Posted Mar 4, 2010, 9:32 am
Watching a Samuel Beckett play is a lot like going a baseball game.
You can go armed with vast knowledge: statistics, history, recent team and individual performances, even gossip, and then hyper-analyze every detail of the ensuing event. Or you can go with the naivety of a child and just enjoy the game. Both methods are valid and rewarding.
Rogue Theatre is currently presenting three of Beckett’s short works: "Act Without Words I," "Not I," and best known of these pieces, "Krapp’s Last Tape." There is no thematic linkage between the three plays; each features different aspects of Beckett’s spare and controversial style.
Beckett himself disdained catagorizing his work as part of the "theater of the absurd." Nonetheless, his plays such as "Waiting for Godot," "Happy Days" and "End Game," are cornerstones of the post-World War II existential-based movement that included Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet.
Scarred by the destruction of Europe and a fundamental loss of faith in all –isms, their bleak, surrealistic works were the darlings of the era’s intelligentsia, especially when they were misunderstood or reviled by the general public.
"Act Without Words," (1957) begins comically, as the character is flung onstage with no explanation. Some unseen force controls his world; trying to exit, he is flung back. When he avails himself of offered shade, it is abruptly withdrawn. Water dangles just out of reach. When given tools to reach it, the water moves further out of reach. In despair, the character adapts the tools to commit suicide, but even that is denied.
One of the mysteries of Beckett’s works is that for as mundane or silly as they sound in description, they have a deeply engaging effect when performed. They are zen-like in that any insight from experiencing and reacting to them is more a mirror of that individual than any truths promulgated by the author.
Dr. Patty Gallagher, who starred in Rogue’s production of Beckett’s "Happy Days" last year, is the play’s mime. A professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, Gallagher is also director in residence of the Clown Conservatory at the San Francisco Circus Center. She draws on that knowledge hilariously in a work whose main stage direction to the performer is simply to "reflect" after each crazy thing occurs.
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Gallagher has an exquisite sense of expression, as she demonstrated in "Happy Days," buried first to her waist and then up to her neck (Beckett seems to have not liked actors much). She carries the audience through a lifetime of confusion, small triumphs, despair and resignation in a just a few short minutes.
Rogue managing director Cynthia Meier is the star, such as there is one, in "Not I." (1972) This work consists of the actor’s mouth in spotlight, pouring out a torrential dramatic monologue, with a vague, hooded figure nearby, sometimes reacting to the words, but mostly not.
What exactly is happening or why is a mystery, even to Beckett, who professed, "I no more know where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text."
Meier ably manages the difficult, racing, 20-minute soliloquy, which loops back upon itself repeatedly to create a jarring and disquieting narrative of a loveless, previously silent life near its end, now suddenly, uncontrollably verbal.
"Krapp’s Last Tape" (1958) was originally written for Patrick Magee, later of British TV’s “The Avengers.” Beckett ingeniously uses a tape recorder to give its sole character multiple voices, exploring the notion of who we are and who we were. Krapp, now sixty-nine, listens to a recording of his younger self, who in turn describes an even younger self whom Krapp can barely recognize. Despite a script that's barely 20 pages long, we learn much about the man, his life, his loves and his failures.
Rogue artistic director Joe McGrath portrays this gruff, unpleasant character with great affection. Introducing Krapp’s comic aspect, McGrath mimes a banana fetish worthy of any of Warhol’s Factory boys.
His performance is a homage to crusty, lusty men looking back at a tainted life, trying now to change the rules of the game to say that it not only doesn’t matter, but that it never mattered. McGrath’s engaged, well-measured performance takes us deeply into the sadness and regret that the character tries mightily to deny.
Like pop art, the theater of the absurd has declined in its significance as an intellectual movement to merge as one of the myriad undercurrents of post-modernism. Because the works are so rarely performed any more, the opportunity to experience them on the stage, especially this well presented, is a gift.
1 comment on this story
An excellent and perceptive review. Occasionally Rogue reviewers seem puzzled by the Rogue Theatre’s offerings. You obviously get what my favorite theater company is about. Thanks.