Playing for Time offers (1) the critical preface Pace, Pacem, advocating the need for poetry to be democratic, inclusive, and empathetic toward all readers, the way Shakespeare, Whitman, and Frost have been, (2) twenty-eight poems in the framework of a play, Coming to Light, An Advent Progress, featuring six engaging "Voices", and (3) twenty-seven more poems featuring a singular voice that also invites the reader to participate in a progress, that of Green, Blue, Brown.