Luck & Failure

 

“BRYAN CRANSTON ON BEING READY FOR LUCK”
by Bryan Cranston 

[The following transcript of a “Brief But Spectacular” essay aired on PBS NewsHour on 1 November 2018.  The essayist, actor Bryan Cranston (b. 1956), won the 2019 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play in Network, which opened at the Belasco Theatre on 6 December 2018 for a limited run and closed on 8 June 2019.]

Oscar-nominated actor Bryan Cranston, best known for his role as Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” didn’t get his big break until age 40, when he was cast in the family TV sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle.” Now, he’ll be playing the role of Howard Beale in the upcoming Broadway production of “Network.” He shares his brief but spectacular take on an unusual career trajectory and the role of luck.

Judy Woodruff: Oscar-nominated actor Bryan Cranston is best known for his Emmy-winning role as Walter White in the TV series “Breaking Bad” [AMC; 20 January 2008-29 September 2013].

But, as he explains in tonight’s Brief But Spectacular episode, it took him some luck to get there.

Starting next Saturday [Woodruff probably meant 10 November 2018, the first preview], Cranston will be playing the role of Howard Beale in the Broadway production of “Network,” based on the famous film [MGM; 1976].

Bryan Cranston: The first thing I look for when I read a script is, does the story move me?

What I truly love about this, and when I talk to audiences about anything I have done or any other movie or stage piece, is that the audience is always right. However you felt, however you reacted to something is always right. That’s how you felt.

And it’s remarkable how you can sit next to someone and watch a movie. I could be weeping, and they’re like, eh. It’s like, really? They say, yes, it missed me.

The only failure is if you move an audience to nothing, to boredom. If they are indifferent about what they just experienced, whether it’s a painting or a recital or a singer or a dancer or a play, if they are, I feel nothing throughout, then we failed. Then we failed.

Actors come to town, to New York or Los Angeles or London, and they say, you know, I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to give it a year and see if I can become successful.

And to those, I want to say, I can save you a year of your time. If you think that this is something that you can carve out some arbitrary amount of time to achieve certain things, this is not for you. This is a lifetime.

When you first start out as an actor, your answer to any question is yes. Do you want to? Yes, I want to do that.

I started out in 1979 doing background work as an extra. Angry mob. Drunken frat boy. Reckless driver. And then, when you first get that break where you actually have a name, Steve, wow, I actually have a name, I’m Steve, you feel like you have progressed to some degree.

There’s no career that has ever been achieved in entertainment — I truly believe this — without a healthy dose of luck. Someone said, OK, kid, I will read your script, or, all right, you want to audition? Come in. Do it right now.

And then you got to be ready. Celebrity is a byproduct of what I do and what I like to do. It’s not what I was after. I was a working actor. Things were fine. I was paying my bills, leading a very middle-class economic life. And then I got a lucky break at age 40 and was cast in “Malcolm in the Middle” [Fox; 9 January 2000-14 May 2006].

At 50, I got an even bigger break when I was cast as Walter White on “Breaking Bad.”

That was my trajectory. It came when it was supposed to come. And that’s the interesting thing about luck. It doesn’t work on your timetable. It works on its own.

My name is Bryan Cranston, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on being an actor.

[The backstory of “Brief But Spectacular,” a weekly series that premièred on NewsHour in 2015, begins with creator Steve Goldbloom, the creator and host of the original comedy news show for PBS, “Everything But the News,” and his longtime producing partner Zach Land-Miller who conduct every interview off-camera and off-screen.  (The segments are all two to four minutes long and there are no cutaways to reporters or interjections of questions.) 

[Each Thursday, “Brief But Spectacular” introduces NewsHour viewers to original profiles; these short segments feature some of the most original contemporary figures, offering passionate takes on topics they know well.  These have included household names like actors Alec Baldwin and Carl Reiner, artist Marina Abramović,  and activist Bryan Stevenson. 

[Topics have included comedian, writer, and director Jill Soloway (Amazon’s original series Transparent) on gatekeepers in Hollywood, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on police reform in America, Abramović on the art of performance, author Michael Lewis on finding disruptive characters, performers Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on the rise of their hit Comedy Central series Broad City, engineer Jason Dunn on creating the first 3-D printer in space, and many more.] 

*  *  *  *
“A HUMBLE OPINION ON DERIVING MOTIVATION FROM FAILURE”
by Elizabeth McCracken 

[Elizabeth McCracken’s essay about failure on “In My Humble Opinion,” from PBS News Hour on 11 March 2019, brought to mind Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”  I’ll present another essay on that passage from Beckett’s 1983 story “Worstward Ho” following this NewsHour transcript.]

It irks novelist and professor Elizabeth McCracken [b. 1966] when people say a success has “humbled” them. She argues it’s in fact failure that produces a humbling effect – but also a highly motivating one. McCracken offers her humble opinion on why the best work doesn’t derive from calm equilibrium, but rather from a “well-nourished, very private sense of revenge.”

Judy Woodruff: New Coke, the Fire Phone, big mistakes for Coca-Cola and Amazon, but their CEOs and those of many other companies have worked the concept of failure into their corporate culture.

Letting employees fail is seen as one way of finding the next big thing that works.

Novelist and professor Elizabeth McCracken also sees the value, but in her Humble Opinion, it’s the darker side of failure that ends up pushing you to success.

Elizabeth McCracken: Lately, I have been thinking about failure.

For instance, it’s a pet peeve of mine when people say that an honor has humbled them. It hasn’t. By what definition could that happen? You might mean that you think you should remain humble in the face of an honor. And, sure, why not? But it doesn’t actually humble you.

Failure, on the other hand, tends to humble people, which is right and also good, because only when you fail can you stand up and assess the damage and then, then get really furious, and vow revenge.

I teach creative writing, and I always tell my students that revenge is great motivation. People who are afraid of failure tend to say, I’m harder on myself than anyone else is.

This is never true.

Or else, my problem is that I’m a perfectionist, to which I always say, oh, you don’t like failing in public, unlike the rest of us?

In order to succeed, you have to risk failing. We all know that, but sometimes we forget that failure is actually good for you. Your immune system needs a bit of failure in order to be inoculated against further failure. The antibodies that failure produces are not pretty, but they are motivating, vengeance, hubris.

My most successful students have already failed. Maybe they didn’t get into graduate school the first time. Maybe they were rejected by a bunch of agents. Maybe they started a completely different career because their parents didn’t want them to be writers.

And failure instilled in them a particular feeling, not a commitment to their art or sense of peace about their fate.

“I thought,” one student of mine said just before she sold her novel, “I will show them.”

We often think that the best work comes from a place of equilibrium and support, but the thing is, equilibrium is pretty static, whereas a well-nourished, very private sense of revenge has enough heat and light to power a city, never mind a novel.

It’s almost heartwarming. Sometimes, when you think, I will show them, the them you end up showing is yourself.

Judy Woodruff: Elizabeth McCracken.

[“in My Humble Opinion,” the successor to “Essay” on NewsHour, was a series dedicated to video essays by writers, artists, and thinkers on diverse topics of interest to them.  I didn’t find confirmation, but it appears no longer to be a feature of NewsHour; perhaps it’s been subsumed into the segment called “Brief But Spectacular,” to which the first transcript in this post belonged.

[Elizabeth McCracken is an author and is a recipient of the 2002 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Niagara Falls All Over Again.  McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree in English from Boston University, a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, and a Master of Science in Library Science from Drexel University.

[In 2008 and 2009, she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Formerly on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, McCracken holds the James Michener Chair of Fiction of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a 1996 National Book Awards finalist for The Giant’s House, was on the 2014 National Book Awards long list for Thunderstruck & Other Stories, won the 2015 Story Prize for Thunderstruck & Other Stories, and made the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award shortlist for “Hungry.”]

*  *  *  *
“’TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER’: HOW SAMUEL BECKETT 
CREATED THE UNLIKELY MANTRA THAT INSPIRES ENTREPRENEURS TODAY”
by Colin Marshall 

[Because McCracken’s essay “A humble opinion on deriving motivation from failure” reminded me immediately of the quotation from playwright and poet Samuel Beckett (1906-89), "Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better,” I decided to add a short piece from Open Culture, a website that “scours the web for the best educational media.  We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.”  Published on 17 December 2017, the following essay discusses the full meaning of Beckett’s line.]

To what writer, besides Ayn Rand, do the business-minded techies and tech-minded businessmen of 21st-century Silicon Valley look for their inspiration? The name of Samuel Beckett may not, at first, strike you as an obvious answer — unless, of course, you know the origin of the phrase “Fail better.” It appears five times in Beckett’s 1983 story “Worstward Ho,” the first of which goes like this: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The sentiment seems to resonate naturally with the mentality demanded by the world of tech startups, where nearly every venture ends in failure, but failure which may well contain the seeds of future success.

Or rather, the apparent sentiment resonates. “By itself, you can probably understand why this phrase has become a mantra of sorts, especially in the glamorized world of overworked start-up founders hoping against pretty high odds to make it,” writes Books on the Wall‘s Andrea Schlottman.

“We think so, too. That is, until you read the rest of it.” The paragraph immediately following those much-quoted lines runs as follows:

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.

“Throw up for good” — a rich image, certainly, but perhaps not as likely to get you out there disrupting complacent industries as “Fail better,” which The New Inquiry’s Ned Beauman describes as “experimental literature’s equivalent of that famous Che Guevara photo, flayed completely of meaning and turned into a successful brand with no particular owner. ‘Worstward Ho’ may be a difficult work that resists any stable interpretation, but we can at least be pretty sure that Beckett’s message was a bit darker than ‘Just do your best and everything is sure to work out ok in the end.’

But if Beckett’s words don’t provide quite the cause for optimism we thought they did, the story of his life actually might. “Beckett had already experienced plenty of artistic failure by the time he developed it into a poetics,” writes Chris Power in The Guardian. “No one was willing to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the book of short stories he salvaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold disastrously.” And yet today, even those who’ve never read a page of his work — indeed, those who’ve never even read the “Fail better” quote in full — acknowledge him as one of the 20th century’s greatest literary masters. Still, we have good cause to believe that Beckett himself probably regarded his own work as, to one degree or another, a failure. Those of us who revere it would do well to remember that, and maybe even to draw some inspiration from it.

[Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture.  His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles (in press) and the video series The City in Cinema.

[I’ve blogged several times on Samuel Beckett, all on his theater.  (Many of the posts have been about Waiting for Godot, which readers of Rick On Theater will probably know I think is a masterpiece.)  ROT’s Beckett posts are: “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; “Waiting for Godot (Gare St. Lazare),”31 October 2015; “Beckett Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby.” 1 May 2016; "‘Beckett by the Madeleine’" by Tom F. Driver, 25 January 2018; and “Waiting For Godot (Druid Theatre Company),” 21 November 2018.]

'Waiting For Godot' (Druid Theatre Company)

As frequent ROTters will know, I consider Waiting for Godot one of the most important plays of the 20th century—perhaps the single most important work of Western theater.  It confused many viewers, both theater pros and general audiences, when it first hit the stages of Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, and many dismissed it.  But it changed everything that came after.  Western theater has never been the same.  Just the week after I saw a new staging of Godot, I saw the revival of a 2004 play, Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno, who was described at its U.S première in the New York Times as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”

I don’t get to see all the new productions of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, but I go to as many as I can manage, so when my friend Diana called over the summer to tell me that coming to the 2018 Lincoln Center White Light Festival was a production of the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, one of whose previous productions I’d seen six years ago (Famine by Tom Murphy, part of the three-play series DruidMurphy presented at the Lincoln Center Festival that summer; see my post on 24 July 2012), I jumped at the chance.  We booked seats at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on West 59th Street for the 7:30 performance on Friday evening, 9 November.

The Druid’s presentation of Waiting for Godot ran from 2 to 13 November 2018.  Previously, the production ran at the company’s home theater in Galway from 22 February to 3 March 2018 and then toured Ireland, playing Limerick, Letterkenny, Dublin, Cork, Longford, Wexford, Dún Laoghaire, and Sligo.  Before coming the New York’s White Light Festival, the Druid’s Godot appeared at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (17 April–20 May), the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (23 May-3 June), and the Edinburgh International Festival (3-12 August); the production also made a return trip to Druid’s hometown for the Galway International Arts Festival (7–23 July).  (The explanation for the very short run at the home theater, a scant 10 days, is director Garry Hynes’s “very low expectations,” according to actor and former columnist for Back Stage Michael Kostroff.  “We very deliberately scheduled it for a very short run in our own 100-seat theater,” said the director, “so that if we fell on our ass with it there weren’t going to be too many people around to watch the damage.”  The evidence is that they didn’t stumble—not by a longshot.)

The White Light Festival, now in its ninth year, is Lincoln Center’s annual exploration of music and art’s power to reveal the many dimensions of our interior lives.  International in scope, the multidisciplinary festival offers a broad spectrum of the world’s leading instrumentalists, vocalists, ensembles, choreographers, dance companies, and directors complemented by conversations with artists and scholars and post-performance White Light Lounges. The festival will occupy six venues in the Lincoln Center area to present more than a dozen events.  “This year,” says Jane Moss, festival director, “we focus on what it means to be human in an increasingly fractious world—a world where communication, compassion, and creative expression remain vital to our survival as a global community.”  The festival takes its name from a quotation by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): “I could compare my music to white light, which contains all colors.  Only a prism can divide the colors and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”  

(For background on the Druid Theatre Company, see my report on Famine, referenced above; for a short bio of Samuel Beckett, see the report on the last production of Godot I saw, performed at New York University’s Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts three years ago by Gare St Lazare Ireland, posted on 31 October 2015 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2015/10/waiting-for-godot.html].  See my report on While I Was Waiting, posted on Rick On Theater on 1 August 2017, for a brief profile of the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.  There is more detailed information on the playwright and his absurdist tragi-comedy in “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot” and “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 and 3 April 2009.)

There’s really no plot in Godot, of which Irish Times reviewer Vivian Mercier said in 1956, it’s “a play in which nothing happens, twice.”  (That wasn’t a put down.  Mercier went on to exclaim that it nevertheless “keeps audiences glued to their seats.”)  Of course, Beckett says so himself: One of his characters declares, “Nothing happens.  Nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”  I describe the events of the play in my report on the 2015 Godot).  In brief, act one presents Estragon (Aaron Monaghan, short and stocky), called Gogo (already on stage before the lights come up), and Vladimir (tall, thin, and rangy Marty Rea), known as Didi, as they wait for a man called Godot—who famously never comes.  A study in absurdist co-dependency.  The two wayfarers, obviously once refined men now down on their luck, occupy themselves with various time-passing activities—the French title of the play, the version Beckett wrote first, is En attendant Godot, which translates as “While waiting for Godot”—until they meet Pozzo (Rory Nolan) and Lucky (Garrett Lombard, looking like a Noh white lion character in hobo drag) passing through the barren landscape with one, lone, leafless tree.  Pozzo is the master, the slave-holder, the man of importance; Lucky is his mostly mute, cowed menial whom Pozzo leads by a long rope around his neck.  After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy (Jaden Pace at the performance I saw; he alternates with Nathan Reid) arrives to tell Gogo and Didi that Godot will not come today, but surely tomorrow. 

In act two, the same events occur, though Pozzo and Lucky are traveling in the opposite direction and Pozzo has had a change of fortune: he’s now blind.  After the travelers leave, the boy comes again with the same message.  Indeed, a play of little action, in the strictest sense as Aristotle or Stanislavsky would define it—but riveting and eternally revealing.  At two hours and 30 minutes in length, the performance seems to zoom by and I sat, as I have at other performances of Waiting for Godot since I first saw it as a college freshman in 1965, engrossed and mesmerized, listening afresh to Beckett’s words, hearing them again for the first time. 

It doesn’t make much sense for me to review Beckett’s play again (see what I said in the Gare St Lazare report); I haven’t changed my mind about it.  Each time I see Waiting for Godot, I become more certain that my first impression was absolutely correct and really great productions confirm that opinion in spades.  The Druid staging qualifies as great; even Diana extolled it enthusiastically, including a week later when she and I met to see the Thom Pain revival at the Signature Theatre Company (report forthcoming).  It was magnificent!  Possibly the best Godot I’ve seen so far.  (I’m leaving room for future productions, but I’d be surprised that any surpass the Druid’s.)  I also repeat what I said in 2015 about providing an interpretation of the play: There are so many, and they get so complex that it would be bootless to attempt one here—so I won’t.  (Interested readers can find some discussion of the play’s meaning(s) in the two 2009 articles I mentioned above.)

None of the cast are stars over here (though they all appeared in 2012’s Famine, which was also helmed by Hynes), so this wasn’t a bravura performance, but an excellent ensemble that revealed some things in the play I’d never noticed before (or maybe forgotten).  At 2½ hours (including intermission), it just zipped by without lags or slow-downs.  Oh, and it’s funny, too—often hilarious, with music hall gags and classic comic turns, all executed with alacrity by the Mutt and Jeff of Beckettworld, pratfalls from the portly Pozzo, and Lucky’s insane “thinking” on command (which received enthusiastic applause from the audience) that comes off like Professor Irwin Corey on acid (assuming, of course, that Corey wasn’t already on acid).  The White Light audience was especially receptive to the humor, both low and highbrow.

In that other Irish production of Godot in 2015, I don’t recall the Irish dialect featuring so prominently in the performance.  (I checked my report and I never mentioned an accent.)  Here, Rea’s Didi and Monaghan’s Gogo both use it, which makes Beckett’s lines absolutely musical.  (That alone made me notice some lines on which I haven’t focused before.  I was particularly struck with Gogo’s realization, “Everything oozes.  It’s never the same pus from one minute to the next” because it’s a grotesque restatement of a key term of Heraclitus of Ephesus, one of Beckett’s principal philosophical sources, who said: “Everything flows.”  One cannot place the same foot in the same stream a second time, the classic Greek philosopher explained, because neither the foot nor the stream is by then the same.)  It was truly beautiful just to listen to!  Interestingly, Nolan’s Pozzo is more English in his speech than Rea/Didi and Monaghan/Gogo, which adds a level of political commentary (which I suspect Beckett didn’t intend, but which isn’t intrusive and is even titillating):  Pozzo, the slave-master, the autocrat, the self-important bully, is English, literally throwing bones to the two Irish wayfarers—who, in this production, are clearly once-prosperous gentlemen who’ve fallen low (rather than just tramps or even tramp-clowns à la Emmett Kelly, as they were in the Gare St Lazare rendering). (For the record, young Pace is an American actor and was not made to affect an accent, either English or Irish.)

Overall, the acting and production were superb.  None of the roles (even the boy) is easy, and I can tell you from my own brief experience as an actor that plays like Beckett’s, Absurdist and anti-realistic scripts, are harder than even Shakespeare or the Greeks.  Maybe the artistic challenge puts everyone on his acting toes, but for whatever reason, the Druid company’s Waiting for Godot was a showcase.  As absurd (lower case) as the stage life is, these actors all made it look perfectly reasonable—within the world of Beckett and Godot.  If you’ll allow me to make a crass analogy, it’s a lot like watching the films of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings: we know those worlds don’t really exist, but for the span of the movie, we believe they do and all the people who live in them behave in accordance with the rules, forces, and environments of those snow globes.  That’s what Monaghan, Rea, Nolan, Lombard, and Pace all have to do—and accomplish seamlessly.  I suspect it’s easier to do in the Star Wars or Ring movies because, first, of all the technical assistance the filmmakers have on call and, second, they don’t have to do it live in front of an audience.  They also don’t have to keep it up for 2½ hours, eight performances a week.  

(I have no evidence for this, but I have a feeling that, while most actors and directors who do Shakespeare or Shaw or Molière or Mamet or Hansberry do it because the think the plays are good or important, they do Waiting for Godot because they love it.  Oh, sure, most directors and actors have favorite Shakespeares or Shaws—I love Much Ado About Nothing and The Man of Destiny, for instance—but an entire cast of Hamlet lovers?  Probably not.  But Godot?  I bet if you polled the casts and directors of every major production of that play, you’ll find that almost everyone involved signed on out of love for the play.  Just a feeling.)

Hynes’s staging is more physical than many I’ve seen—not just in the sight gags, which are generally played for laughs, but in the constant business in which Gogo and Didi engage.  (Remember, the point of the play is what the two men do while they’re waiting for Godot.  It’s not about the waiting; it’s about passing the time during the waiting.)  All four of the main actors, Monaghan, Rea, Nolan, and Lombard, are superb physical performers, especially Monaghan and Rea, and Gogo, Didi, and Pozzo always seem to be in motion in some way or another, even if they’re just vibrating or swaying.  Waiting for Godot isn’t a play about activity or motion, yet Hynes’s version seemed right nonetheless.  The difference is that these wanderers don’t wait inactively or motionlessly; for them, waiting is an action.

Designer Francis O’Connor’s conception of Beckett’s “A country road.  A tree.” is a flat, arid space (no road as such) with a leafless tree shaped like a gigantic divining rod pointing at the ground—as if signaling that whatever the travelers are looking for, this is where to search—and an egg-shaped rock, smooth, white, and oval, where Didi and (especially) Gogo sit when they’re not bouncing around the bleached terrain.  It’s not a claustrophobic or confining place, but there’s nothing here to recommend it as a good place to wait.  It’s still a prison, albeit without walls—after all, Didi and Gogo can’t escape it; they may leave, but they always come back.  The whole set, though, is enclosed by a color-changing lighted frame that sets a mysterious boundary around this little world.  From the way Didi and Gogo look out into the distance in either direction, striking a cartoon sailor’s searching posture—one foot thrust way back, torso leaning as far forward as physically possible, and one hand shading the eyes for better viewing—it’s clear that as bare as the waiting place is, the landscape all around the two is even emptier. 

Lit by James F. Ingalls with shades of white light, bright during the day, dim at night, but with no visible color, the gray cyclorama that stands in for the sky is as characterless as the land.  At night, a balloon-like moon floats in from the stage-left wing (reminding me somewhat of Rover, the menacing balloon guard that prevented prisoners from escaping The Village in the ’60s British TV series The Prisoner).

O’Connor’s dress for Didi and Gogo makes obvious that they aren’t the baggy-pants clowns of the Gare St Lazare production and not quite “gentlemen of the road,” but once-successful men of some affluence who’ve fallen on hard times.  The clothing also seems to enhance the physical contrast of the two wanderers.

Show-Score based its review survey on 21 notices, but the site included 10 reviews of performances in Ireland, Washington, and Chicago.  Based only on the ratings for the 11 New York City reviews, the average score was 85, with a top score of 97 (Show Showdown) followed by a 95 (Exeunt magazine) and a low score of 70 (TheaterScene.net), backed by a 75 (New York Times).  All the published reviews tallied by Show-Score (100%) were positive.  I’ll survey nine reviews for my round-up.

In the New York Times, the only newspaper to cover the White Light’s Godot, Ben Brantley began his review by asking, “Have you ever paused to consider the spiritual and physical affinities between the desolate universe of Samuel Beckett and the wacky world of vintage Warner Brothers cartoons?”  Well, I never have, and Brantley acknowledged that he hadn’t, either.  “Or at least not until I saw the Druid Theatre’s production of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot.’”  Calling the production “highly stylized and very funny” in his 75-rated notice, the Timesman confessed, “I found myself transported to Saturday mornings with Looney Tunes from my childhood,” adding, “Little did I know then, as I chuckled over the frantic antics of Daffy and Bugs and company, that I was taking an extended course in existential futility.”  Among the parallels with the universe of cartoons, Brantley pointed out “the sense that no matter how hard and cruel the day has been, those who lived through it are ready to begin the same old punishing routine the next morning” and, perhaps most pointedly, “the suspicion, which freezes into certainty, that those who work so ardently to achieve their elusive goals will never, ever be rewarded: not Wile E. Coyote in pursuit of the fleet Road Runner, nor Sylvester the Cat, hungry eyes forever trained on the unreachable Tweety Bird.”  The same, he observed, is true of Vladimir and Estragon. 

In addition to their “vaudevillian and music-hall-clown nature,” Brantley found that “the improbably elastic pair of Aaron Monaghan (Gogo) and Marty Rea (Didi) float them into the stratosphere of the Looney Tunes menagerie.”  The Times reviewer pronounced the production “one of the most accessible, and enjoyable, ‘Godots’ on record.  It’s lively and sensibly silly enough to take a child to, at least for its first act.”  He affirmed, “Every one of the jokes, in all their fugue-like repetition, lands solidly.  And lines to which I’ve never paid much attention before stand out in illuminated relief.” 

“What you may find yourself missing,” Brantley lamented, “is the deeply touching familiarity of Gogo and Didi’s relationship, a portrait of marriage of sorts, in which interdependence is mixed with impatience and irritability.”  (I’m not so sure this co-dependency was lacking.  Another reviewer said of the Edinburgh International Festival that the relationship was like that of a father with a toddler.)  He found the production’s “comic exaggeration can feel a bit distancing.”  “Still,” wrote the reviewer, “I can’t imagine a better introduction than this lucid and entertaining cartoon of a show.”

Emily Nemens declared in the Paris Review, “The Galway-based company knows its Beckett, . . . nailing not only the dialogue but those strange stage directions, bowler hat blowing and all.”  Nemens continued, “By the end of the two acts, I felt like I’d known Gogo and Didi . . . for many more moons than the two that rise onstage—it’s a testament to the pair’s ability to perform the challenging script, which is at once existentially wrought and physically demanding.  Both are taken to their logical extremes with the actors’ emphatic delivery (there are squeaks, whispers, shouts) and physical feats (there’s a good moment of shoe-tugging that looks more like partners’ yoga).”  Sympathizing with Gogo and his sore feet because she’d injured her own, the Paris reviewer asserted that “the strange sense of urgency wrapped in never-ending limbo that compels Beckett’s play is bigger than my busted pinkie toe.  It echoes across the ‘muddy’ scenery and into all of our lives.”

In the review with the highest rating from Show-Score, a 97, Wendy Caster labeled the Druid production of Godot “superb” on Show Showdown and proclaimed it “damn close to perfect.”  Caster felt, “Garry Hynes’s meticulous direction exquisitely balances the pain and humor of Beckett’s heartbreakingly funny play.”  She even found parallels between “the rich bully Pozzo, full of bluster and in desperate need of constant flattery”  and our “45th president,” making the  play hit “particularly hard this time around.”  The Show Showdowner affirmed, “Everyone affiliated with the production provides top-notch work,” adding a “special tip of the hat to movement director Nick Winston, whose work deliciously blends clowning and grace.” 

In her review which scored a 95 on Show-Score, Exeunt magazine’s Ran Xia made a painterly reference to set the tone of her notice and the play: “The color scheme recalls Rembrandt, but the aesthetics are full Magritte: making something tragic-sad into whimsy.”  (I have to quote Xia’s next remark—because it could be me saying this; in fact, I did say it: “Waiting for Godot has always been one of my favorite plays.  It is a pretty much flawless script.  Over the years I’ve seen a fair share of topnotch productions and with each one I see, I hear something new and realize something fresh to unpack.”)  The Exeunt reviewer further declared, “Never have I experienced Waiting for Godot in such a brand new way than I did with director Garry Hynes’ interpretation,” adding that the Druid rendition “is by far the funniest version I’ve seen.”  She affirmed, “The result is deeply satisfying.  It galvanizes an unsettling, surreal, and entertaining version of Godot.” 

Xia, like me, was taken with the language of the Druid staging of Godot.  “The poetry of this production is built in in a macro way.  The rhythm of the language is stylized, but accessible; it treats every word with care, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously.”  I attributed this in large part of the Irish English spoken by actors Monaghan and Rea.  Xia makes a somewhat similar judgment, finding that “the performers’ Irish lilts . . . grounds the language in a kind of naturalism that cannot be achieved with an American or British accent.”  She even draws a  conclusion from the fact that Pozzo, Lucky, and the boy don’t use Irish accents: “this further accentuates the ‘otherness’ of Estragon and Vladimir.”  Xia’s concluding assessment of Druid’s Waiting for Godot is quite personal:

Godot has always made me cry, but Druid’s version made me laugh harder than I ever have before.  It later became the most unsettling too, in a satisfying way.  I’ve heard it said that the purpose of theatre is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.  I see Waiting for Godot as the epitome of that.

The website New York Stage Review posted two reviews of Godot.  In one, David Finkle asserted that Beckett’s play is “the great play of the 20th century” and affirmed that “nothing done in Garry Hynes’ production . . . makes me think otherwise.  If anything, it substantiates and enhances my opinion.”  Finkle’s colleague Michael Sommers found that the “Druid theater company . . . delivers a very fine staging of Waiting for Godot that lends the play a glowing sense of humanity.”  He reiterated, “The production . . . presents a truly radiant interpretation of Beckett’s challenging work.”  Sommers remarked extensively on “the natural quality of [the] easy rapport” of Monaghan’s Estragon and Rea’s Vladimir, feeling that their “personal warmth and vitality . . . brightens the existential desolation of Beckett’s classic.”  In addition, “Somehow they are able to be as funny as they are poignant, and that’s quite an achievement.”  Sommers also comments on the Irish accents of the performers, which he felt “underscore the musical quality of Beckett’s dialogue and point up its Irish rhythms.”  Overall, the cyber-reviewer concluded, Hynes “successfully infuses Beckett’s bleak study in existence with a warm, wonderful sense of humor and eternal life.”

On Broadway World, Adam Cohen asserted, “The production excels at finding the humor in the mundane; it pierces with a gracious, poignant truth of friendship” and the director “mines the piece for its quiet moments and visceral existential angst and vaudeville farce.  She firmly redefines our notion of tragic daily rituals while finding the necessary, vital humor.”  Cohen added, “There's immense heart to this production” and he found, “Hynes direction is assured, filled with comedic grace and the brittle tension of daily grind.” 

David Barbour of Lighting & Sound America deemed “that Garry Hynes' production has an antic physicality that gives this Godot an artfully cartooned quality all its own.”  He asserted, “Indeed, in this Godot, the news is so awful that there's nothing left to do but laugh.”  Barbour complained, however, “The one weakness of this approach is that—during the first half, especially—the actors seem to leap from one comic conceit to another with such skill that some of the play's darker, deeper notes are obscured.”  But he backed off some, conceding that “in the later passages, a genuine and profound sense of loss emerges.”  The LSA reviewer’s final analysis was: “For all its comic invention, Hynes' approach may not be to all tastes . . . .  But if, like me, you recognize Beckett's essential place in the dramatic canon while quarreling—for reasons of temperament, philosophy, or religious belief—with his vision, this may be the Godot for you.”

Show-Score’s lowest-rated review, with a score of 70, was Darryl Reilly’s notice on TheaterScene.net, in which he explained, “Yoga tree poses, pratfalls, and rapid-fire verbal delivery reminiscent of Abbott and Costello routines are characteristic of how director Garry Hynes answers the question of what to do with Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, Waiting for Godot.”  Reilly reported, “Ms. Hynes has the cast at full speed emphasizing slapstick and employing stylized poses and gestures.  There’s exaggerated choreography-like movement such as extending legs and dipping down, grabbing at each other and jumping.”  He felt that this tactic was “accomplished if overdone” because the “plethora of gags and set up punchline recitation gets laughs at the expense of emotional resonance.”  The TS reviewer thought, however, “A few bits are quietly played due to the nature of those specific passages and are quite lovely,” but “[o]verall, there is a lack of visceral depth to this arguably superficial treatment.”  His final word was: “This Waiting for Godot is overall pleasing without making much of an impact.”

[I got to the theater for Godot at about 7:15 for the 7:30 curtain. (I had a problem on the subway.)  I arrived to be greeted by a longish line for security checks.  I encountered heavy security for To the End of the Land, the Israeli play I saw at the Lynch at last year’s Lincoln Center Festival (report posted 6 August 2017), but there’d been threats and protests for that.  I don’t know why there’d have to be such security measures for an Irish production of Waiting for Godot. ] 

"Beckett by the Madeleine"

by Tom F. Driver

[One of the most important Samuel Beckett documents is Tom F. Driver’s interview with “Beckett by the Madeleine” in which Beckett stressed the distress, the mess in the world today, and dismissed any overt religious interpretation of Waiting for Godot.   This text is reproduced  from: Stanley A. Clayes, ed., Drama and Discussion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 604-7.  Diver’s interview was originally published in Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961): 21-25.]

Nothing like Godot, he arrived before the hour.  His letter had suggested we meet at my hotel at noon on Sunday, and I came into the lobby as the clock struck twelve.  He was waiting.

My wish to meet Samuel Beckett had been prompted by simple curiosity and interest in his work.  American newspaper reviewers like to call his plays nihilistic.  They find deep pessimism in them.  Even so astute a commentator as Harold Clurman of The Nation has said that “Waiting for Godot” is “the concentrate . . . of the contemporary European . . . mood of despair.”  But to me Beckett’s writing had seemed permeated with love for human beings and with a kind of humor that I could reconcile neither with despair or with nihilism.  Could it be that my eyes and ears had deceived me?  Is his a literature of defeat, irrelevant to the social crisis we face?  Or is it relevant because it teaches us something useful to know about ourselves.

I knew that a conversation with the author would not settle such questions, because a man is not the same as his writing: in the last analysis, the questions had to be settled by the work itself.  Nevertheless I was curious.

My curiosity was sharpened a day or two before the interview by a conversation I had with a well-informed teacher of literature, a Jesuit father, at a conference on religious drama near Paris.  When Beckett’s name came into the discussion, the priest grew loud and told me that Beckett “hates life.”  That, I thought, is at least one thing I can find out when we meet.

Beckett’s appearance is rough-hewn Irish.  The features of his face are distinct, but not fine.  They look as if they had been sculptured with and unsharpened chisel.  Unruly hair goes straight up from his forehead, standing so high that the top falls gently over, as if to show that it really is hair and not bristle.  One might say it combines the man’s own pride and humility.  For he has the pride that comes of self-acceptance and the humility, perhaps of the same genesis, not to impose himself upon another.  His light blue eyes, set deep within the face, are actively and continually looking.  He seems, by some unconscious division of labor, to have given them that one function and no other, leaving communication to the rest of the face.  The mouth frequently breaks into a disarming smile.  The voice is light in timbre, with a rough edge that corresponds to his visage.  The Irish accent is, as one would expect, combined with slight inflections from the French.  His tweed suit was a baggy gray and green.  He wore a brown knit sports shirt with no tie.

We walked down the Rue de L’Arcade, thence along beside the Madeleine and across to a sidewalk cafe opposite that church.  The conversation that ensued may have been engrossing but it could hardly be called world-shattering.  For one thing, the world that Beckett sees is already shattered.  His talk turns to what he calls “the mess,” or sometimes “this buzzing confusion.”  I reconstruct his sentences from notes made immediately after our conversation.  What appears here is shorter than what he actually said but very close to his own words.

“The confusion is not my invention.  We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion.  It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in.  The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.  It is not a mess you can make sense of.” 

I suggested that one must let it in because it is the truth, but Beckett did not take to the word truth.

“What is more true than anything else?  To swim is true, and to sink is true.  One is not more true than the other.  One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess.  When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me.  I am not a philosopher.  One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess.”

Then he began to speak about the tension in art between the mess and form.  Until recently, art has withstood the pressure of chaotic things.  It has held them at bay.  It realized that to admit them was to jeopardize form.  “How could the mess be admitted, because it appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be?”  But how can we keep it out no longer,  because we have come into a time when “it invades our experience at every moment.  It is there and it must be allowed in.”

I granted this might be so, but found the result to be even more attention to form than was the case previously.  And why not?  How, I asked, could chaos be admitted to chaos?  Would that not be the end of thinking and the end of art?  If we look at recent art we find it preoccupied with form.  Beckett’s own work is an example.  Plays more highly formalized than “Waiting for Godot,” “Endgame,” and “Krapp’s Last Tape” would be hard to find.

“What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art.  It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.  The form and the chaos remain separate.  The latter is not reduced to the former.  That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates.  To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artists now.

Yet, I responded, could not similar things be said about the art of the past?  Is it nor characteristic of the greatest art that it confronts us with something we cannot clarify, demanding that the viewer respond to it in his own never-predictable way?  What is the history of criticism but the history of men attempting to make sense of the manifold elements in art that will not allow themselves to be reduced to a single philosophy or a single aesthetic theory?  Isn’t all art ambiguous? 

“Not this,” he said, and gestured toward the Madeleine.  The classical lines of the church, which Napoleon thought of as a Temple of Glory, dominated all the scene where we sat.  The Boulevard de la Madeleine, the Boulevard Malesherbes, and the Rue Royale ran to it with a graceful flattery, bearing tidings of the Age of Reason.  “Not this.  This is clear.  This does not allow the mystery to invade us.  With classical art, all is settled.  But it is different at Chartres.  There is the unexplainable, and there art raises questions that it does not attempt to answer.” 

I asked about the battle between life and death in his plays.  Didi and Gogo hover on the edge of suicide; Hamm’s world is death and Clov may or may not get out of it to join the living child outside.  Is this life-death question a part of the chaos?

“Yes.  If life and death did not both present themselves to us, there would be no inscrutability.  If there were only darkness, all would be clear.  It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable.  Take Augustine’s doctrine of grace given and grace withheld: have you pondered the dramatic qualities in this theology?  Two thieves are crucified with Christ, one saved and the other damned.  How can we make sense of this division?  In classical drama, such problems do not arise.  The destiny of Racine’s Phèdre is sealed from the beginning: she will proceed into the dark.  As she goes, she herself will be illuminated.  At the beginning of the play she has partial illumination and at the end she has complete illumination, but there has been no question but that she moves toward the dark.  That is the play.  Within this notion clarity is possible, but for us who are neither Greek nor Jansenist there is not such clarity.  The question would also be removed if we believed in the contrary—total salvation.  But where we have both dark and light we have also the inexplicable.  The key word in my plays is ‘perhaps.’”

Given a theological lead, I asked what he thinks about those who find a religious significance to his plays.

“Well, really there is none at all.  I have no religious feeling.  Once I had a religious emotion.  It was at my first communion.  No more.  My mother was deeply religious.  So was my brother.  He knelt down at his bed as long as long as he could kneel.  My father had none.  The family was Protestant, but for me it was only irksome and I let it go.  My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died.  At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old-school tie.  Irish Catholicism is not attractive, but it is deeper.  When you pass a church on an Irish bus, all the hands flurry in the sign of the cross.  One day the dogs of Ireland will do that too and perhaps also the pigs.”

But do the plays deal with the same facets of experience religion must also deal with?

“Yes, for they deal with distress.  Some people object to this in my writing.  At a party an English intellectual—so-called—asked me why I write about distress.  As if it were perverse to do so!  He wanted to know if my father had beaten me or my mother had run away from home to give me an unhappy childhood.  I told him no, that I had had a very happy childhood.  Then he thought me more perverse than ever.  I left the party as soon as possible and got into a taxi.  On the glass partition between me and the driver were three signs: one asked for help for the blind, another, help for the orphans, and the third for relief for the war refugees.  One does not have to look for distress.  It is screaming at you even in the taxis of London.”

Lunch was over, and we walked back to the hotel with the light and dark of Paris screaming at us.

The personal quality of Samuel Beckett is similar to qualities I had found in the plays.  He says nothing that compresses experience within a closed pattern.  “Perhaps” stands in place of commitment.  At the same time, he is plainly sympathetic, clearly friendly.  If there were only the mess, all would be clear; but there is also compassion.

As a Christian, I know I do not stand where Beckett stands, but I do see much of what he sees.  As a writer on theater, I have paid close attention to the plays.  Harold Clurman is right to say that “Waiting for Godot” is a reflection (he calls it a distorted reflection) “of the impasse and disarray of Europe’s current politics, ethic, and common way of life.”  Yet it is not only Europe that the play refers to.  “Waiting for Godot” sells even better in America than in France.  The consciousness it mirrors my have come earlier to Europe than to America, but it is the consciousness that most “mature” societies arrive at when their successes in technological and economic systemization propel them into a time of examining the not-strictly-practical ends of culture.  America is now joining Europe in this “mature” phase of development.  Whether any of us remain in it long will depend on what happens as a result of the technological and economic revolutions now going on in the countries of Asia and Africa, and also of course on how long the cold war remains cold.  At present no political party in Western Europe or America seems possessed of a philosophy of social change adequate to the pressures of current history.

In the Beckett plays, time does not go forward.  We are always at the end, where events repeat themselves (“Waiting for Godot”), or hover at the edge of nothingness (“Endgame”), or turn back to the long-ago moment of genuine life (“Krapp’s Last Tape”).  This retreat from action may disappoint those of us who believe that the events of the objective world must still be dealt with.  To say “perhaps,” as the plays do, is not to say “no.”  The plays do not say that there is no future but that we do not see it, have no confidence about it, and approach it hopelessly.  Apart from messianic Marxism, where is there today a faith asserting the contrary that succeeds in shaping a culture?

The walls that surround the characters of Beckett’s plays are not walls that nature and history have built irrespective of the decisions of men.  They are the walls of one’s own attitude toward his situation.  The plays are themselves evidence of a human capacity to see one’s situation and by that very fact to transcend it.  That is why Beckett can say that letting in “the mess” may bring with it a “chance of renovation.”  It is also why he is wrong, from philosophy’s point of view, to say that there is only “the mess.”  If that were all there is, he could not recognize it as such.  But the plays and the novels contain more, and that more is transcendence of the self and the situation.

In “Waiting for Godot” Beckett has a very simple and moving description of human self-transcendence.  Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) are discussing man, who bears his “little cross” until he dies and is forgotten.  In a beautiful passage that is really a duet composed of short lines from first one pair of lips and then the other, the two tramps speak of their inability to keep silent.  As Gogo says, “It’s so we won’t hear . . . all the dead voices.”  The voices of the dead make a noise like wings, sand, or leaves, all speaking at once, each one to itself, whispering, rustling, and murmuring.

vladimir.  What do they say?

estragon.  They talk about their lives.

vladimir.  To have lived is not enough for them.

estragon.  They have to talk about it.

vladimir.  To be dead it not enough for them.

estragon.  It is no sufficient.

(Silence)

vladimir.  They make a noise like feathers.

estragon.  Like leaves.

vladimir.  Like ashes.

estragon.  Like leaves.

In this passage, Didi and Gogo are like the dead, and the dead are like the living, because all are incapable of keeping silent.  The description of the dead voices is also a description of of living voices.  In either case, neither to live nor to die is “enough.”  One must talk about it.  The human condition is self-reflection, self-transcendence.  Beckett’s plays are the whispering, rustling, and murmuring of man refusing merely to exist.

Is it not true that self-transcendence implies freedom, and that freedom is either the most glorious or the most terrifying of facts, depending on the vigor of the spirit that contemplates it?  It is important to notice that the rebukes to Beckett’s “despair” have mostly come from the dogmatists of humanist liberalism, who here reveal, as so often they do, that they desire the reassurance of certainty more than they love freedom.  Having recognized that to live is not enough, they wish to fasten down in dogma the way that life ought to be lived.  Beckett suggests something more free—that life is to be seen, to be talked about, and that the way it is to be lived cannot be stated unambiguously but must come as a response to that which one encounters in “the mess.”  He has devised his works in such a way that those who comment upon them actually comment upon themselves.  One cannot say, “Beckett has said so and so,” for Beckett has said, “Perhaps.”  If the critics and the public see only images of despair, one can only deduce that they are themselves despairing.

Beckett himself, or so I take it, has repented of the desire for certainty.  There are therefore released in him qualities of affirmation that his interpreters often miss.  That is why the laughter in his plays is warm, his concern for his characters affectionate.  His warm humor and affection are not the attributes of defeatism but the consequences of what Paul Tillich has called “the courage to be.”

[Tom F. Driver (b. 1925) was the Christian Century’s drama critic and a Union Theological Seminary faculty member.  I have posted several pieces about Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot on Rick On Theater; 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; “Waiting for Godot,” a performance report, 31 October 2016; and “Beckett Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby,” another performance report, 1 May 2016.]

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.”