The photograph is the stage for an epic, all-encompassing, oceanic play, an elemental ur-play that take its subject, its plot and its ultimate revelations from the great diurnal rhythm of day-night, dark-light that beats through every living thing. The cosmic boundlessness of the theme is carried here in homey detail: "Night" is night because the scrawled word "night" tells us so--in sineage as stark and roughly amusing as the continual artifice-announcements in a play by Brecht.
There is even a tiny, painted, inescapable slip of a moon--a cheap but tender stage-moon. The cat is transitional. It has been onstage throughout the "night" and into the "morning." Morning is flooding onto the stage from the fright. The morning light is creamy, porous, uncertain, at this point, as to its transformative authority. It takes a lot of daylight to push a plushy, drop-curtain night out of the way.
