student of Harvard Law School.