You don’t just watch a person / and they don’t know you’re there / and you’re just standing there just looking at them.”
-- Beverly  (Act One)

Importance: This is one of the first instances in the play in which the dialogue references the multiple layers of reality that would be going on in a performance. On one level, Beverly is speaking only of what just happened with her husband; she was startled by him when she discovered him watching her without her knowing. On another level, in shaping the line as she has, the playwright is referencing the fact that there is an audience "just watching" the "persons" in the play, who "don't know they're there." On a third level, the quote foreshadows the appearance, in Act Two, of a third group of characters, who emerge into the action and also watch the Act One characters, also without knowing that the audience...