Word: beckett
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JWAS APPREHENSIVE beforehand, having already heard that the Caravan Theatre's new production of Waiting for Godot turns Beckett's four lonely male characters into two married couples. So was the gregarious young New York actress I talked to outside, "It's the all too familiar spectre, so to speak," she said, attempting to swagger like Mae West, "of the question just what can and cannot be dose with a play after it leaves the playwright's hands. Why someone went so far as to put on Virginia Woolf with an all gay cast. Albee went to court to stop...
...more worried about what had driven the company to undertake repairs on Godot. After just twenty years since its first performance, could the play that had so acutely formulated the "modern predicament" be wearing out, slowing down under the drag of over-familiarity, in need of rejuvenation? Could Beckett's spare masterpiece have become, along with Sartrian existentialism, a little bit worn by the shuffle of crowds? If none of this were true, why should a company take a play one of whose premises is the impossibility of consistent love or consistent anything else, and try to sexualize...
...approach begins to achieve the fascination he has strived for all along. It is only after he has left compromise behind and forsaken all ties with realistic credibility that the theatrical experience transcends O'Neill's stupid intellectual conceits and takes its place in the tradition that led to Beckett and Albee...
Even as he draws near the final condition to which the cylinder is doomed, Beckett is willing to grant but an instant of irony: the admission that "in this old abode all is not yet quite for the best." Then, soon, the last searcher ceases searching and joins the ranks of the vanquished, and the last sentence comes, as exact and pitiless as the first: "So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers...if this notion is maintained...
...dadaist image, a kind of giant coffee can with strobe light. The boredom is less involving than in Godot, the texture of the prose less rich than in the novels, but by maintaining its peculiar notion. The Lost Ones creates a super-metaphor with a life of its own. Beckett's latest book looks at the world with intent, unshrinking understanding--and touches its expression with an uncertain gleam of the playful...