Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Beckett Shorts by Samuel Beckett. Directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Original music by Philip Glass. Set design by Alexander Brodsky. Costume design by Kaye Voyce. Lighting design by Jennifer Tipton. Sound design by Darron L West. Video design by Mirit Tal. With Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Neumann, Bill Camp and Karen Kandel. A presentation of New York Theatre Workshop, James C. Nicola, artistic director. Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 14 December 2007 performance. At the New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4th Street, New York, 5 December 2007-20 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at Telecharge.com.
Four early Beckett plays are successfully refurbished for the 21st century
Mikhail Baryshnikov and Bill Camp in
Rough for Theatre I, from Beckett Shorts
(Photo: Joan Marcus)
The news about which you'll all be wondering is good: Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the most renowned dancers of the 20th century, eases into his new role as Beckett interpreter with grace and style in the program Beckett Shorts at the NYTW through 20 January.
And for this production, I have few "buts" to offer. JoAnne Akalaitis stages the four plays in the program with a visual imagination that retains Beckett's vision of optimistic futility while acknowledging, in the final play (a stage adaptation of the television play Eh Joe), the technological origins of Beckett's work for broadcast media. In this she is assisted by sculptor Alexander Brodsky's debut as a stage designer and the rest of the ensemble gathered for this short evening.
 Mikhail Baryshnikov as a Beckettian metrosexual in Act Without Words I (Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York Times) |
In Act Without Words II (1959), Baryshnikov is joined by choreographer/actor David Neumann. This most comic piece of the evening features Baryshnikov in sullen, sloppy mode, scarcely able to sustain interest in the carrot that he eats; in the meantime, Neumann's prompt, neat pragmatist is no further served by his precision than Baryshnikov's slob is by his apathy (though, too, Baryshnikov proves that irritable slovenliness can have a precision all its own). They each drag the other, never meeting, from repetition to repetition, stage left to stage right, each of them a comic Sisyphus, their rocks each other.
The fine Bill Camp is a crippled tramp to Baryshnikov's street musician in Rough for Theatre I (c. 1956), which is barely more than a Beckettian doodle, a sketch of the dynamics of envy, affection, hostility and human companionship. Camp especially makes the most of Beckett's histrionic cripple.
Mikhail Baryshnikov and Karen Kandel in Eh
Joe
(Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York
Times)
The final play of the evening, Eh Joe (1965), is the weakest in execution, though the most ambitious technically. Originally conceived as a television play, the play examines a man alone in a bare room; the camera movements are a series of closeups of Joe's face as the dynamics of guilt, memory and conscience play upon his features. These dynamics originate with an unseen woman's words. In Beckett's conception, the source of the words is tentative and ambiguous: they could be the memory of the woman's voice, conscience and guilt themselves as female, or an imagined former lover.
To locate the voice in an onstage body, as Akalaitis does here in the person of Karen Kandel, is to undermine some of these ambiguous dynamics. No argument with Kandel's performance (though she does risk a certain imperiousness which detracts from the experience of the ambivalent voice), and Mirit Tal's video design cleverly maintains the experience of the videographed closeup of Joe's (and here Baryshnikov's) face. But, as a whole, the shifting audience perspective from Joe to the speaker, from down right where Joe sits to up left where the woman alternately sits and stands, dissipates Beckett's more laserlike conception of the work. Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn wrote about the play in A Beckett Canon:
... the voices of Joe's past -- only his parents are mentioned -- are moral voices, but in the present intensity of listening the voice is sarcastic about a residual Christian morality, and it is crucial to remember that the voice exists only in Joe's mind. The words that Joe hears in a woman's voice are his own ...
The four plays presented in Beckett Shorts never really add up to more than the sum of their parts -- perhaps that's inescapable, given the varying genres of mime, sketch and video play presented here. But the Akalaitis/Baryshnikov Beckett is, regardless, a fine evening. Philip Glass's new score for the program is unobtrusive -- it will be effective for those who enjoy the composer's work, but won't detract from the plays for those who find it less entrancing.
More on Samuel Beckett here.
Posted at 8.46 am in /Notices
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