It's Only a Play
Cultural complacency & aesthetic anesthesia in The Frogs
“It’s Only a Play” arrives in The Frogs like a lullaby wrapped around a philosophical grenade. It is nestled within a show characterized by its exuberance: the high-camp spectacle, the gleeful anachronisms, the sheer audacity of its premise. But this number—quieter, stiller, but no less audacious—deserves serious consideration.
Where do we find ourselves as “It’s Only a Play” begins? Dionysos explains his mission to Pluto: to bring George Bernard Shaw back to earth because “the world is in such a mess,” because their leaders “won’t tell us the truth,” and because “if we start to question things—merely question—we’re accused of being disloyal.” These are not light concerns. Yet at this moment of moral urgency, the Chorus intervenes with their seductive counsel: “Don’t worry. / Relax. / He’ll do it for you. / Besides, / No cause for alarm. / It’s only a play.’
In classical Greek drama, the parabasis served as the playwright’s direct communication with the audience, a momentary dropping of dramatic pretense to engage with contemporary issues. Aristophanes used this device to skewer politicians, critique social policies, and advance his own artistic and political positions. The Chorus, speaking partly out of character, became the author’s mouthpiece for urgent commentary on the world beyond the theater walls.
Sondheim’s deployment of this ancient form here creates a fascinating paradox. In Finishing the Hat, he writes of “It’s Only a Play” that the Chorus “speaks for the playwright,” addressing the audience directly. Yet what they speak for is not the urgent relevance of art but its comforting irrelevance. The playwright uses his voice to argue against the power of his own medium. It’s a recursive loop that would make Gödel dizzy.
On the surface, we have characters within a musical telling a theatre audience that theatre doesn’t matter. But more subtly, we have Sondheim ventriloquizing through his Chorus a series of sophisticated arguments for artistic disengagement. Art’s retreat from social responsibility and political commentary is, we are told, not only justified but wise. As we will see, this is a position that Sondheim simultaneously exposes and critiques.
"It's Only a Play" as Aesthetic Anesthesia
The titular phrase appears with the persistent regularity of a sedative, each iteration serving to diminish the stakes of what we’re witnessing—what we might call aesthetic anesthesia. The first occurrence comes as reassurance: “No cause for alarm / It’s only a play.”
But as the number progresses, the phrase accumulates weight through repetition, developing what Walter Benjamin might recognize as “aura”—though where Benjamin saw aura as conferring unique authority, Sondheim’s repeated phrase accumulates the opposite: an authority to dismiss, a presence that argues for absence.
The phrase later comes embedded within a wider argument:
Well, words are merely chatter,
And easy to say.
It doesn’t really matter,
It’s only a play.
It’s only so much natter
That somebody wrote.
And the world’s still afloat,
So it’s hardly a note
For today.
We see here the full scope of the Chorus’s dismissive logic. Theatre is reduced to “natter,” idle talk that is utterly inconsequential. That the world is “still afloat” is offered as evidence that artistic intervention is unnecessary. Worse, it’s futile. Art, the Chorus argues, barely registers in a world that remains essentially unchanged, stubbornly intact.
“It’s only a play” becomes a sacred incantation for the profane act of looking away.
The Rhetoric of Temporal Manipulation
“It’s Only a Play” weaponizes time itself against the urgency of action. In the lyric below, each claim builds toward a comprehensive case for deferral that would make Hamlet’s procrastination seem decisive by comparison:
And there’s time,
There’s plenty of time—
There always is time.
You’ve got all the time in the world.
In those first three lines, Sondheim moves from specific claim to general principle to metaphysical assertion. By the final line, time has been transformed from a finite resource requiring careful management into an infinite ocean in which urgency drowns.
We can better understand this temporal rhetoric through what Henri Bergson distinguished as the difference between mechanical time (time as measurement, as deadline, as pressure) and duration (time as flow, as experience, as the medium of consciousness). The Chorus systematically transforms every manifestation of mechanical time—the pressure to act, the urgency of crisis, the deadline of social decay—into duration, where all moments become equally weightless and interchangeable.
The lines “You know, time has a way of healing all things. / Things fix themselves.” represent the climax of this temporal mysticism. Here, time becomes not just abundant but actively benevolent. The phrase “things fix themselves” is particularly insidious in its grammatical passivity. Agency disappears entirely. Problems become self-solving, change becomes automatic, and human intervention becomes not just unnecessary but presumptuous.
Walter Benjamin’s concept of “homogeneous, empty time” proves illuminating here. Benjamin critiques the bourgeois conception of time as a smooth, continuous flow in which all moments are equivalent and progress occurs automatically. This is precisely the temporal framework the Chorus promotes: a time without crisis, without kairos (the decisive moment), without what Benjamin calls the “constellation” that demands immediate action.
Against this stands Dionysos’s mission, which embodies what Benjamin calls “messianic time”—the urgent present moment that is qualitatively different from all others and demands immediate response. The Chorus’s temporal philosophy seeks to dissolve precisely this difference, transforming crisis into routine.
Consider the number’s final temporal gambit: “You can turn off the lights / And on alternate nights / You can pray.” Here, the Chorus offers a ritualized relationship to time that further dissolves urgency. Prayer becomes not a crisis call for divine intervention, but a scheduled activity—as regular and unthreatening as any other bourgeois routine. Even the possibility of divine aid is domesticated, made comfortable, stripped of its potential to demand immediate transformation.
The Grammar of Evasion
The lyrics of “It’s Only a Play” amount to what we might call a syntax of avoidance—a grammatical structure that systematically removes agency, specificity, and responsibility from every proposition, mirroring and enabling the social complacency the number critiques.
Abstract subjects and reflexive constructions abound: “things fix themselves,” “time has a way of healing all things,” “things could be worse.” In each case, human agency disappears in favor of impersonal forces or self-acting entities. Crucially, this systematic obscuring of who’s responsible for what creates a discourse where accountability simply evaporates.
Even more revealing is the strategic use of vague referents. Two phrases stand out here: “It really doesn’t matter / What somebody writes,” and our old friend “It’s only so much natter / That somebody wrote.” Who is this somebody? What did they write? When? Under what circumstances? The Chorus’s language evacuates such specificity, transforming all artistic production into an undifferentiated mass of somebody writing something at some time. It’s a linguistic flattening, which in turn enables their dismissive stance. No particular piece of writing, under these conditions, can claim special urgency or relevance.
The phrase “somewhere somebody rejoices for you” is perhaps the most sophisticated example of this evasive grammar. It’s a kind of grammatical fog in which responsibility, location, and identity all dissolve. Someone somewhere is presumably celebrating your achievements (whatever they may be), but you’ll have to take that on trust. The phrase offers the comfort of recognition without any of the demands that real recognition might entail.
The cumulative effect of these grammatical choices is to create a discourse where engagement becomes not just pointless but almost impertinent. The Chorus’s suggestions—“Let the leaders raise your voices for you / Let the critics make your choices for you”—aren’t demands but seductive offers. Why burden yourself with the difficult work of forming opinions or taking stands when others can handle such tedious responsibilities? This logic of deferral thus extends to every aspect of civic and cultural life: not only is action unnecessary, but even the mental work of decision-making can be outsourced.
Meta-Theatrical Vertigo
And so we return to that dizzying recursive loop: we are watching actors playing a Chorus telling an audience watching a play that plays don’t matter. The Chorus uses the power of theatrical persuasion to argue against the efficacy of theatrical persuasion. If their argument succeeds, their own performance becomes meaningless, including the very argument they’ve just made. They cannot be both right and effective.
In this way, “It’s Only a Play” embodies what Theodor Adorno called art’s “double character.” For Adorno, authentic art exists in constant tension between affirmation and negation. In other words, it participates in the social order it critiques, drawing its power from the very structures it seeks to transcend. “It’s Only a Play” affirms the social order’s dismissal of art while simultaneously demonstrating art’s power to effectively articulate (and perhaps transcend) that dismissal.
But by pushing these paradoxes to their logical extreme, Sondheim creates a philosophical reductio ad absurdum. The Chorus’s arguments become so perfectly circular, so comprehensively self-undermining, that they expose themselves as elaborate rationalization. The vertigo is—perhaps—designed to make us dizzy enough to stumble out of the circle of evasion the Chorus has itself constructed.
The Parabasis Paradox Resolved
In the end, “It’s Only a Play” functions as what Benjamin would call a “dialectical image,” a moment in which contradictory forces crystallize into a single, illuminating flash. The Chorus speaks for the playwright, but only by speaking against everything the playwright represents. They use theatre’s power to argue for theatre’s powerlessness, employ sophisticated rhetoric to advocate for intellectual passivity, and participate in a work of considerable artistic complexity to argue for art’s irrelevance.
What emerges is a brilliant exposure of how cultural complacency actually operates. Chorus members don’t crudely dismiss art or attack engagement; they seduce us into disengagement through arguments about time, agency, and social responsibility. Their very sophistication reveals the sophistication of the forces that encourage us to relax in the face of crisis. Sondheim makes visible what usually remains hidden: the philosophical machinery that transforms urgent political questions into comfortable aesthetic ones.
But the exposure of this machinery doesn’t necessarily disarm it. Even as we recognize the Chorus’s arguments as elaborate rationalization, we may find ourselves susceptible to their appeal. There is something genuinely seductive about the idea that we can “turn off the lights” and let others take responsibility, that “time has a way of healing all things,” that problems “fix themselves” without our intervention.
“It’s Only a Play” doesn’t offer an easy escape from the forces of complacency it diagnoses; instead, it exposes the ways in which those forces operate, including within ourselves. Every sophisticated argument for disengagement becomes, through the very act of its articulation, an argument for the kind of engagement that could see through such seductive sophistication.
The call to “relax” becomes a call to remain alert. “Don’t worry?” No: “Speak up! Get sore!” (as Dionysos will soon tell us). It’s never only a play.