Beckett Trilogy: 'Not I', 'Footfalls,' 'Rockaby'

Back in October 2015, I walked down to the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University, just south of Washington Square, to meet my friend Diana for a performance of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (see my posted report on 31 October 2015).  This season’s offerings at the Skirball also included the Beckett Trilogy, three short plays by the Irish playwright, all one-woman performances featuring acclaimed Irish actress Lisa Dwan, directed by Walter Asmus, Beckett’s long time friend and collaborator.  I tried to persuade Diana to join me for that presentation, which Dwan had been performing for some time both at home and around the world.  (It was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014, for example.)  Diana wasn’t amenable to an evening of one-person plays, even by Samuel Beckett, so I determined to go on my own.  For one reason, I’d never seen these three plays: Not I (1972), Footfalls (1975), and Rockaby (1980).  For another, probably more significant: I think Beckett is a theatrical genius (he won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, a pretty good bona fides of his status); I’ve acknowledged my esteem for the Irish dramatist and writer in several ROT posts (see “History of Waiting For Godot,” 30 March 2009; “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 April 2009; “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 3 April 2009; “Is Waiting for Godot Trash?,” 17 April 2009).  So, on Saturday evening, 16 April, I walked down to the Skirball once again to catch the 55-minute Lisa Dwan Production.  Dwan, who’s touring the Beckett Trilogy and will be retiring Not I after these shows, was only scheduled to be in New York from 13-17 April—six performances only.  It was also reportedly Dwan’s final appearance for this tour, which has included stops in Cambridge, England; Belfast; Perth, Australia; Paris; Hong Kong; and Toronto, before hitting the U.S., where it’s played in Boston and L.A. before ending in New York City.

Lisa Dwan, 38, is from Coosan, Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland.  She first wanted to be a ballerina and was chosen to dance with Rudolf Nureyev in the Ballet San Jose’s production of Coppélia in Dublin when she was 12.  After winning a scholarship to the Dorothy Stevens School of Ballet in Leeds at 14, Dwan left school.  (She had to leave ballet when she tore a cartilage in her knee.)  Her first movie role was Agnes in a 1997 TV adaptation of Oliver Twist which co-starred Elijah Wood (Artful Dodger) and Richard Dreyfuss (Fagin).  Dwan’s first regular television role was as Princess Deirdre, the Mystic Knight of Wind, on The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog (FOX, 1998-99).  She played the role of Orla in eight episodes of RTÉ’s (Irish national radio and TV) The Big Bow Wow in 2004, the role of Zoe Burke in 21 episodes of the Irish soap opera Fair City from 2006 to 2007, and the role of Angel Islington on ITV’s Rock Rivals (2008) in the U.K.  In 2009 she starred opposite Martin Sheen as Marika in Bhopal: Prayer for Rain.  The actress appeared on Broadway in December 2015 when she recited a previously-unpublished Seamus Heaney poem about Brian Friel, who’d died a few months earlier, at a tribute to the Irish playwright at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.  Dwan began performing Samuel Beckett’s Not I at London’s Battersea Arts Centre in 2005, and was interviewed with Billie Whitelaw as part of the Beckett celebrations on BBC Radio 3 in 2006.  She performed the piece again in 2009 in the Southbank Centre in London and at Reading University in 2013.  In 2014, the two other pieces in the Beckett Trilogy joined Not I (it was director Walter Asmus who suggested that these plays could be performed together, though Beckett never intended them to be) and Dwan performed the program at London’s Royal Court Theatre; it began the world tour that brought it to BAM with performances at the Duchess Theatre in London’s West End.

Walter Asmus was born in 1941 in Lübeck, Germany.  He studied German and English literature, philosophy, and theater sciences in Hamburg, Vienna, and Freiburg and spent a year in London in the late ’60s.  After two years as co-director of Theater in der Tonne (Reutlingen, Germany), he worked as assistant director/dramaturg and director at the Schiller Theater in Berlin where in 1974 he met Samuel Beckett and served as his assistant for the author’s renowned production of Waiting for Godot in 1975.  Asmus worked with Beckett in both theater and television, on pieces including That Time,  Footfalls, Play, Come and Go, Waiting for Godot, . . . but the clouds . . ., Ghost Trio, Eh Joe, and What Where, until the author’s death in 1989.  Asmus has directed all of Beckett’s plays internationally; his 1991 Gate Theatre (Dublin) production of Godot, regarded by reviewers and academics alike as “definitive,” was revived several times until 2008, touring to Chicago, Seville, Toronto, Melbourne, London, New York (Lincoln Center Festival), Beijing, and Shanghai.  There were U.S. tours in 1998 and 2006 and the production closed in 2008 after an all-Ireland tour of one-night stands in 32 counties.  Asmus was co-director of the international festival, Beckett in Berlin 2000.

(For a brief bio of Beckett, see my report on Godot, referenced above, and a profile of the Skirball Center is in my report on Not by Bread Alone, 12 February 2013.)

During the performance of the Beckett Trilogy at the Skirball, all the lights in the auditorium were switched off, including the “Exit” lights.  The show was 55 minutes in virtually complete darkness.  (There were stage lighting effects, as you’ll learn.)  There were three-minute breaks between the playlets during which the main drape closed—to allow the stage crew to change set pieces under work lights without illuminating the auditorium—but the house remained in total blackout.  (To avoid potential panic or anxiety—it reportedly has happened—the audience was informed of this in advance, along with hearing an assurance that the theater staff was in complete control of the lighting system and in an emergency, the lights would be turned back on immediately.  We were also admonished not to leave our seats during the performance or the pauses.  The announcement was delivered solemnly, without a hint of irony or humor to be sure, I suppose, that no one took it for a joke.)

(While some of the characters in these plays have names or designations in the published texts, the Beckett Trilogy program didn’t list any.  In Not I, Dwan’s character is called Mouth, and in Footfalls, she’s called May, the name of Beckett’s mother; in Rockaby, she’s designated in the text only as W.)

Not I, written in 1972, is a short dramatic monologue (translated into French as Pas moi).  It premièred at the Samuel Beckett Festival by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York on 22 November 1972.  The original production was directed by Alan Schneider (a leading director of Beckett’s plays, including the U.S. première of Godot in 1956) with Jessica Tandy and Henderson Forsythe.  (The piece was originally conceived for two performers, the Mouth and the Auditor; Beckett later removed the second figure, who may be of either gender but has no lines, from his own productions of the play, though he didn’t eliminate the Auditor from the published text.  Asmus and Dwan’s staging omitted this presence.)  In January 1973, Beckett himself directed Billie Whitelaw, one of the foremost interpreters of his works for 25 years, at the Royal Court Theatre.  (The BBC aired a film version of Not I with Whitelaw in February 1973, but only her mouth appears on the screen.)  Dwan, coached by the late Whitelaw (who died in 2014) from Beckett’s own notes from 1973, first performed Not I at London’s Battersea Arts Centre in 2005 and then in July 2009 in the Southbank Centre, also in London.  The Skirball performance took about 10 minutes—Beckett’s instructions are to do the pay as fast as the actor can—at “the speed of thought”—and some reports indicate that Dwan has done it in less time.  Tandy took 22 minutes to perform Not I, and Beckett declared that she ruined his play.  Whitelaw’s performance in ’73 lasted 14 minutes and was considered a triumph.  (The ’73 film runs 13 minutes.)

In Not I, a woman, reduced to nothing but her mouth (in London’s Independent, Paul Taylor quipped, “imagine the Cheshire Cat’s grin as reinvented by Munch”), seeks consolation in a disjointed, fragmented speech streamed at a breakneck pace.  In the Lisa Dwan Production, the actress’s mouth was lit by a pinpoint spot while everything else was immersed in total darkness.  (The masterful lighting design for the program was by James Farncombe.)  Dwan was suspended with her mouth exactly eight feet above center stage (Beckett wrote explicit instructions).  I discovered later that to enhance the effect of the disembodied mouth, Dwan wore black face makeup except around her lips.  She also wore an “opaque tight shroud” that blinded her as well.  Dwan’s mouth seemed to bob up and down slightly as she released her stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.  The actress, though, was bound to a wooden plank with her face through an oval hole so she couldn’t move her mouth out of the light.

The words are jumbled and appear haphazard, though pieces of a story start to come together.  The woman tells the story in third person, as if it were about someone else, but this is the speaker’s attempt to distance herself from her memories.  The woman’s story is horrendous, though there are moments of absurd humor here and there.  Having spent most of her solitary, forlorn life abused and neglected, she became mute.  Now she finds herself logorrheic.  The details of the woman’s story aren’t provided and the third person she keeps using keeps her at a remove from the specifics.  We’re kept distanced as well, not only by the speech’s structure but by it’s pace, not to mention that we’re watching only a mouth talking, not even a talking head.  (If you’re sitting any distance from the stage, you don’t even really get that much visual stimulus: all I could really see was a dot of light that I knew before I sat down was a woman’s mouth.)  The words, however, aren’t meant to be understood rationally: it’s almost pure emotion that Beckett, through Dwan, is engaging and each of us gets out of the performance what’s right for us at that moment. 

I can certainly understand why Dwan would want to retire Not I from her repertoire after performing it for over a decade.  Physically and emotionally, she’s acknowledged, I takes a toll.  Dwan recounted that Billie Whitelaw had once proclaimed, “I will not play that role again; I cannot; if I do then I shall go mad.”  But, of course, Dwan wasn’t done yet: she was only one-third through the evening.  By her own account: “I rip off the head harness, run as fast as I can round to the dressing box, and start ripping off the black make-up while somebody is sticking a wig on me, trying to squeeze me into a dress—that’s pretty frenetic, and doing that in the half-light. . . .”  The audience, of course, sat in the dark while Dwan was kitted out for the next playlet; then she was back out on stage for Footfalls.                                              
Footfalls was also written in English (its French version is entitled Pas, which means ‘footsteps’ or ‘paces’), in 1975, and was first performed on 20 May 1976 at London’s Royal Court Theatre as part of the Samuel Beckett Festival, directed by the playwright with Whitelaw, for whom the piece had been written, and Rose Hill as the voice of the mother.  (At the Skirball, the recorded voice of the mother was uncredited; I thought it might have been Dwan’s own voice, and according to the Guardian, it was.)  The play reveals a bruised soul, drained of life, pacing relentlessly back and forth outside her dying mother’s bedroom.  Or is the unseen mother merely a creature of the woman’s mind?  Only Dwan is lit—in an eerie blue light—while the rest of the stage is bathed in complete darkness.  I don’t know how Farncombe accomplished this effect because it really seemed as if Dwan’s tattered dress glowed, giving off the light rather than some outside source focusing the cold light on her.  (Alex Eales was listed as the designer, presumably of both set, what there is of it, and costumes; the wardrobe supervisor and wig stylist was Naomi Miyoko Raddatz.)  The patch of bare, wooden floor up and down which Dwan walked showed only the slightest light spillage; only Dwan seemed to be illuminated (and I can’t tell you how that’s even possible). 

The duologue—it’s hardly a conversation—is divided into parts, separated by the ringing of a bell.  The bell changes tone with each section, getting almost imperceptibly softer (though I only realized this after the second or third section because the difference was so slight I wasn’t sure it was intentional).  The illumination also changed—something else I didn’t see until the later sections—becoming darker each time.  Dwan’s pacing was very regular (I later read that Beckett instructed that it should be “metronomic” and, depending on the actor’s stride, the same number of steps for each cross), so the movement seemed mechanical—or the way a prisoner in a cell might pace off the length and width of his confinement—obsessively.  Dwan paused a few seconds each time the bell rang and then continued pacing.  At the end, the bell rang and the lights faded on an empty patch of floor—Dwan wasn’t there—and went very dim.

Every footstep was audible; I thought there might have been mics at floor level to amplify Dwan’s steps, but I’ve read that when Whitelaw did the play under Beckett’s direction, the actress wore sandpaper on the bottom of her slippers to make her steps discernible.  I can’t confirm that Dwan did the same thing, but I suspect she and Asmus followed Beckett’s practice.  The overall image was ghostly, spectral. 

The text is nearly without a plot at all, though we learn tidbits of a lonely life.  We learn, for instance, that the mother is 90, though she thinks she’s in her “40’s”; we also learn that Dwan’s character started pacing as a girl, after something the nature of which is never revealed happened, and has never stopped—nor does she ever go outside in daylight.  We learn about the daughter’s nocturnal visits to the nearby church, where she paces along the “arms” of the cruciform sanctuary (transept).  The daughter asks her mother if she needs her daughter to give her another injection, to reposition her again, or to bring her the bedpan.  We don’t see the daughter doing any of these duties: Dwan only paces up and down the strip of floor.  The mother also comments on her daughter’s pacing, counting the steps, though technically it’s impossible for her to see her daughter outside her door.  The story we hear is told in a third-person narrative.  We could get the impression that the daughter and the mother’s voices are the same person (especially if the same actress plays both parts), and whether any of it’s real or imagined is uncertain; indeed, whether the pacing woman is real or imaginary is uncertain as well. 

Rockaby, too, was written in English (translated into French as Berceuse, which means both ‘rocking chair’ and ‘lullaby’) in 1980, commissioned by Daniel Labeille, then a professor of theater arts at Cayuga Community College, State University of New York, for the SUNY-wide Programs in the Arts, for a festival and symposium in commemoration of Beckett’s 75th birthday.  The play premiered on 8 April 1981 at SUNY-Buffalo with Alan Schneider directing Billie Whitelaw.  (A 1983 documentary film, Rockaby, by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus recorded the rehearsal and the first performance of that staging.)  That production went on to be performed at the Annex (now the Ellen Stewart Theatre) at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York’s East Village on 13-15 April 1981 and, in December 1982, in the Cottesloe at the Royal National Theatre in London. In Rockaby, an old woman (the script apparently describes her as “prematurely aged,” though I’m not sure how we’re to know that) slowly withdraws from the world as she rocks herself to eternal sleep in her dead mother’s wooden rocking chair.  Once again, Dwan’s in pitch blackness in a phosphorescing dress—this time, an elegant Victorian-style gown.  (In the eerie lighting, it’s hard to discern this, but photos of the actress on stage in Rockaby clearly show the lace-trimmed bodice of a sequined  black dress.)  It was a remarkable vision that could be mesmerizing enough to distract a spectator from the words Dwan is saying.  Her monologue, Dwan’s recorded voice, became a litany, with phrases and words repeated more like an incantation or sound poem than a text. 

The curtain opened to reveal Dwan already in the chair.  The light didn’t follow Dwan as she rocked back and forth, so as she rocked in a steady rhythm (which at least one reviewer likened to “the beats of a slowly collapsing heart”), her mask-like face moved in and out of the light.  Like Dwan’s pacing in Footfalls, the rocking was regular to the point of seeming mechanical, as if the rocker were moving on its own.  It was hypnotic—or, as the New York Times’ Ben Brantley called the movement, “soporific”—intended to lull the woman into the sleep of death.  (The play’s English title alludes to the nursery rhyme “Rock-a-bye Baby” that seems to conflate birth, sleep, and death in its lyrics.)  The rocker’s rhythmic creaking as it totters was, indeed, sleep-inducing.  The woman’s recorded thoughts recount her past life and her mother’s (is this the same woman from Footfalls some years later?) as she pulls back from the world. 

Like Footfalls, Rockaby is divided into sections, each one signaled when the woman says “More,” each time a little softer.  Dwan joined in with the recording in the one-word plea or demand, until the last section as her head slowly dropped onto her chest.  The first parts of the monologue, in which the voice speaks of the death of the woman’s mother (in that house?  That chair?  That dress?) and her search through an upstairs window first for someone like her, then anyone at all, seem to be recounting the woman’s past as she withdrew stage by stage from the rest of the world; the last part, in which the woman’s moved downstairs and no longer looks out the window, parallels what we see on stage so the voice appears to be narrating the woman’s present, which is, of course, her end.  The London Independent called it “a kind of auto-euthanasia.”

When my mother was dying in the hospice unit of a Silver Spring hospital a little less than a year ago, one of the nurses told me that the occasional muttering and shouts, the movements of her eyes, and changes in facial expression may be her responses to visions and sounds she’s hearing in her head.  It was a Catholic hospital, so the nurse thought it might be visions of loved ones in the afterlife, but I wonder if it wasn’t more like what Beckett posited was going on in Dwan’s character’s deteriorating mind in Rockaby: the revisiting of the life being left behind.  (Fortunately, my mother’s life had been a great deal happier than Beckett’s character’s.)

Dwan’s performances in these three encounters with dying were unquestionably astonishing pieces of work, approached with intelligence, strength, and sensitivity (and not a small amount of Irish poetry in her heart and voice).  Brantley asserted in 2014, “Ms. Dwan, you see, is an instrument of Beckett, in that way saints and martyrs are said to be instruments of God,” and I’ll let that comment stand for me as well.  That didn’t make watching her any easier to take, however.  Clearly, every theatergoer will have a different experience of this trilogy, and there’s no reconciling one viewer’s take-away with another’s.  The plays are oddly moving, even as they’re disturbing and a little frightening, and I had the impression, without being able to articulate it, that I’d experienced something profound.  Yet, I have to admit—and I suspect this will be true for others as well—that the experience was more awe-inspiring than pleasurable. 

“Taken together,” wrote Lyn Gardner of the 2014 Royal Court début of the Trilogy in the Guardian, “this is an hour that feels like being trapped in somebody else’s nightmare.”  That absolutely nails it.  The whole evening, as short as it was, left me with a feeling of loss and despair—it’s not a happy evening at the theater—and sadness.  It was very hard for me not to flash on my mother’s last year as her mind disintegrated and then her body died while I was listening to Dwan speak Beckett’s words.  On the 10-block walk home, I was lost in thought about what I’d just witnessed.  It wasn’t cathartic, more Proustian in a distressing way.  It was, in the end, though, an experience I’m mighty glad I had; sometimes, I guess, a little discomfort has trade-offs—especially when it comes from art of the quality of these plays and Dwan’s performances. 

It should be a shame on the New York City theater press, here in the theater capital of the country, if not the world, that there were almost no reviews of Dwan’s Beckett Trilogy at the Skirball Center.  (The same had been true of the Godot at the Skirball in October.  I wonder if it’s about the venue.)  None of the major print outlets, including the so-called Paper of Record, reviewed this performance (though, to be fair, the Times covered the 2014 outing at BAM); there are a couple of on-line reviews I’ll cite, but for the purposes of going broad, I’ll have to cite some of the big papers that ran notices of Dwan’s stops in other cities like Boston and L.A.

The tour that stopped at NYU Skirball last month was in Toronto, Canada, in October 2015, playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre.  In the Globe and Mail, J. Kelly Nestruck said of Not I, “Dwan’s demonic delivery of the words . . . lands in your own ears the way words do when you are in an extreme state, a state of terror.”  Of Footfalls, Nestuck reported, “It looks great,” but found that the “ambiguity is missing in Dwan’s version” because her “emphasis on musicality and precise physicality over emotionally connected delivery takes away from this one.”  Rockaby, however, is “a simple short, but I found it almost unbearably moving in its depiction of the end of life.”  The Toronto Star’s Richard Ouzounian declared, “The darkness has never seemed as bright as it does in Beckett Trilogy”: despite the theater’s “stygian blackness,” Ouzounian insisted, “you will see enough to keep you thinking for weeks ahead.”  Dwan, he pronounced, “is brave, she is brilliant and she is unforgettable, like the man whose words she brings to life.” 

In Boston last March, where the trilogy was housed at the Paramount Center, Terry Byrne wrote in the Boston Globe, “Something extraordinary happens in the utter darkness of the “ theater because of “Dwan’s stunning performance.”  On the website Arts Fuse, Bill Marx called Dwan’s performance “powerful and . . . deliciously revelatory.”  The actress “is adroitly alive to the verbal and metaphysical nuances of these somberly lyrical pieces.”  Marx characterized Not I as “fabulously quicksilver,” a “roiling sonic whirlwind.  Amusing, frightening, confusing, bedeviling.”  Though Dwan performed “with admirable commitment and skill,” Marx found Footfalls and Rockaby lacking the “sense of mischievousness generated in Not I.”  He complained that in the final two playlets, “the emphasis fell a bit too heavily on the futility.”  He characterized this deficiency as a “quibble with what is a memorable evening . . . that was uplifting.”

On the Left Coast, the Lisa Dwan Production of Beckett’s three short plays was staged at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California, in the April week before it came to New York City.  Charles McNulty warned in the Los Angeles Times, “What is frightening about these works . . . isn’t the dimness of the physical production but the blinding illumination of existence as a wound.”  Warning, “It takes a brave actor to perform any one of these monologues,” McNulty asserted, “Dwan doesn’t so much enact these plays as take possession of them in the manner of a spirit on temporary leave from purgatory.”  He found, however, that Dwan’s “speed of delivery” in Not I came “at too high a cost” because too many “of the words are unintelligible” and “too much of the context . . . is lost.”  The L.A. reviewer acknowledged, though, that “‘Footfalls’ and ‘Rockaby,’ fortunately, are superbly executed.”  Here Dwan’s “embodied pathos unites these explorations of daughters imprisoned in their own skulls.  Her rhythmic movements are coordinated perfectly with Beckett’s words, which function more like a score than a traditional play.”  On the website of Annenberg Media, a student-run media organization at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, theater editor Ryan Brophy pronounced Dwan “a necromancer” as she “breathes life into the ether of the blackness in a fashion unlike quite nearly anything I have yet to see in Los Angeles.”  Beckett’s “legacy lies in the abstract,” observed Brophy, “yet Ms. Dwan makes his concepts specific.  So specific, in fact, that as we let the ethereal, haunting 55-minute trilogy wash over us, we experience a flooding of untapped sensation that can only be triggered by stories of this deep a caliber.”  Not I, “the first few minutes” of which, said Brophy, was “the most unnerving part of the show,” was “hellish, disorienting, panic-inducing”; Footfalls “showcases the actress in her most vulnerable state of beauty”; and in Rockaby, “the most heartbreaking” piece, Dwan “submits” to the “power” of darkness.  In conclusion, Brophy challenged “anyone who did not experience some sort of spiritual revival or enlightening from this production to go see a shrink,” even though the trilogy “is not, per se, enjoyable.”  Dwan, he reported, “commands the stage and the text with a boldness and an openness uncompromising in its severity.” 

Turning now to coverage of the New York visit of the Beckett Trilogy, arguably the most prominent notice appeared as a short review in a two-notice column by Fern Siegel of the Huffington Post, who called the trilogy “a musing on the persistence of consciousness against all odds, as well as a realization that suffering is endemic to the human experience.”  Siegel reported, “In the hands of an accomplished actress like Dwan . . . it is a haunting experience.”  The actress “brings dexterity to each character, while sustaining specifically crafted moments with grace,” said the on-line reviewer, and “[a]ided by lighting designer James Farncombe and sound designer David McSeveney, Dwan’s performance is memorable.”   

On TheaterScene, Darryl Reilly declared that Dwan is “justified” in being “heralded as the successor to the late actress Billie Whitelaw as the foremost female interpreter of Beckett’s work.”  Her acting in the three plays, said Reilly, “is a spellbinding feat”: “Each of her characterizations is distinct vocally and physically and each is compelling.”  Her performance in Not I “is quite entertaining amidst the sheer symbolism”; in Footfalls, Dwan plays both roles “hypnotically”; but in Rockaby, the actress “is at her eeriest.”  These performances, added Reilly, “are enhanced by the ravishing theatricality of the production” and the review-writer concluded, “This mesmerizing production of Beckett Trilogy: Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby vividly captures that expression with Lisa Dwan’s titanic performance and its striking presentation.”  Tyler Plosia pronounced Dwan’s presentation of Not I “a terrifying experience” on Strage Buddy, one that’s “hard to imagine anyone getting . . . any more perfect than Dwan.”  This is followed by Footfalls, “a grave and sobering meditation” that’s “fraught with tension and an almost paranormal suspense,” and then Rockaby, in which Dwan’s portrayal of a woman whose “life has come to haunt her prematurely” serves as “the close of our difficult and enthralling experience.” 

'Waiting for Godot' (Gare St. Lazare)

“I think Beckett was a genius and that Godot is a masterpiece.”  I confessed this sentiment 6½ years ago in a post called “Is Waiting for Godot Trash?” (17 April 2009), and I haven’t changed my mind on that score since I first saw the play at my college theater my freshman year.  (I’m old enough that the play was only nine years past its U.S. début and Broadway première when the Troubadour Theater put it on.)   I’d never seen, or even heard, of anything like it at that point in my cultural life—I was 18 and “Theater of the Absurd” was a whole new idea to me.  (A year or two later, the Troubs staged Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade—in which I had a role—and if Waiting for Godot and Theater of the Absurd opened my eyes, Marat/Sade and Theater of Cruelty blew my mind!  We did exciting stuff at Washington and Lee University back in the day.)

I haven’t always been able to see new productions of Samuel Beckett’s most famous play, so when I read that the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University, just down 5th Avenue from my home, was hosting a performance of Godot, I jumped at the chance to catch it during its short stay here (13-17 October).  My frequent theater companion, Diana, agreed to go with me, so on Saturday evening, 17 October, we met at the Skirball Center on LaGuardia Place just south of Washington Square for the show’s 8 p.m. closing performance. 

A co-production of Gare St Lazare Ireland and the Dublin Theatre Festival, this presentation of Waiting for Godot premiered at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in October 2013 and toured to the Lyric Theatre for the Belfast Festival at Queen’s University and then to Boston, Massachusetts, to perform at ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage in November 2013.  In 2014, the show traveled to Shanghai as part of the ACT International Festival of Contemporary Theatre at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre.  

In 1991, after graduating from college with a BA in fine arts, Judy Hegarty Lovett, who directed the current Godot, moved to Paris and joined Gare St Lazare Chicago; Conor Lovett, who appears as Vladimir, was also a member of the Paris troupe, where they worked together as director and actor on several productions.  In 1996, the Lovetts founded Gare St Lazare Players Ireland, of which they are joint artistic directors, in County Cork.  Dedicated to the faithful rendering of Samuel Beckett’s plays—it has 17 of his titles in its repertoire—Gare St Lazare Ireland has also adapted Herman Melville’s epic Moby Dick (2009) and produced the original play Title and Deed (world première, 2011), written specifically for the troupe by American Will Eno and seen in New York at the Signature Theatre Company in 2012 as part of Eno’s STC residency.  GSLI has also staged works by Michael Harding (Swallow, 2003) and Conor McPherson (The Good Thief, première, 2006).  The company has become Ireland’s most traveled theater troupe, going to over 60 sites in Ireland and making more than 200 tours to 80 cities outside Ireland in 25 countries on six continents. 

The NYU Skirball Center, funded in part by the Skirball Foundation and named for Jack H. Skirball (1896-1985), a rabbi who became a producer in Hollywood as well as on Broadway, is part of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life, the NYU student center on Washington Square South (West 4th Street), replacing the Loeb Student Center which was demolished in 1999.  The 860-seat theater opened in 2003, and this was only the second time I’d ever been there.  (The first show I saw at the Skirball was Not by Bread Alone; my report, posted on 12 February 2013, contains some additional details on the Skirball Center.)

Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin, Ireland, in 1906, the second son of middle-class parents.  He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, with a major in French and Italian.  His first job in 1928 was teaching English in the École Normale Supérieur in Paris.  During this time, the young Beckett met James Joyce and quickly became part of the older writer’s circle.  In 1931, he returned to Ireland as a lecturer in French literature, received his masters degree in French, and subsequently returned to Paris as a teacher in 1932.  He made Paris his home from then on, except for visits abroad and a retreat to the Unoccupied Zone in Vichy, France, from 1942-44. 

Beckett found teaching disagreeable and soon turned all of his attention to writing.  During the 1930s and ’40s, his writing consisted of critical studies (“Proust” and others), poems, and two novels (Murphy and Watt), all written in English.  During these Wanderjahre, he moved to Dublin to London to Paris and traveled through France and Germany.  Whenever he passed through Paris, he called on Joyce.  Once or twice, Joyce, whose sight had been failing for a long time, dictated passages from Finnegan’s Wake to Beckett.

In the late 1940s, he began writing in French, partly in rejection of his homeland.  Asked why he found Ireland uncongenial, he offered the same explanation as fellow Irish expatriates Sean O’Casey and Joyce: he couldn’t tolerate the many restrictive aspects of Irish life, especially the arbitrary censorship of the Catholic clergy and anti-intellectual cultural bias.  In 1958, during the International Theatre Festival in Dublin, a play of his compatriot O’Casey was banned, and Beckett, in protest, withdrew his own plays, none of which were seen in Ireland until many years later.

During the 1960s, Beckett became an influential figure in all dramatic media.  In British television studios; in the streets of New York where his Film (1965) starring Buster Keaton was shot; in the legitimate theater in which he worked firmly but easily with directors and actors, many of whom regard him as a genius.  At the end of his career, he served as his own producer.

When not in rehearsal, he divided his time between his Paris house and a country cottage bought with the proceeds from Godot.  He gave few interviews, was rarely photographed, and indeed, after winning the Nobel Prize in 1969, gave away all the prize money and went into complete seclusion for several months.  News from his friends, however, indicated that the great bi-lingual artist was exploring a new world of imagination, using innovative forms, which his English publisher John Calder, described in 1970 as “more painterly than literary.”

In the 1970s, partly because of failing eyesight and recurring ill health, Beckett wrote little; most works published were collected short pieces written years earlier.  Major honors, however, were accorded him during the decade: he was elected to the German Academy of Art in 1973 and the Royal Court company produced a two-part Beckett Festival to honor his 70th birthday in 1976.  A number of small works, including several short plays, were published and produced around the world.  In 1983, three new short plays opened in New York under the title “The Beckett Plays,” and ran 10 months on Theater Row.  In 1984, Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdána (literally, the “wise man” of the “people of the arts”), the highest honor of the Irish national artists’ association.

Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson’s disease, Beckett died on 22 December 1989. He was interred with his wife Suzanne, who had predeceased the playwright by just five months, in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris where they share a simple granite gravestone.  He wrote his last work, the poem “What is the Word” (“Comment dire”), dedicated to Joe Chaikin, at the nursing home in 1988.  His writings still influence current novelists, poets, and playwrights, and his plays, which arguably introduced world audiences to what Martin Esslin came to call the Theater of the Absurd, continue to be a significant influence on dramatists, actors, and directors today

En attendant Godot was composed between 1947 and 1949 when Beckett was experiencing the first of two sustained creative bursts.  The French version was published in 1952 and opened in Paris on 5 January 1953, for a run of more than 300 performances.  It was directed by Roger Blin, who also played Pozzo, with Lucien Raimbourg as Vladimir, Pierre Latour as Estragon, Jean Martin as Lucky, and Serge Lacointe as the Boy.  The English version, which Beckett didn’t so much translate from the French as write again in English, was published in New York in 1954, débuted in London the following year with a cast of Paul Daneman as Vladimir, Peter Woodthorpe as Estragon, Timothy Bateson as Lucky, Peter Bull as Pozzo, and Michael Walker as the Boy, under the direction of Peter Hall.  The Irish première at the Pike Theatre in Beckett’s native Dublin, directed by Alan Simpson, was on 28 October 1955.  The play had its American première under the direction of Alan Schneider at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida, on 3 January 1956, with Bert Lahr as Gogo, Tom Ewell as Didi, J. Scott Smart as Pozzo, Arthur Mallet as Lucky, and Jimmy Oster as the Boy.  It bombed.  Lahr played Gogo again when the show moved to New York on 19 April under the new director, Herbert Berghof, with E. G. Marshall as Didi, Kurt Kasznar as Pozzo, Alvin Epstein as Lucky, and Luchino Solito de Solis as the Boy—all of whom repeated their roles for the Columbia Masterworks recording produced the same year.  Since then the play has been performed in over twenty tongues—in such scattered parts of the world as Japan, Sweden, Yugoslavia—and in all types of theaters, including on campus, in summer stock, in “little theaters,” and in prisons. 

Almost every opening night of Godot has been marked by extreme reactions.  The Paris production was hailed by many critics as a major dramatic breakthrough.  No less a literary figure than Jean Anouilh declared in Arts-Spectacle on 27 January 1953:

Godot is a masterpiece that will cause despair for men in general and playwrights in particular.  I think the opening night at the Théâtre de Babylone is as important as the opening of Pirandello in Paris in 1923 . . . .

At San Quentin Prison, on 19 November 1957, the inmates responded as never before to a theatrical piece.  The anonymous reviewer for the San Quentin News described this scene:

The trio of muscle-men, biceps overflowing . . . parked all 642 lbs. on the aisle and waited for the girls and funny stuff.  When this didn’t appear they audibly fumed and audibly decided to wait until the house lights dimmed before escaping.  They made one error.  They listened and looked two minutes too long—and stayed.  Left at the end.  All shook . . . .

But in Miami, a large segment of the audience left in disgust before the curtain rose for act two.  As director Alan Schneider put it in the 1958 Chelsea Review two years after it closed:

Doing Godot in Miami was, as Bert Lahr [the original Gogo] himself said, like doing Giselle in Roseland.  Even though Bert and Tommy [Ewell, who played Didi in Miami] each contributed brilliantly comic and extremely touching performances, . . . it was—in the words of the trade—a spectacular flop.  The opening night audience in Miami, at best not too sophisticated or attuned to this type of material and at worst totally misled by advertising billing the play as “the laugh sensation of two continents,” walked out in droves.  And the so-called reviewers not only could not make heads or tails of the play but accused us of pulling some sort of hoax on them.

And in London, Peter Bull, who played Pozzo in the original British production in 1955, witnessed a similar occurrence: in his memoirs, I Know the Face, But . . . (P. Davies [1959]), he wrote:

I have a habit of comforting myself on first nights by trying to think of appalling experiences during the war, when terror struck from all sides, but the windiness felt on the Italian beachheads . . . was nothing to compare with one’s panic on that evening of August 3, 1955 . . . .  Waves of hostility came whirling over the footlights, and the mass exodus . . . started quite soon after the curtain had risen.  The audible groans were also fairly disconcerting.

En attendant Godot was first performed in the small auditorium of the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953.  Typical of the enthusiastic response—and most prophetic of all—was the opinion of Sylvain Zegel, who wrote in La Libération:

Theater-lovers rarely have the pleasure of discovering a new author worthy of the name; an author who can give his dialogue true poetic force, who can animate his characters so vividly that the audience identifies with them; who, having meditated, does not amuse himself with mere word juggling; who deserves comparison with the greatest . . . .  In my opinion Samuel Beckett’s first play Waiting for Godot, at the Théâtre de Babylone, will be spoken of for a long time.

English-speaking audiences, which hadn’t seen as much avant-garde drama as had the Parisians (who’d already seen premières of Jean Genet’s The Maids in 1947 and Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, 1950, The Lesson, 1951, and The Chairs, 1952), reacted with mixed feelings.  Harold Hobson concluded his review in the London Times by saying: “Go and see Waiting for Godot.  At the worst you will discover a curiosity, a four-leaved clover, a black tulip; at the best something that will surely lodge in a corner of your mind for as long as you live.”  In The Observer, Kenneth Tynan, Hobson’s fellow doyen of London criticism, asserted, “It is vividly new, and hence I declare myself, as the Spanish would say, Godotista.”  But the American critic Marya Mannes, wrote acidly in The Reporter about the same London production:

The play concerns two tramps who inform each other and the audience at the outset that they smell.  It takes place in what appears to be the town dump, with a blasted tree rising out of a welter of rusting junk including plumbing parts.  They talk gibberish to each other and to two ‘symbolic’ maniacs for several hours, their dialogue punctuated every few minutes by such remarks as ‘What are we waiting for?’ ‘Nothing is happening,’ and ‘Let’s hang ourselves.’  The last was a good suggestion, unhappily discarded.

And surveying the London theater in 1957 for Sewanee Review, Bonamy Dobrée said flatly about Godot that

it is time to affirm that anything that can be called art must ultimately be in praise of life, or must at least promote acceptance of life, thus indicating some values.

Dobrée thus epitomized the widely-accepted view of the time that Beckett’s work, because of its “nihilism,” could not “be called art.” 

The New York production of 1956 garnered a mixture of critical response.  In the Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr wrote on 29 April 1956 that “Mr. Lahr has . . . been in touch with what goes on in the minds and hearts of the folk out front.  I wish that Mr. Beckett were as intimately in touch with the texture of things.”  In the New Republic on 14 May 1956, Eric Bentley dubbed the play “like all modern plays . . . undramatic but highly theatrical.”  He declared that “what has brought the play before audiences in so many countries—aside from snobberies and phony publicity—is its theatricality.”  (Eleven years later, Bentley revised his estimation upwards.)  On the other hand, for the New Yorker, Kenneth Tynan, already on record in London as praising the play, described the audience reaction: “And when the curtain fell, the house stood up to cheer a man [Bert Lahr] who had never before appeared in a legitimate play . . . .  Without him, the Broadway production . . . would be admirable; with him, it is transfigured.”  And the dean of New York critics, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times on 20 April 1956, calling the play “a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” wrote:

Although “Waiting for Godot” is a “puzzlement,” as the King of Siam would express it, Mr. Beckett is no charlatan.  He has strong feelings about the denigration of mankind, and he has given vent to them copiously.  “Waiting for Godot” is all feeling.  Perhaps that is why it is puzzling and convincing at the same time.  Theatregoers can rail at it, but they cannot ignore it.  For Mr. Beckett is a valid writer.

Even as late as 1988, when New York’s Lincoln Center Theatre produced Godot, than which the New York Times’ Frank Rich asserted “no play could be more elemental in either form or content” and which “began remaking the world’s theater” when it first appeared on stage, playwright Robert Patrick demeaned Beckett as “a pleasantly lugubrious, collegiate skit writer” and Waiting for Godot as “trash and trivia” and a “mediocrity” which ought to be “placed among the space junk.”  (Patrick’s remarks are the subject of my blog post “Is Waiting for Godot Trash?,” mentioned earlier.) 

Regardless of the direction of the response—for or against—no one seemed to be able to leave it alone.  It stirred something in all audiences—be it anger or praise, but it stirred.  Somehow that seems appropriately Beckettian—and, as the French say, godotesque.

In more recent years, the play, still controversial, has continued to be produced all over the world.  In 1984, Israeli director Ilan Ronen and the Haifa Municipal Theatre presented a bi-lingual production of Godot in Hebrew and Arabic (with Arab actors as Didi and Gogo and Jewish actors as Lucky and Pozzo).  British director Sean Mathias directed Ian McKellen as Gogo and Patrick Stewart as Didi as his first production as artistic director of the Theatre Royal Haymarket Company. Dubbed the X-Men Godot (because both stars had appeared in that 2000 film and some of its sequels), it toured the U.K. prior to opening in London on 30 April 2009.  Sydney Theatre staged Godot in November 2013 directed by Andrew Upton, husband of actress Cate Blanchett.

In New York, Berghof staged a 6-performance Broadway return of Godot in 1957 at the Ethyl Barrymore Theatre with an entirely new cast.  In 2009, the Roundabout Theatre Company staged a revival at Studio 54, a former club that the Off-Broadway company converted into a Broadway house, directed by Anthony Page with a cast of John Glover (Lucky), John Goodman (Pozzo), Bill Irwin (Vladimir), Nathan Lane (Estragon), and Matthew Schechter (Boy); it ran 84 performances.  A new production staged by Mathias was mounted at Broadway’s Cort Theatre in 2013-14 in which McKellen and Stewart reprised their West End roles and Billy Crudup played Lucky, Shuler Hensley played Pozzo, and Colin Critchley and Aidan Gemme alternated as the Boy for a run of 77 performances in rep with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. 

Off-Broadway, Schneider, the director of the ill-fated Miami première of Godot, staged a revival at Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square Playhouse in 1971 that ran for 277 performances.  In 1981, Schneider again directed the play, a three-performance presentation with the Acting Company at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Newman Theater in the East Village.  Mike Nichols, former stand-up comedian turned renowned film and stage director, mounted a much-publicized staging of the play at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in1988 for a run of 56 performances; it starred Robin Williams as Gogo; Steve Martin as Didi; F. Murray Abraham as Pozzo; Bill Irwin, in what I believe was his first dramatic stage role (he would later play Didi on Broadway), as Lucky; and Lucas Haas as the Boy.  In 2005-06, Alan Hruska  directed a production at the Theater at St. Clement’s Church in the Theatre District.  The Classical Theatre of Harlem produced an all-African American revival of Godot in 2006, directed by Christopher McElroen, the founder and then-artistic director of CTH.  In 2014, the New Yiddish Rep presented a revival of Godot performed in Yiddish with English supertitles under the direction of Moshe Yassur at the Barrow Street Theatre in the Village.

The BBC having aired the play on radio on 25 April 1960, NTA Film Network, a part-time network in the United States, broadcast a TV version on 3 April 1961 directed by Alan Schneider from his Miami production script.  The stars of the telecast, also shown in the U.K., were Zero Mostel as Gogo, Burgess Meredith as Didi and Luke Halpin as the Boy, with Kasznar and Epstein repeating their Broadway stage roles.  Becket pronounced himself displeased with the television staging, principally because of the confinement of the small screen.  On 29 June 1977, a TV version of the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre production of Waiting for Godot for Theater in America was broadcast on KCET, the Public Broadcasting System’s station in Los Angeles, with a cast of Dana Elcar as Vladimir, Donald Moffat as Estragon, Ralph Waite as Pozzo, Bruce French as Lucky, and Todd Lookinland as the Boy, directed by Charles S. Dubin and Gwen Arner.  In 2001, British director Michael Lindsay-Hogg made a film version—despite Beckett’s own admonition in 1967 that he did not “want any film of Godot.”  The playwright had insisted, “An adaptation would destroy it.”  (The film may never have been released in the U.S.)

The famous quip about Godot is that it’s “a play in which nothing happens, twice.”  I beg to differ, but . . . to each his own.  (I’ll just quote one of Beckett’s philosophical influences, Heraclitus of Ephesus: “Many people learn nothing from what they see and experience, nor do they understand what they hear explained, but imagine that they have.”)  In act one, Vladimir and Estragon, two music hall clowns or tramps (Beckett preferred the former but many productions go with the latter), are alone near a bare, roadside tree, where they meet daily to wait for Godot (which, in Anglo-Irish is pronounced GOD-OH, with both syllables stressed, not g’d-OH, as we Americans usually say).  Estragon struggles to get his stuck boot off his sore foot; Vladimir fusses with his hat.  Gogo (as his partner in waiting calls him) naps but can’t recount his dream because Didi (Gogo’s common name for his companion) won’t listen.  They discuss separation (but make up), suicide (but defer it), vegetables, religion, Didi’s urinary troubles, and Godot.  As Didi and Gogo sit in resignation, a loud cry terrifies them.  

Passing through are Pozzo and his servant Lucky on a leash, carrying Pozzo’s possessions.  Pozzo, who owns the surrounding terrain, introduces himself and has a meal of chicken and wine.  Gogo begs the bones.  Pozzo smokes his pipe, speaks of time, discusses selling Lucky, who weeps at this but rewards Gogo’s offer of a handkerchief with a kick.  On command of Gogo, Lucky “dances”; on command of Didi, he “thinks” (in the most astounding monologue ever staged).  Pozzo and Lucky resume their journey and Didi’s glad the incident helped pass the time while they waited.  (The French title, En attendant Godot, actually means “while waiting for Godot.”  The play is about what happens—what Didi and Gogo do—while waiting for Godot.)  The two wonder again what to do—besides wait for Godot.  They decide to make conversation about whether they’d previously known Pozzo and Lucky; no agreement is reached.  Gogo returns to tending his feet.  Out of nowhere, a goatherd arrives with a message: “Mr. Godot . . . won’t come this evening, but surely tomorrow.”  Didi questions him about his brother, a shepherd, and Mr. Godot.  The boy leaves.  Night falls.  Gogo sets his boots on the road for some passerby.  Agreeing to leave, the two stand still.

In act two, it’s the next day and Vladimir and Estragon are alone again.  The two begin waiting again with games, calisthenics, and philosophical talk.  Didi finds and wears Lucky’s hat; Gogo finds boots apparently left in exchange for his.  Pozzo, now blind, and Lucky, now mute, return and collapse in a heap.  Didi and Gogo deliberate over whether to help; they fall, too, but finally help Pozzo up.  Pozzo, disparaging clock-time, goads Lucky into traveling.  Gogo’d been napping again, but Didi won’t let him recount his dream.  Didi soliloquizes on his predicament.  A boy, this time the shepherd brother, brings the same message.  Didi questions him about Godot but frightens the boy, who runs off.  Night falls.  Didi and Gogo decide to hang themselves with the cord from Gogo’s pants.  The cord breaks, and Gogo’s trousers fall down.  The two decide to return tomorrow.  Agreeing to leave, they stand still.

Waiting for Godot, which runs two hours and twenty minutes with one intermission in GSLI’s mounting, is such a philosophical and metaphysical (not to forget religious) mélange, as well as a language puzzle, that writing out an interpretation is a book’s worth (even many books’ worth) endeavor, and I’m going to skip it.  As I said, it’s rationale is looking at what Vladimir and Estragon do while waiting for the mysterious Godot.  (Beckett didn’t write or often even talk about any of his work, and he refused to say what or whom Godot represented, so it’s up to each of us to decide—sometimes at each viewing or reading.)  I discovered on reading the French version, which Beckett wrote first and then rewrote into English, that some material was not rendered into English—largely because censorship in England was strict.  Not until the end of 1964 did an unabridged version of the script get a British staging—and reading the first version reveals a lot that’s not clearly spelled out (even for Godot) in the standard English script.  Over the years, I’ve done some reading and research on the play (there are four 2009 posts on ROT on Godot-related topics:  “History of Waiting For Godot,” 30 March; “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 April; “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 3 April; “Is Waiting for Godot Trash?,” 17 April) and based on that work, I do have a few pithy ideas.  First, the spine of the play (in Harold Clurman’s sense of the term) is “To find salvation”—which usually becomes “to survive; to get through the day,” or, to use Vladimir’s words, “to keep the ball in play.”  (Some theater people call this the play’s “action”; it means the same thing.)

Second, the theme of Godot is universal helplessness and uncertainty.  Beckett’s key word is “perhaps”; he deals not with knowledge and strength, but ignorance and, therefore, impotence.  Beckett believed the first spoken words should introduce the play’s theme: “Nothing to be done”—that is, we have no control over what happens.  It’s important to note that “helplessness”—the inability to have an effect on events—is not hopelessness.  Lack of control is not synonymous in Godot with doom—there is always the possibility of hope.  We just can’t be sure.  One of Beckett’s favorite statements is from St. Augustine: “Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.”  Beckett liked it for the symmetry of its form; but it also balances hope with despair in equal measure—and Vladimir even sees this dichotomy in Godot.

The metaphor of the play, its central situation—the uncertain and endless waiting—is analogous to waiting for a bus at night on a strange route without watch or timetable.  You may be at the right spot for the bus to stop—or you may not; the last bus may have already passed—or you may be on time.  If you wait, and the bus hasn’t gone by, and you’re in the right place, you’ll catch your bus and be on your way (that is, “saved”).  If the bus has passed, or you’re in the wrong place, you’ll wait all night to no avail and jeopardize your chances of catching another somewhere else or finding a taxi.  But if you leave to find another spot, the bus may come at any moment and leave without you.  Your complete ignorance of the essential facts—time, bus route, schedule—makes you impotent to take any specific action.

Judy Hegarty Lovett is obviously well-versed in the ways and means of Beckettian theater, having staged nearly all of GSLI’s productions.  Another of the dramatist’s philosophical influences was William of Occam, and Lovett certainly knows his Law of Parsimony, commonly called “Occam’s Razor” because it cuts to the bone.  That’s how Lovett approached her staging concept of Waiting for Godot, simple, straightforward and unadorned with irrelevancies.  The setting Ferdia Murphy (who also designed the simple costumes) gave her and the very performances themselves are manifestations of this notion.  It contains everything the performers and the spectators need, and not a jot more—not a frill or furbelow.  Lovett’s production of Waiting for Godot is the theatrical equivalent of a minimalist painting—but fraught with content.  Not to mention whimsy.  Godot may have been oversold as “the laugh sensation of two continents,” but the play, which is labeled a tragi-comedy, is funny and Lovett lets it show.

This raises a point relative to Murphy’s costumes, which are a take on the most common scheme for Godot.  According to Beckett’s original choice, Didi and Gogo are baggy-pants clowns, not tramps.  The playwright was very enamored of music hall (vaudeville) and burlesque forms and made frequent use of “low comedy” techniques, routines, and lazzi in Godot, along with his other works.  (Roger Blin, the director of the French première, at first intended to set the play in a circus.)  The ideal image is Emmet Kelley, aka Weary Willy; Beckett was also taken with the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton (who starred in Film).  In Ms. Lovett’s cast, Conor Lovett’s Vladimir and Gary Lydon’s Estragon together on stage give the visual impression of Laurel and Hardy.  Murphy holds with this baggy-pants imagery. clothing the four adult men in variations of Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Chap” get-up.  (The bowler hats play a significant role in one recognizable vaudeville routine in which Vladimir and Estragon engage.  The hank of rope that serves as Gogo’s belt is also an important comedy prop.) 

Murphy’s scenic design is essentially circular, like the play’s structure.  In the center of the Skirball’s proscenium stage is a tilted disk of a playing area, devoid of any enhancements or décor except the famous bare tree, which here overhangs the platform at stage left (Peter Hall, for the London début, made the setting a junk yard).  This is a depiction of Beckett’s vision of emptiness of life and the unlocalized setting demonstrates that life is the same the world over, that no place is special.  Murphy has given Gogo an open trap stage right so he can sit on the platform and dangle his feel in the hole.  (The hole has no further use—no one pops out of it or drops down into it.  It’s sort of a small sink hole in the landscape.)  All entrances and exits are made through the black, upstage legs either from the right or from the left.  The set’s backdrop is a screen on which is projected images which establish the time of day, sunshine for day and a huge, white, full moon for night.  (Since there’s no program credit for the projections, I assume they are the work of lighting designer Sinead McKenna.)  It’s as plain as plain can be, the production’s most visible application of “Occam’s Razor,” which, according to Beckett, is intended to keep the situation uncluttered with irrelevancies, in which the human mind often seeks refuge in its flight from the truth.  McKenna’s lighting, too, follows this principal, simply lighting the playing area, brightly during the daytime and darkening into evening and then night (after the Boy announces that Godot won’t come).  Bravo!

The performances, once again, fall solidly and happily, into the ensemble category.  I think all productions of Waiting for Godot (and probably all of Beckett’s plays) need to work like little clocks, each part driving and driven by all the others.  (I wonder how that worked out with the various star-studded productions with all those powerful personalities coming together.  I imagine the rehearsals were either hilarious and stimulating or annoying and frustrating.)  In any case, Gare St Lazare Ireland put a marvelous two- and four-hand partnership on stage at the Skirball (the Boy’s two scenes being almost separate set pieces, though 10-year-old William Keppler-Robinson did a fine job), operating like a small, absurd machine.  Lydon’s Estragon is, appropriately, the more physically oriented of the central pair; he responds to life almost instinctively and accepts himself and the world readily, even his regular beatings.  Conor Lovett’s Vladimir is the spiritual and intellectual (and verbal) half of the pair, more concerned with emotions, compassion (for Lucky, for example), and philosophy (the fate of the two crucified thieves).  He’s more the leader, as the name Vladimir, a saint’s name that means “ruler of the world” in Russian, implies and is focused on his duty and responsibility to Estragon (French for tarragon, a spice used in making pickles and vinegar) and, especially, Godot. 

Dominic J. Moore’s Pozzo is the personification of Raw Power and acts like the nouveau riche at its most arrogant.  He believes ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,’ and it’s important to know Pozzo.  Moore shows how important it is to Pozzo that he be top man.  Marcus Lamb’s Lucky, permanently stooped from carrying his constant burden—not just Pozzo’s literal possessions (which he can put down) but, metaphorically, also Pozzo and his whole world (which he can’t)—seems more animal than human.  Altogether, the work was stunning.

I’m disappointed to report that one lone blog review of the terrific New York performance of this modern classic was published (at least that’s all that I could find on line).  Several notices appeared during the 2013 Boston production, but in the world’s greatest theater town, a solitary word.  Shameful. 

I won’t quote any of the notices for the out-of-town performances (there are quite a few from Ireland) because the casts weren’t the same as the one that appeared at the NYU Skirball Center.  The single local review I found must have come on line just a day or so before I finished this report (it’s undated) because it wasn’t there all the while I was writing this—I kept checking.  On Theater Scene, Deirdre Donovan, pronouncing GSLI’s Waiting for Godot “something special,” opened her review saying, “Samuel Beckett’s great classic Waiting for Godot . . . seldom gets staged with such clockwork precision that it takes your breath away.”  Her one demurral was that “its one real drawback was that it left New York too soon.”  Warning that “Beckett didn’t create [Godot] to have you bask in the glow of its syrupy-sweet sentimentality,” Donovan asserted “the bleak poetry that plays out in this landmark work is unparalleled—and unforgettable.”  Declaring, “The Gare St. Lazare Ireland production was first-rate,” the cyber reviewer reported, “Its acting . . . was a real ensemble effort with no slouches.”  Judy Hegarty Lovett staged “each scene with razor-sharp clarity and kept the pace whip-fast.”  Donovan complimented GSLI’s “bent toward delivering prose with a fierce lyricism” and observed, “They took Beckett’s spare poetry and made it sing with a lilt.”  Her final remark was: “Indeed, this Waiting for Godot was funny, sad, and just as good as it gets.”

If you’re only going to get one review, this one’s a good ’un.  I’ll take it.

'Not by Bread Alone'

Readers of ROT will know that on 23 January, I published a post called “Dispatches from Israel” by my friend Helen Kaye.  It included Helen’s 2008 review of Not by Bread Alone, an extraordinary performance by the Nalagaat Deaf-Blind Theater Ensemble of Tel Aviv.  “I was very moved when I saw it,” Helen wrote when she sent me the review, recommending very strongly that I see the performance that was coming to New York City.  As it happened, the company was performing its U.S. début at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University just off of Washington Square South, a few blocks south of my home.  So, on Tuesday evening, 29 January, I walked down to catch the 8 p.m. show.  (The performance schedule was very erratic, with shows at different times on different dates and the production was dark not only on Mondays, the traditional day off for theaters, but also on Fridays.) 

Nalagaat (the name means “Please Do Touch” in Hebrew) began work on Not by Bread Alone, the troupe’s second production, in 2005 and it took two years to gestate.  It premièred in 2007 and toured to London in July 2010 (among other places) before coming here this year.  It was the first work of the ensemble at its new home, the Nalagaat Center in Jaffa, the oldest part of Tel Aviv.  The troupe began almost accidentally in 1999 when Zurich-born stage director Adina Tal was approached by a social club for deaf-blind people to conduct a two-month theater workshop.  She’d been asked to lead programs for disabled people before, Tal explained, but, she confessed, “It didn’t interest me, though I thought it was nice that others did it.”  But Tal, who had no previous experience with this kind of work and has characterized herself as having “little patience and even less sense of pity,” agreed this time.  Her intention was to run a general drama workshop, but she was enthralled by the enthusiasm of the group and, particularly, the challenge to find a new way to communicate, especially with a large audience rather than one on one.  The director wasn’t interested in doing standard works like Shakespeare plays with deaf-blind actors and when one participant said he wanted to do a play by Maxim Gorky, Tal responded, “You are deaf-blind and non-verbal.  How are you going to do Gorky?”  (Most of the actors suffer from Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes hearing impairment and deafness often at birth.  During adolescence or later, retinitis pigmentosa develops, resulting in gradual vision loss and ultimately complete blindness.  Only one of the 11 company members was born blind and later became deaf as a consequence of meningitis.)  Tal told the group, “Other people can do Gorky better than us.  But what they can’t do is what we can do. The strength of Nalaga’at is in being us.  That’s what we do really well.”  So after a year of work on rhythm, improvisations, body movement, and touch-sign language until the performers learned to pantomime their feelings and dreams, the troupe’s first production, Light is Heard in Zig Zag, was born.  About the actors’ “heart-wishes,” Zig Zag premièred in 2003.  (Highly regarded, the production went on to play before the Knesset in Jerusalem; in Toronto and Montreal, Canada; and at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva.)  Nalagaat, the only group of its kind in Israel and perhaps the whole world, was officially launched by Tal, who became the president and artistic director, in 2002 and moved into its own home in Tel Aviv’s ancient port district five years later. 

Not by Bread Alone, also directed by Tal, explores “the districts of their inner world; the world of darkness, silence” as the 11 ensemble members make fresh bread.  “Welcome to our darkness and silence,” says one Nalagaat actor. “We invite you to share our everyday lives together.”  Over 80-minutes and ten scenes (many accompanied by music of guitar and accordion, composed by Amnon Baaham and Zvi Tal), the cast shares the individual memories, experiences, aspirations, and fantasies of the actors while the loaves bake in the ovens on stage behind them.  (The aroma of the baking bread is an ever-increasing presence.  Bread Alone is the only stage piece I can remember ever having seen in which the sense of smell forms such a real part of the performance experience.)  The 11 bakers tell us who they are with bits of their autobiographies. As each actor introduces him- or herself to us, telling us where they were born, when they lost their hearing and sight, what they like to do, when they came to Israel, each one takes off the blank, featureless white mask they all wear.  Each actor thus transforms from an anonymous, faceless being—the way I imagine they feel they’re regarded by the hearing-and-seeing world—into an individual with not just a face, but an expressive visage.  Just like you and me.  Later, each performer tells us whom they’d like to share part of their bread with (a pregnant woman, an abused child, soldiers in the army, horses, birds) and what they think life is all about.  Nalagaat’s most successful production so far, Not by Bread Alone ran at the Skirball from 16 January to 3 February.  (Following Bread, the troupe has staged a children’s show, Prince Rooster, and launched a new multi-cultural ensemble of deaf-blind Jews, Muslims, and Samaritans that premièred Luna Park in 2012 after four years of work.)

NYU’s Skirball Center on LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village was funded in part by the Skirball Foundation ($2 million of the approximately $40 million total cost) and named for Jack H. Skirball (1896-1985), a rabbi who became a Hollywood producer (Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 Shadow of a Doubt) as well as the producer of S. N. Behrman’s Jacobowsky and the Colonel on Broadway (1944-45).  The 860-seat performing arts center, opened in 2003, is part of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life, the NYU student center on Washington Square South.  The largest theater in New York City south of 42nd Street, the Skirball didn’t exist when I was a student at NYU (the Kimmel Center replaced the Loeb Student Center which was demolished in 1999) and I’d never been there until this experience.

With only one notable exception that I saw, everyone with an opinion has embraced this performance.  I’ll confirm that Bread Alone was a remarkable and astonishing experience, both humanly and theatrically, but I can’t help feeling that some of the enthusiasm from the professional commentators (that is, reviewers) was considerably influenced by what the performance was and who the performers are and the feeling that they were supposed to appreciate and laud the event.  There’s a proverb, supposedly Russian (which is appropriate since so many of the Nalagaat ensemble are Soviet-born), that says: “The wonderful thing about a dancing bear isn’t how well it dances, but that it dances at all.”  I mean no disrespect by a dubious comparison—the Nalagaat performers are not dancing bears—but I wonder if there isn’t an element of that mindset operating here.  Bread Alone was both interesting and, as Helen said, moving, there's no doubt of that.  But it's such a personal piece—to a degree that's not common in mainstream theater—it may approach an encounter session.  I don’t think it’s a play in the ordinary sense of that term, so if I address it like The Piano Lesson or Harper Regan, this report would be misleading and incomplete.  At the same time, it wasn't exactly The Famous People Players, either.  I probably won’t know what I feel about the performance until I've actually written it—to paraphrase Gracie Allen.

Nonetheless, I won’t take the kind of stance that Adam Feldman, that one outlier, took in Time Out New York.  Feldman savaged the production, thoroughly though briefly, declaring, “That it exists at all is remarkable”—echoing the very Russian proverb I quoted.  “Not by Bread Alone means to explore its subjects’ dreams and memories,” the reviewer continued, “as well as their overwhelming isolation, frustration and loneliness—to shine light on their darkness, and give voice to their silence.”  But the performance, “alas, is a mitzvah gone wrong,” resulting in “a maudlin mash-up of The Miracle Worker and Weekend at Bernie’s.”  (A mitzvah, for non-New Yorkers and others benighted in the quirks of Yiddish and Hebrew, can mean an act of kindness, a good deed.  I won’t comment on Feldman’s invocation of Weekend at Bernie’s, a 1989 juvenile farce I’ve never seen, but from what I know of it, the comparison strikes me as unnecessarily cruel.)

While it seems to me that the positive reviewers were influenced more by the sociological impact of Bread than by its artistic merits, I feel that Feldman was responding to a misreading of the performance.  When he wrote, for instance, that the performers “enact a series of hackneyed, awkward vignettes,” he seems to have forgotten that he just pointed out that the ensemble is revealing the members’ “dreams and memories,” which they’re exposing as basically the same as everyone else’s.  Tal’s intent was to show the audience that what the Nalagaat actors want from life, what they imagine and fantasize about, are the same things for which we all yearn.  Perhaps Tal could have selected more dramatic examples of those dreams—I assume the material was all drawn from what the company members told her during the development period—but the less common the memories and reveries are, the less forcefully the point of Bread is made.  I don’t know anything about Tal’s pre-Nalagaat stage work, so I don’t know if she leans toward the sentimental and clichéd habitually, but it’s certainly not the fault of the actors that they dream about the same things the rest of us do.  (One of Feldman’s complaints was that in a scene about a trip to Italy, the characters are all costumed “cartoonishly,” and that’s almost certainly Tal’s choice.  I have no idea what the Italians imagined by the Nalagaat players would look like, since most of the actors will have lost their sight years ago, but the company members surely wouldn’t have much inkling what the costumes they were wearing, credited to Dafna Grossman, look like.)  Bread has two main points, one of which, as already noted, is to show the audience what the deaf-blind long for and that those dreams are much like ours.  (The other point, which I’ll get to momentarily, is to let us in a little on what their darkness and silence is like.)  Of course acting them out will seem familiar.  We’ve all seen the same scenes before—in our own dreams and fantasies.

So, where do I focus when I try to describe and assess this performance?  Do I stress the ensemble’s intent, its heart?  Or do I emphasize its aesthetics and skill, its artistry?  Adina Tal declares, “Nothing is impossible,” when she discusses Not by Bread Alone and Nalagaat, suggesting to me that her focus is on the message more than the aesthetics.  Remembering the Russian bear, she seems to want us to see that the players are simultaneously like us and different from us more than how well they reveal this truth from the stage.  If I’m right, then she and Nalagaat have succeeded marvelously, because the revelation was, indeed, touching, striking, and eye-opening.  The overall feeling emanating from the stage was “sweet.”  (Yes, and some of it was painful, too.  But even those memories were tenderly, even wistfully depicted.)  However clichéd the players’ vision of their trip to Italy is, it was imbued with happiness and affection; if that’s how the players see their Italian hosts, it flows from tenderness and pleasure, not meanness.  (As I suggested, however, I suspect Tal had a hand in the visual portrayal we saw, and she should know better.  Aside from her ability to see and hear, we should remember that though the director grew up in German Switzerland, the confederation’s official culture is a quarter Italian.) 

It wasn’t hard to accept that the deaf-blind players have dreams and fantasies much like ours in the seeing and hearing world—though it was remarkable how much of those musings was devoted to or derived from the senses of touch, smell, and taste.  It was also notable that many of the events depicted in the imaginings were the humblest human activities: going to a hairdresser, eating an ice-cream cone, swinging on a swing, slow-dancing.  One Nalagaat member found an immense feeling of gratification and freedom from just smoking a cigarette outside.  Even the fantasy wedding staged at the end of Bread expressed a basic human need: the desire for companionship.  I’m not sure if Tal selected such fundamental acts to reinforce the message that the deaf-blind think the same way the rest of us do, or if it’s evidence that they yearn for the simplest of human interactions because that’s what they miss.  (In several of the exchanges depicting the world of the deaf-blind, players stressed how much they depend on touch—shaking hands, having a stranger touch their hand or arm—just to know that someone else is there, that other people are real.  It is, indeed, how the deaf-blind communicate, by tactile signing, where the receiver reads the signs of the signer through movement and touch.  I believe the importance of physical contact is where the company’s name comes from.)  This is where I feel TONY’s Feldman missed an important point and read basicness as cliché.  The commonness of their visions isn’t a bad selection, a flawed theatrical choice—it’s the very point Tal and Nalagaat are trying to make. 

The second main message of Bread, as I noted, is to show us a little of what the eternally dark and silent world of the deaf-blind is like.  This is harder to do, of course, and possibly a more disturbing experience for us in the audience.  (In an adjunct to the show itself, Nalagaat transported versions of what they call their “immersive culinary offerings” from Tel Aviv to New York City.  Elsewhere in the Skirball Center, the company set up BlackOut and the Café Kapish.  In the first, diners, served their meals by blind waiters, ate in total darkness, guided by taste, smell, and touch; at the second eatery, guests engaged with the deaf and hearing-impaired staff by sign language only.)  While the dreams and fantasies were acted out, often in pantomime, the depiction of the real world in which the players live was principally accomplished by autobiographical narratives and anecdotes.  Many of the stories were from the players’ childhoods, frequently telling what it had been like when they first lost their sight (remembering that except for Itzik Hanuna, the man who was born blind and lost his hearing at 11, most Nalagaat members were deaf at birth and gradually lost their vision) or realized that they’d never know what a new-born nephew’s face looked like or no longer be able to read poems and stories as they’d loved to do before.  It’s not so difficult to grasp the notion that a deaf-blind woman has the same wishes and yearnings as you or I do; it might take a Nalagaat to make the point, but the idea’s not hard to conceive.  Conveying what it’s like to live in darkness and silence, to experience the world entirely through the remaining senses of smell and, especially, touch (taste is only occasionally suggested on stage—and I suspect it’s actually less effective as a gateway to experience than the other two senses) requires a leap of the imagination that was harder for me to make. 

One reason may be that while the dreams and aspirations can be acted out and portrayed visually and theatrically, the biographical anecdotes that illustrate the sensory deprivations are largely verbal and intellectual.  Ironically, the dream portrayals may have been commonplace and mundane, but the stories about the darkness and silence in which the players live were unique and personal.  Whether related directly by the actor, some of whom still have speech, or translated by the black-clad interpreters who functioned on stage much like Japanese stage assistants, the tales were moving and arresting—even as several contained humorous aspects despite the underlying anguish.  (One of the revelations of Bread was how good-humored and light-hearted the ensemble is.  A number of the ensemble members affirmed that what they liked most was to clown around or make people laugh.  What those of us outside their world might perceive as tragic, the players seemed to see as much more like red hair or left-handedness: a fact of their lives, though certainly more challenging.) 

This dichotomy brings me to an assessment of the stage work, the artistry of Not by Bread Alone.  First, I have to go back to the Russian bear—and I don’t mean this as a put-down in the least.  After a few minutes, one pervasive fact took over my perception: these actors can’t see or hear what’s going on on stage.  Not only that, but they couldn’t see or hear what they were doing during the development and rehearsal of Bread.  Several techniques were employed to overcome some of the obvious disadvantages of that fact, but I still kept wondering how Nalagaat managed to do what I was watching them do.  Some of the performers had sighted guides (the interpreters) to help them navigate the stage, but many didn’t.  No one carried a cane and though I know that blind people learn how to gauge distances in familiar places like their homes or workplaces, the Skirball stage is different from their home stage and any other space in which they’d worked.  How did they accomplish this so apparently fluidly and smoothly?  Since the actors can’t hear themselves (and never had heard not just their voices, but their intonations and other vocal variations), how did they manage to deliver lines (those who did) so expressively?  (To be honest, some of the performers were more affectless than others—though the least vocally expressive were usually the interpreters who, when they voiced an actor’s words, seemed deliberately not to convey emotional content, as if to avoid adding a layer of their own personal responses.)  In addition, the Nalagaat players couldn’t hear or see Adina Tal, either, as she had pointed out.  “Nobody could see me or hear me,” Tal explained. “I couldn’t imagine how we might begin to work together.  So we sat in a circle and squeezed hands and tapped knees and tried to find a way of communicating.”  They must have found one, because they communicated like gangbusters—straightforward, unmediated (to a great degree, not counting Tal’s input and the work of the interpreters), honest, and, often, blunt.  As Helen Kaye put it, “They were/are saying ‘Here we are. This is what we do. Take it or leave it, but don't pity us.’”  Well, I didn’t pity them—they seemed to be having too much fun—but I did marvel at their accomplishment.

 
Not by Bread Alone was very theatrical—some of the pantomime came very close to homages to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, yet the actors aren't likely to have ever seen them (or, really, to know if they looked like those actors since they can't see themselves).  One of Tal's remarks was that these performers have never seen Pacino or Brando act, so they can't imitate them (an asset in her assessment), so how could they imitate Chaplin and silent movies?  (Of course, all movies would be silent to the Nalagaat actors, but you know what I mean.  According to one reviewer, however, one of the actors especially adept at channeling the Little Tramp had been a fan of the silent film great before losing his sight.)  Furthermore, I found the blatant (but genuine) sentimentality a little off-putting.  I mean, a fantasy wedding for two deaf-blind middle-agers: could you just cry?  It ought to have been cloying, but wasn't.  It was, as I said earlier, sweet—but it was also immensely revealing. 

On the other hand, I contend that declaring “Here we are.  This is what we do” is precisely a description of something that's not a conventional play in the usual sense of the term.  There are no characters—the actors all appear as themselves, though they play “manipulated” versions of themselves—or unified plot.  If the actors appear as themselves, the performance is out of the mainstream of current theatrical practice.  Western theater still relies on the Stanislavsky paradigm, irrespective of the method by which it's reached, where the performer subsumes his or her persona in the character's.  Actors who appear as themselves, telling their own actual stories, are not giving standard performances; even performers like the late Spaulding Gray (that is, monologists) and Anna Deavere Smith are considered theatrically radical or avant-garde.  Bertolt Brecht demanded that his actors appear as themselves while demonstrating the behavior of the characters, a tactic sometimes called “schizoid acting,” but he was also a radical writer and director even by today's standards.  (I described schizoid acting briefly in my ROT report on Venus in Fur, 11 July 2011.  And, yes, I know the concept is misapplied; I didn’t coin the term.)  Further, a performance piece like Bread in which there's no unified plot is also non-traditional, more like a non-musical revue or collage, neither of which is a conventional play structure.  Whether or not any of that's dramatic is a hard question to answer—it depends on how you define ‘drama’—but I still say it’s not a play per se.

The decision to bake bread was both a practical and philosophical one.  First, director Tal wanted to give the actors a basic physical task to accomplish while they’re telling their stories.  Nalagaat experimented with making salads and other basic foods because Tal saw the preparation of food as a “binding experience” for the troupe.  But kneading and baking bread became the activity that brought the company together and connected them to the audience.  Bread is one of the most basic foods, existing in every culture from before history was recorded.  In Jewish tradition, visitors often bring bread as a gesture of friendship and at a Jewish table, along with wine, bread is specifically blessed (in a prayer repeated on stage when the loaves are removed from the ovens).  It symbolizes life in many cultures (“the staff of life”) and, as the players remind us, Jews are commanded to share 10% of our bread with others—as the Nalagaat members share their lives with us.  “Breaking bread” is a custom that demonstrates sharing and offers of friendship and peace (especially among strangers or former adversaries).  God provided manna from Heaven to sustain the Jews during the Exodus and after many Sabbath services, the rabbi invites the congregation to share a challah loaf before leaving the synagogue.  At the end of the performance, the company invited the spectators to come up on stage and partake of the freshly baked loaves and meet the actors.

Theatrically, the aroma of baking bread, one of the homeliest and most pleasing odors known to humans, connected the audience to the performance and, thence, the performers.  (When I was in second or third grade and we were studying food and nutrition, one of our field trips was to a commercial bakery.  Even after nearly 60 years, I still vividly remember the smell of the fresh-baked bread we got to taste after the bakery tour.)  The process also served as Bread’s hourglass: the performance started when the 11 bakers, standing behind long tables dressed in white aprons and wearing tall, white chefs’ toques, began kneading the dough and ended when the finished loaves were brought out of the oven; when the smell began to fill the theater, we knew that Bread was coming to a close.  The separate vignettes give Bread the structure of an old-time TV variety show (think Sid Caesar or Carol Burnett), but the bread-baking corrals them into a single theater event—the string for the beads, so to speak.  Further, as one of the players explained: “While the bread is in the oven, thoughts appear.”  It was a perfect symbolic and practical vehicle for this show.

I have no substantive comments on Tal’s direction, aside from reservations I’ve already expressed about some of her choices.  She conceived and staged a successful and communicative presentation in Bread Alone and clearly drew effective performances from the troupe.  She overcame many impediments, most visibly with the employment of the interpreters who translated not only the performers’ sign language but also sometimes their Hebrew.  (The production used English supertitles for the Hebrew dialogue.)  When the interpreters weren’t aiding an actor, she or he might get assistance from a castmate.  (Both instances were practical examples of how much the deaf-blind rely on the touch of another person.)  The staging used drumbeats to signal the ends of scenes because, though the actors can’t hear the sound, they can feel the drum’s vibrations.  Tal’s job was to get the point of Bread Alone across to a sighted and hearing audience, to show us what she and her troupe wanted us to see, and that she accomplished without question.  If there were cleverer or less stereotypical ways to do it, it might have been a more theatrically exciting show, but it also might not have made the point as emphatically.  I suspect Tal would have rejected the trade-off.

As for the acting, I have to equivocate some.  Though the company has been learning the craft for a number of years now, the Nalagaat players aren’t trained professionals.  (I’m not dismissing their commitment, which is clear.)  It should go without saying that this company had many obstacles with which to contend—learning how to communicate to a mass audience with no tradition on which to rely is just one—so as actors, the players had a burden unlike that faced by any other troupe, professional or amateur.  That they came up with successful solutions at all—remember that Tal, too, had nothing on which to fall back—is truly remarkable.  As for their acting skill, however, I’m still astonished by the resemblance some of their turns came to Chaplin-esque silent-movie pantomime, the timing the whole company displayed, and the joy the actors all exuded as they told us what they dream and how they live.  (Several of the Nalagaat players are excellent physical comics, though how they learned to do it is a mystery to me.)  In one scene, the cast did a Busby Berkeley-esque routine with coordinated twirling parasols!  If theater is communication, then this was top-notch theater, even if there were cavils here and there about some choices and occasional execution.  My college theater teacher used to say that in theater, whatever works is right.  Not by Bread Alone worked.  That’s never wrong.

In the New York press, as I said earlier, all the publications I saw save one praised the company and the production.  (I won’t recap what Feldman said in TONY.  The other weeklies, including the Village Voice didn’t cover the performance, and neither did Variety or the usual on-line theater outlets.)  The reviewers pretty much all spoke in the same terms.  You’ll notice, though, that there’s a dearth of commentary on the quality of the theatrical art on view.  Ben Brantley declared in the New York Times that the actors “possess memorable and distinctively expressive faces,” though he observed that “it’s their hands you’re likely to focus on.”  The Timesman affirmed that “the show is never stronger than when they depict . . . the sensory content of their lives” even as he acknowledged that some vignettes “descend into sticky mawkishness.”  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli asserted that Bread “isn’t a traditional way to approach theater” because it “isn’t so much a play as a collection of autobiographical vignettes, skits and anecdotes.”  The vignettes are “sometimes emotional, sometimes funny,” wrote Vincentelli, even “heartbreakingly intimate.”  The Post reviewer noted, “It would be lying to say that the show flows so smoothly that we forget these actors can’t see or hear,” but reminded us that it wasn’t supposed to.  In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz observed that “there’s nothing cookie-cutter about ‘Not by Bread Alone,’” and he declared the Nalagaat company “remarkable” and “a one-of-a-kind professional company.”  Describing the scenes as “colorful,” Dziemianowicz affirmed, “These moments flow with a surprising ease,” and concluded with: “‘Not by Bread Alone’ is filling on various levels.”  “[D]isturbing sense memories flood back in the first moments of a new play called ‘Not by Bread Alone,’ wrote Linda Winer in Long Island’s Newsday, adding that “I do mean just the first moments.  Almost immediately, the feelings change to wonder, then to amazement, then to something tough but tender—like awe.”  In the theater press, Lisa Jo Sagolla of Back Stage opened her notice with what sounds like a caveat:

Creative practice in the visual and performing arts has lately shifted from the production of an art object—a painting, a dance, a play—to the orchestration of an “experience,” centered perhaps on something of the artist’s own making but substantially dependent on what you, the audience, bring to the game and how you choose to play along.

Sagolla, however, finished her introduction with a reversal: “While many such experiences seem devised simply in compliance with trendiness and sometimes out of laziness or inability on the part of the artists, “Not by Bread Alone” is prodigiously different.”   She went on to describe Bread Alone as “a sublime testament to the power of experiential theater to enrich our understanding of humans as innately social beings.” 

In the end, though, the reviewers may have been right, at least on one score, to focus on the experience rather than the art.  A great part of the effectiveness and edification of Not by Bread Alone was in experiencing the joy which the Nalagaat ensemble displayed during and, especially, after the performance.  I imagine, after seeing Bread, that a similar response must hit each of the deaf-blind players when they reach out of their silent darkness and connect with someone.  Normally, that’s a one-on-one occasion, but in their theater, it happens night after night with hundreds of people at a time.  The impression was that all the actors support and help one another—we saw them do that on stage—but touching a stranger from the seeing-and-hearing society that probably usually ignores them or encounters them in discomfort and making contact this way seems to be an extraordinary feeling.  For us, I suspect, it’s mostly a revelation, a lesson learned, an idea broached.  For them, who do the touching and the contacting they rarely get the chance to do, it seems much more than that; it seems like a piece of one of their dreams, which are filled with light, colors, and sounds.  No wonder they tell us how much they love this work and how it has become so important to their lives and their senses of themselves.  If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

And you know what?  It hardly matters that Bread may or may not be a play.  It is whatever it is—and that’s magical enough for this world.