Beckett In Brief: Three Short Plays by Samuel Beckett

Beckett In Brief: Three Short Plays by Samuel Beckett
Sorenson Center for the Arts
Babson College
Babson Park, MA
Presented by The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
Directed by James Seymour
James Fenton, Scenic Designer; Chelsea Kent, Costume Designer; Alexander Fetchko, Lighting Designer; Elizabeth Callas, Sound Designer; Lisa Berg, Properties Master; Greg Nash, Stage Manager; Rachel Coming, Assistant Stage Manager

Ken Baltin, Will Lyman, Ashley Risteen
April 27–30 and May 3–7,2017

If you’re brave enough to go to a Samuel Beckett play, you’re in for a display of 15 rounds of intellectual and emotional turmoil. It’s a good idea to bone up on the playwright’s history and some kind of Cliff’s Notes summary about the plays.

If I heeded that advice, I wouldn’t have been trying to play catch up for the production of “Beckett In Brief,” a bundle of three Beckett plays last night. Beckett is the kind of playwright whose work I feel more than I understand. Even after reading discourses about "Rough for Radio II," I still could not fathom its twists and turns.

Irishmen Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are about as far apart in their style as Laurel and Hardy. Joyce expended pages to create his fictions, Becket created syllables…including un-nerving (for an audience not used to it), hold-your-breath passages of silence onstage. The bleak and fatalistic Irishman in him is in high gear in “Beckett in Brief,” a collection of three plays told in one 90-minute chunk at the Sorenson Center for the Arts at Babson College.

The Sorenson Center for the Arts is perfect for Beckett. The compact 60-seat black box theater is just the right size, intimate enough so the actors are close enough to the audience so we get powder burns as they deliver their pungent lines.

Beckett can be opaque one minute and punch-you-in-the-gut-observant the next, reminding us that our existence has a shelf life and chances are that, like his characters, we’ve let a good deal of it slip like sand between our fingers.

Beckett wrote “Radio Rough II” as a radio play in 1961. Played with the two actors who we see in silhouette, it recreates the auditory nature of a radio broadcast.

The radio play recreates the interchange between an aging character called The Animator, a young stenographer who appears to partially disrobe during the session, (ok the play was originally written in French during Beckett’s stay in France. Maybe he was drinking Absinthe at the time) and an unseen character called Fox. Honestly, I could barely figure out the allusions even after reading the Wikipedia notes. Beckett’s tortured characters, however, like the smoke from cigarettes that permeates your clothing, stay with you long after you’ve left their company.

“The Old Tune” is more familiar territory, the most straightforward Beckett you’re ever going to get.

Two old friends, 69 and 73, meet by chance after years of separation. The thirty-minute play is a morbidly humorous reflection on the unreliability of memory  and glimmerings of mortality on the horizon. The two argue over what happened to whom and when and the associations they have with their marriages and children as they reminisce.

Will Lyman as Mr. Gorman and Ken Baltin as Mr. Cream play the forgetful, arthritic old man roles a bit over the top, but since we’re talking about Beckett any injection of humor is appreciated. To modern audiences, the theme of that life has passed by those in their seventies is all too familiar. Or, with the advent of such dramedies as "Grace and Frankie," maybe he was way ahead of his time.

“Krapp’s Last Tape” is Beckett  (and Lyman) in full. It is Krapp’s 69th birthday. He’s made a new recording of his life in review for years and this night he finds a recording he made on his 39th birthday. The recording reminds him of the opportunities he’s lost or not had the courage to make. He gets into his cups. It’s not pretty. If you have the usual collection of the ‘road not taken’ moments in your life, his doubts and regrets are likely to set some of yours off as well.

Beckett’s persistent themes regarding memory, aging, sex, the cost of dreams deferred, and the cold shadow of death echo throughout the three short plays.  

The brooding Irishman went through patches of intense retrospection himself. Undoubtedly the musings are biographical, their expression meant to express in words what he’s felt and withheld for years. His work, from the enigmatic to the cautionary, has been doing that for over fifty years. Make a tape recording of your year in review at your own risk.

Comments

[Ann Baker]

You are admirable to go and see this. Especially now when life as we have known it may be coming to an abysmal end.