Beckett

It was, I guess, unavoidable in this year of Beckett, that we would go see the evening of three pieces performed by Lisa Dwan. The three solo pieces, Not I, Rockabye and Footfalls were at the Skirball Center at NYU.

Traffic was bad news (not unusually bad in Manhattan, but really really bad on the Sawmill Parkway), but after we got there everything settled down. We went to Dojo on Mercer St. which is a couple of blocks from the theater. I've always been fond of that place and it didn't disappoint; food is good and prices are extremely reasonable. The one downer about Dojo is it's across the street from what used to be The Bottom Line . . . ah memories!

The first thing out of Wallace's mouth when he saw the space was 'This is not the right theater for these plays'. And he was right. Especially for Not I. The disembodied mouth was a tiny speck elevated 10 feet or more and way upstage. You could barely see it. I guess for a lone voice screaming into the void it was an interesting choice, but I think the piece would have been better served in a more intimate space.

I didn't have a similar problem with Rockabye and Footfalls. I guess with virtually any play the more intimate the better, and Bette had seen and been knocked out by these two plays with Billie Whitelaw when she originally performed them in the early '80s in NY in one of those smaller spaces on Theater Row. In the case of last night's performance, I think haunting is the best adjective. Beckett had a real sense of not only the poetry of the words but of the stage pictures themselves. In these two pieces an actress alone in the world, with the exception of the recorded voice. In the case of Footfalls the voice is the mother of the character and in Rockabye it is the internal monologue of the lone figure rocking her way through life 'alone in a window'.

Technically these pieces were amazing. The lighting in footfalls was ghostly and evocative, and in Rockabye it was stark white, from the side as she rocked and we hear the voice, providing an image of one side of her face lit and the other as dark as the far side of the moon, then the lighting would change when the voice and rocking stopped . . . and the woman in the chair would say simply: More. And the lighting would change back and the rocking start again.


Lisa Dwan was very good; in fact, Bette said she surpassed Whitelaw in Footfalls. At any rate, I'm glad we made the effort and went . . . a rare opportunity to experience Beckett on a very high level of performance and production. The director was Walter Asmus, who also directed the amazing Godot I saw a few years back. He is also a direct link to Beckett, having worked with him extensively.

Good stuff. I'll sure never forget it.

Next up in Beckettland: Happy Days with Diana Weist at Yale Rep! And you know what comes after that!