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Theater: Boredom’s Brimstone

3 minute read
Gerald Clarke

PLAY AND OTHER PLAYS by Samuel Beckett

The architectural dictum “Less is more” can be applied to plays as well as buildings. A simple structure can be grander than an ornate one, and a few words from a great playwright can say more than volumes from a second-rater. No one has matched principle and practice as closely as Samuel Beckett. Some of his plays, indeed, are so spare that they can scarcely be said to exist: one new work is only 35 seconds long and dispenses with actors altogether, making use only of lights, sets and sounds.

In his best plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Beckett’s economy has the same unadorned force as a bolt of lightning. In his worst, he seems merely to be making bleak jokes, the humor of which is lost on everyone but himself. These three plays, expertly directed by Beckett’s chief interpreter, Alan Schneider, at the Manhattan Theater Club, show both sides of the playwright. Play ranks just below the best; That Time and Footfalls settle not far from the bottom.

Play opens on three faces, those of a man and two women, protruding from three giant urns. All speak at once, and none of them knows that the other two are there. Then a spotlight, often the most important actor in a Beckett drama, shines on each in turn, leaving the others in darkness. The spotlight is both narrator and inquisitor, forcing each of the three to tell his or her side of the same sordid story of betrayed love and adultery. Released from their urns and the grip of the spotlight, the three faces—of husband, wife and mistress—would be re-enacting a domestic triangle in an old-fashioned drawing room.

But they are not let go, and Beckett has placed them in what for him is hell, the brimstone of boredom. The merciless light makes each repeat the lies of life throughout eternity. “Is it that I do not tell the truth?” asks the wife (Sloane Shelton). “Is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then no more light at last, for the truth?” The light does not answer, but Beckett does, and the play is repeated, word for word, a second time and the beginning of a third Man is doomed, Beckett seems to be say ing, to go on.

That despairing theme recurs in That Time and Footfalls, but the effect is more numbing than chilling. That Time presents only the face of a sleeping man (Donald Davis) and his disembodied voice, coming from three different places as he dreams about the past. In Foot falls, a woman (Suzanne Costallos), apparently confined to an institution, shuffles back and forth across the stage, talking to her mother (Sloane Shelton), who cannot be seen. In both cases Beckett’s meaning is obscure, and he fails to meet a basic test of drama: the clash of character and idea. Sometimes less is really less.

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