In the program for “Beckett Briefs,” a bill of three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City, three questions are posed: “Why these plays?” “Why now?” And “Why Beckett?”
The concise answers put forth by the production’s director, Ciarán O’Reilly, and Irish Rep Artistic Director Charlotte Moore are not my own, but I agree with them when they write that “there has never been a more consequential time to delve deeper and ask the fundamental questions: The Whys.”
On a recent short trip, while deciding what to see, I felt compelled to make room for Beckett in what was an impossible schedule. Yes, I was curious to see Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham in the play I consider Beckett’s masterpiece, “Krapp’s Last Tape.” And yes, I find I’m unable to pass up an opportunity of seeing “Play,” in which three characters — a man, his wife and his mistress — are potted in funeral urns in the hereafter, each retelling their side of a romantic triangle that hardly seems worth the everlasting discord.
As for “Not I,” the briefest of the three pieces, I have been waiting for another chance to experience the spotlighted mouth of a woman talking a mile a minute in fragments that I have yet to be able to piece together. Sarah Street, who heroically performed the work at a hurtling pace, confirmed for me that coherent narrative sense wasn’t what Beckett was aiming for.
After I arranged tickets, it was announced that the League of Live Stream Theater will be streaming “Beckett Briefs” from March 16 through March 30. I had thought this bill would be an ideal streaming offering and wished I had known in advance, but I’m glad I got to experience the production in person for reasons that have to do with the “Why Beckett?” question.
Beckett is perennially timely because his works concern themselves with those eternal questions that the political emergencies of the day cannot override. Even as we confront impossible times, we remain planted in that greater impossibility — human existence.
But I was craving “Beckett Briefs” for other reasons. I want to be more mindful of where I place my attention. Our minds are being hijacked by Big Tech, and one of the ironies of our age is that, even as our access to information, entertainment and consumer goods has grown exponentially, our capacity to focus and extend ourselves cognitively has become severely impaired.
As an act of personal resistance, I’m tackling James Joyce’s “Ulysses” again. I’ll admit it’s a struggle. I read a chapter, browse through supporting materials online, and then listen to the chapter in an audio recording on YouTube. Tech isn’t all bad. The resources on the internet were not available to me when I read “Ulysses” for the first time as a student. But back then, I didn’t feel the need to read Joyce as a sociological corrective. And I was somewhat more comfortable with the idea of difficulty in art. I wasn’t conditioned to expect everything worthwhile to be predigested and readily exploitable.
Joyce was, of course, Beckett’s mentor, and though he went in the opposite direction of Joyce’s maximalism, he shares the same determination to start from scratch with artistic form. In whatever discipline Beckett happened to be working in, he reinvestigated not just the vocabulary but the grammar of that medium.
His plays demonstrate a fierce effort to get down to brass tacks. What is the least that is required to reveal the most? Audiences have no choice but to exist in the theatrical moment, without recourse to linear logic, sententious language or psychological epiphanies.
“Krapp’s Last Tape” creates a dialogue between an old man and his younger self, through audio diary tapes that reveal what the character was like 30 years earlier — to his everlasting disgust. Krapp eavesdrops, in effect, on his younger literary aspirations and his decision to end the relationship that turned out to be his last chance of love.
The play may be Beckett’s most personal, the one that brings you closest to the man. In less than an hour, it achieves what took Marcel Proust, another key literary influence, thousands of pages in “In Search of Lost Time” to convey — that we die not once but myriad times, being a succession of selves, recognizable yet discrete.
Abraham, adopting a dignified clown demeanor, has an embodied theatricality that is well suited to Beckett’s style. His exuberant acting benefits from the severity of Beckett’s concision. I recently showed my students the film of John Hurt’s performance in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” which I was lucky enough to see in person at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. It remains for me the high-water mark of Beckett acting. But I was grateful to experience the text through a different voice and countenance.
It tells you something about Beckett that an actor of Abraham’s stature wants to do this play off-Broadway at this time of his career. The cast of “Play” — Kate Forbes, Street (doing double duty after “Not I”) and Roger Dominic Casey — lends the astringent playfulness a fresh tone in a lucid, deliberate, perhaps a tad overcareful production. The audience at Irish Rep on the Sunday matinee I attended may have been Beckett veterans, but it’s vital that a new generation of artists stays in contact with the vision of this pathbreaking playwright.
Which brings me to the other reason I had for seeing “Beckett Briefs” — my complete fatigue with realism. Or should I say my exhaustion with a kind of TV realism that seems to believe the purpose of art is to offer a slice not so much of life but of idiosyncratic behavior. It’s not simply that the canvas has shrunk. Beckett worked on a rigorously compact scale. It’s that realism has been confused with reality, and I worry that actors and writers are losing sight of the experience of living by zooming in on psychological minutiae.
Beckett reminds us of the metaphysical vastness that the stage can contain. Luckily, his style, always so ahead of us, is amenable to the close scrutiny of streaming. Were he alive he would have designed a digital performance that would have made us rethink the possibilities of the form. But it’s heartening that more people will be able to experience through “Beckett Briefs” the aesthetic renewal of his example.
For streaming tickets to “Beckett Briefs,” click here.
