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Buckets O'Beckett -- Four Short Plays by Samuel Beckett
Irish Repertory of Chicago
Directed by Matt O’Brien
June 7 through June 25, 2000
Victory Gardens Theater
2257 North Lincoln Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60614
(773) 871-3000 (box office)
In 1976 the American composer Morton Feldman met Samuel Beckett in Berlin and took him to lunch. Over a beer Feldman showed the hesitant Beckett the score of a piece he had written, inspired by Beckett's Film. Something in the score affected Beckett deeply. His whole life's work, he told Feldman, had a single theme. On a page of the score Beckett wrote: "To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow."
The program of four short Beckett plays in Irish Repertory Company's Buckets O' Beckett festival ingeniously traces the path from outer shadow to inner shadow. We see the whole range of Beckett's dramatic art in four stages: from the characterless abstraction of Quad, where silent automatons pace in mysterious patterns, through the mundane mime of Acts Without Words 2 and the droning melodrama of Play, to the intensely personal world of Krapp's Last Tape, in which a grizzled but still-fierce old man faces the mistakes of his younger selves. This last play is the festival's masterpiece. The production takes us deep into the inner shadow of Krapp's personal anguish and finds all the humor and heartbreak there. The outer shadow of the first three plays, however, director Matt O'Brien seems reluctant to enter. Faced with portraits of impersonal anguish, worlds in which nameless characters move through senseless routines, O'Brien looks for laughs too soon. Beckett's humor is not meant to relieve or contrast the oppressiveness of his world; it is a direct result of the oppressiveness of his world. Human persistence in a world without reasons is for Beckett the best joke of all. O'Brien doesn't trust the audience to get the joke. He perks up the world of the first three plays, undermining the comedy and pathos alike. We see the outlines of the path Beckett described, and we manage to arrive at its end, but we look back and realize we were not allowed to walk it.
The festival opens with Quad, a piece so bleak and cryptic at first glance one can understand a production's impulse to make a joke of it. Beckett wrote and directed it in 1981, perhaps unsurprisingly for German television. Four figures in monkish robes, cowls hiding their faces, pace in unison around and through an invisible square. The first figure enters alone and walks each possible path in the square, then the second joins and does the same, then the third, then the fourth. The figures exit in succession. After a pause the whole process repeats, but this time the second figure is the first to enter. Another pause, another repetition with the third figure entering first, etc., until every possible combination of paths and orders has been exhausted. The final figure exits and the audience, in unison, scratch their heads.
The particular excitement Beckett's short plays offer is the revelation of a human world in what first seems alien and incomprehensible. Nearly all of Beckett's plays employ purposeful repetition. In Acts Without Words 2, two characters who live in brown sacks mime contrary daily routines, but in the end drag their sacks along the same path; their commitment to their differences in the face of the repeated task becomes both comical and poignant. Play, with the comically modest stage direction "Repeat play," demands just that–and the story springs open like a locked box. In Krapp's Last Tape, Krapp plays and replays a recording of a certain potent memory; finally we realize with him it was the moment of his greatest loss in life. The repetition in Quad, however mechanical it seems, is purposeful, and must be shown to be so in production.
The most basic purpose the repetition serves is to attune the audience to the contrasts and obstacles that interrupt it. Beckett's script calls for different colored robes for each figure, and a different percussion track to follow each, "intermittent...to allow footsteps alone to be heard at intervals," and "pianissimo throughout." These contrasts are only the barest suggestions of individual identities, perhaps intended to pale before the incessant and ultimately oppressive march. But we are meant to see distinctions, and we are meant to hear human footsteps. In diagonal paths across the square each figure makes a brief turn to avoid the center, then continues to the opposite corner, creating a space in the center of the square that no figure will cross. This forbidden space has inspired intellectual contortions impressive even for Beckett critics, who have found in it everything from "Beckett's most vivid image of postmodern literary theory," to "Being that determines but is itself indeterminate, whose ultimate mystery is humanly undeterminable." More immediately, the space reinforces the sense of Quad as a human world. One wonders whether the figures avoid it because are they compelled to or because they choose to; one notices that while the figures avoid it they can neither collide nor meet.
O’Brien’s production is primarily concerned with keeping the audience stimulated, and as a result manages to obliterate any trace of a human world. He dresses the figures in garish fluorescent robes and sets their steps to percussion tracks so noisy and hyperactive that the four together sound like a Tito Puente solo. There are no footsteps to be heard. The players rush to keep pace with the soundtrack, and their haste makes their movements so imprecise we cannot read intention in them. Whatever the center space might mean, in this production it means nothing. The blaring sound and color spare the audience the risk of boredom. They also spare us the excitement of looking, however briefly, into a forbiddingly bleak and quiet world, and discovering it to be a human place with familiar paths.
Acts Without Words 2, though far less cryptic than Quad, meets a similar fate when the production sacrifices the characters' predicament to self-conscious silliness. The actors in the festival's Acts, Christopher Lo Duca and Dan Kozlowski, are allowed performances of excessive length and self-indulgence. Lo Duca as the bumbling sack-dweller picks the least active physical attitude possible: fatigue, which he succeeds in transmitting to the audience. Kozlowski as the vigorous sack-dweller cannot let Lo Duca do all the bumbling, so he does too, only faster. The contrast between the routines is undermined, the characters' commitment to them seems minimal, and the conflict between individuality and enforced repetition is obscured. Without a sense of the characters' predicament, Acts is reduced to sight gags.
Play takes place in the threshold between outer shadow and inner shadow. As in Quad and Acts, the characters are victims of an unseen force, but as their story unfolds we discover they are also victims of themselves. For all the pressure the play puts on the characters, it puts at least as much on the actors, demanding almost superhuman speed, precision, and timing. The cast of the festival's production are not always up to the task. Neither is O'Brien, who in an effort to relieve the pressure reduces the play to a high-speed soap opera.
On a darkened stage the heads of three characters, a man and two women, protrude from three giant urns. "Faces impassive...voices toneless...rapid tempo throughout," is Beckett's instruction. A sharp spotlight darts from face to face, provoking bursts of speech from the character lit. When the light moves the speaker falls silent in mid-line or mid-word. The new speaker starts just as abruptly. Their speech seems at first to be nonsense. One catches phrases like, "He stinks of bitch–" "I'll cut my throat–" "Calves like a flunkey–" "I simply could no longer–" A pause, darkness, then a second section in which the speech is quieter and the lines briefer, but no more coherent. Pause, darkness, and the play repeats.
Upon repetition Play explodes with meaning. The first section allows us to piece the story together. The characters are cliches: the hysterical and possessive wife, the condescending husband, and the catty mistress. Their story, a classic domestic melodrama, moves from betrayal to confrontation to confession, then back to betrayal. In the second section the characters break from the story of the affair to reflect on their present situation. They are dead, we realize, and only faintly aware of it, not at all aware of each other. Each imagines the other two reconciled and living happily together. They are compelled to speak by the light, the source of which they do not know, and each time it returns they repeat first their cliche-ridden accounts of the story, then this brief reflection, word for word.
Beckett subjects the characters, three self-made cliches, to the trauma of incessant interrogation, and they find a way to speak as suffering people. However silly and deluded their story, their reflection shows glimmers of suffering and self-awareness. "Mercy, mercy, tongue still hanging out for mercy. It will come," the wife says. Beckett subjects his audience to initial incoherence and stark repetition, and our sudden discovery of the story and the hidden suffering beneath it moves us more than the story itself ever could.
But much as O'Brien's Quad kept us from finding a human presence in the sound of scuffing feet by cranking up the soundtrack until we couldn't hear the feet, O'Brien's Play makes it difficult to find the suffering beneath the melodrama by cranking up the melodrama until it seems to be all the play has to offer. Cast members Melissa Van Kersen, Vincent Mahler, and Mindy Feedham wail and moan their way through the story and the reflection alike. The pace and pitch of the performances vary so widely that the characters seem to be in different worlds, if not different plays. We never feel the oppressive weight of a waking death of endless repetition, which is precisely what makes the signs of real suffering in the second section so powerful. "Faces impassive...voices toneless...rapid tempo throughout," was Beckett's method for conveying the weight of this subterranean world. O'Brien's production disregards this–which is perfectly acceptable–but makes no effort to find its own method.
After the noisy banality the festival forces on the first three plays, Krapp's Last Tape comes as a relief–and soon becomes so powerful one forgets the first three entirely. The success of the festival's production is attributable in part to the play’s intensely personal character. Since Krapp’s misfortune is a result not of a mysterious outside force but of Krapp's own character and choices, O’Brien seems not to feel the need to rescue the audience from the gloom. This gives full rein to actor William Norris, whose combination of ferocity and sensitivity as Krapp is little short of miraculous.
The play depicts an old failed writer facing the moment he abandoned romantic love for a life of self-imposed artistic isolation. Each year on his birthday Krapp has recorded a tape of spoken notes about the past year after listening to a tape made on a previous year. This year, on his 69th birthday, Krapp listens to a tape of himself at age 39. The younger Krapp rhapsodizes about his decision to devote his life to an artistic vision of "the dark I have always struggled to keep under," a vision which has since come to nothing. The older Krapp skips forward until he finds what he most wants to hear: the story of his last encounter with a woman who loved him. Out among the reeds in a rowboat he told her "it was hopeless and no good going on." They lay in the bottom of the boat together, his head on her breast, and drifted. The older Krapp then tries to record this year's tape, but finally tears it from the machine and returns to the old tape. While the lights fade he listens again to the story of his lost love.
Since Krapp has abandoned human relationships, his own accounts of himself are all he has to remind him who he is. He listens to the tapes not to enjoy old memories before setting down new ones, but to find a reflection of himself in old memories so that he knows how to relate to the new ones. The stakes of his listening to past tapes are nothing less than finding the reason he is alive.
Norris listens with an intensity to match. His Krapp seizes every word his younger self speaks in the hope of finding a few that will sustain him. The younger Krapp mentions an old woman he often hears sing. "Shall I sing when I am her age, if I ever am?" he asks. Norris’s Krapp seems ready to burst into song for the first time in his life if only his old self tells him to. The answer is, "No." Norris is just as intent at the questions that follow: the past is so present in his performance that his Krapp is ready to find inspiration in a boyhood song. "Did I sing as a boy?" "Did I ever sing?" Each time the answer is, "No."
This is how Krapp listens, to sustain himself; when he speaks, it is to justify himself. Norris is as smug and scornful when speaking–both on tape as the younger Krapp and in person–as he is sensitive and eager when listening. The 39 year-old Krapp on tape says of himself at 29, "Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp," and notes that the 29 year-old Krapp, whose tape he has just reviewed, "sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it’s over." Having gained the support and perspective of his past selves, Krapp must then assert his superiority over them, if only by mocking their naivete. The 69 year-old Krapp begins his new tape with the words, "Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that." Norris, as he speaks, practically writhes with disgust. But this year the scorn won’t hold. While Krapp has grown less naive, he has grown closer to realizing how poorly memory alone has sustained him. And having just confronted what might have sustained him–his lost love–Krapp can no longer justify himself. He returns to what is left of his love, a few feet of tape that hold the story of his proud farewell to love. As the tape plays Norris cradles the recorder like a wounded child.
If Krapp's Last Tape seems less oppressive than many of Beckett's plays, it is because we first understand this play as an anatomy of personal anguish. The character's soul is in shadow, but the audience sits at a safe distance, sympathizing or judging. Krapp chose his own unhappiness, we tell ourselves: we are free to choose otherwise. In Quad, Acts, and Play, however, the whole world on stage is in shadow, and the darkness covers the audience as well. We must either reject the world of the play as being an untrue portrayal of our own, or we must accept it and locate the senseless patterns, the pointless tasks, the waking death in our own lives. This is hardly a welcome task, and seems to be the very task the festival productions of Quad, Acts, and Play would spare us.
Krapp's Last Tape, however, can serve to open a reluctant audience to an experience of Beckett's other short plays. Krapp's predicament is not simply the result of a decision, but of qualities every person shares in some measure: ambition, pride, stubbornness, selfishness. The release of "the dark I have always struggled to keep under" is a self-indulgence so extreme it leaves no room for love. Krapp's Last Tape shows us how the shadow of isolation and futility can begin within us, after which the worlds of Quad, Acts, and Play no longer seem bizarre or unfamiliar. Had the festival productions not tried to dispel the shadow in Quad, Acts, and Play, any lingering resistance the audience felt could have been conquered by Krapp's Last Tape. The process of discovery the individual plays offer–the revelation of a human world in what first seemed alien and incomprehensible–might have been repeated threefold. Had the festival lived up to the program's potential to carry us from outer shadow to inner shadow, our own excitement might have carried us back again.
Beckett's plays have reached an increasingly large audience over the past few years, due in no small part to the efforts of Michael Colgan, artistic director of Dublin's Gate Theater. Colgan has produced large-scale revivals of Beckett's plays in New York in 1996, Melbourne in 1997, London in 1999. Colgan's latest endeavor is the Beckett Film Project. Directors from Anthony Minghella to David Mamet and actors from Kristen Scott Thomas to John Hurt are currently at work on film versions of all 19 of Beckett's stage plays. "It's the same plays but different audiences," Colgan said in a recent interview with the New York Times. "Today, people are overcoming the idea that he is bleak and inaccessible. What we now see more is the humor is in the plays."
The humor, of course, has been there all along. So has hope. As we have grown more familiar with Beckett's work, we have come to distinguish between the worlds on stage and the outlook of the plays themselves. The worlds are bleak; the plays are not. The difference is human persistence. One can conceive of the characters in Beckett's plays as a collective protagonist, the worlds they struggle through as a collective antagonist. The world's advantage is so decisive, it seems ridiculous: no character can escape, alter, or even understand his or her surroundings. But more ridiculous–and ultimately decisive–is the human miracle: that in the face of such a world, however foolishly, the characters persist.
Beckett's plays may be less frightening to us than they were to his generation, but as the Buckets O' Beckett festival demonstrates with both positive and negative examples, a production still must enter the shadow in order to find their humor and humanity, and this still requires bravery.
--Stephen Boykewich
PRODUCTION NOTES:
Cast:
Quad
Christopher Lo Duca
Mindy Feedham
Melissa Van Kersen
Vincent P. Mahler
Acts Without Words 2
Dan Koslowski
Christopher Lo Duca
Play
Melissa Van Kersen
Vincent P. Mahler
Mindy Feedham
Krapp’s Last Tape
William J. Norris
Set design: Robert G. Smith
Lighting design: Jaymi Lee Smith
Sound design: Lindsay Jones
Costumes: Margaret Walsh
Stage Manager: Karl Sullivan
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