Word: beckett
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...Samuel Beckett's message comes across clearly, but not through the exponential words of an essayist or even the straightforward narrative of a conventional playwright. And last weekend at Sanders Theatre, Earl Kim relayed it with music...
...composer teaching at Harvard and long an admirer of Beckett (whom he and his wife met in Paris), has succeeded in creating a production, using Beckett's words, that does not orchestrate but instead amplifies. For the one thing always true of Beckett is that he is all essence: over the years he has pared down his work until there is nothing left but the bare message of indomitable life-without obscuring fuzz. Accordingly, of the ninety-odd minutes of Exercises en route, not one was superfluous...
...used music, which he has been working on for the past eight years; dance, which his wife Mimi Kagan choreographed with the same fidelity to Beckett's spirit that Kim shows throughout the work; film; and actors. But this is no multi-media mishmash. Each medium, sparse and perfect, is fully capable of transmitting on its own Beckett's humble yet invincible commitment to struggle. Only rarely does more than one of the seven fine musicians-two of them percussion-play at a time. With them, and alone, sings an incredibly clear soprano, Benita Valente. Her voice rises...
...THIS is not only Beckett's world-it's everyone's. Later on Kim presented Beckett's play Come and go in its entirety. Three women are seated on a bench and one by one each leaves and returns, while the other two say a few words. Each set of two shares a secret about the third: "Doesn't she know?" "God hope not!" but each is oblivious to her own predicament as she returns. At the end they all three clasp hands-a superficial closeness, each alone with her memories, each having said little and communicated nothing...
...BECKETT himself once said, in the days when he still talked in sentences, "There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us . . . Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous...