"head, shoulders, knees, and toes..." A dying man stands up as the dance begins, in the process losing some of his guts, which he has been holding in his hands. As the trees try in vain to point to body parts that are out of reach or they just don't have, he removes all his clothing, covering his genitals, finally, with a balloon. When the music stops, he begins to talk about time. It is a big topic. Important. And he has some very profound things to say about it... I think... But we can't ever quite follow what he's saying. He's not very articulate and that damn dog keeps barking and sniffing him and the trees are perpetually slapstick-ing it up. There's a man with a gun trying to shut them all up so we can watch the performance, but he just makes matters worse.

Showtime is an endlessly entertaining piece of theater. Personally, I could watch people playing with those tree costumes for hours. The problem is that there are Big topics that we should be thinking about, right? Time is a very important bit of business, isn't it? Why, even when the camera stays on the dying man, do I have to watch those damn trees? If we're ever going to understand something like time we'll have to pay attention, focus, and stop frittering it away.

Showtime forces the audience to struggle directly against the way time flows, both during performance and more generally. Some of the moments seem calculated to bore the audience. They drag on seemingly forever. The audience stretches, coughs, yawns, thinks about something else and then BANG! a balloon pops and the trees get in a fight, just as we were about to drift off. "Time is supposed to go all at the same speed, but that's not true, sometimes it goes more slowly." (approximate quote from Showtime) Showtime exaggerates and examines the relationship between "show" and "time." It strives to increase the audience's experience of theatrical temporal anxiety—as described by Gertrude Stein—as much as possible rather than trying to resolve the gap between time's passage and the perception thereof. Forced Entertainment doesn't seem to have been interested in smoothing out temporal bumps and wrinkles for their audience. Instead, they created a somewhat inaccessible piece of theater—inaccessible not because any part of it is particularly difficult but because it is constantly working to distract you away from itself.

The man's naked body onstage might create a moment of vulnerability and intimacy, but it becomes an echo of an earlier moment in which he ran on naked to borrow some money, presumably to buy some pants for the performance. In that moment he was merely a visual gag, and later he can't quite escape, can't "pop" out amongst all the other visual gags onstage. But he has this really important point about time and if only we could just pay attention and really listen to him for a moment...