Word: beckett
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...Bernstein: There have been innumcrable interpretations of Endgame, perhaps the most famous being Martin Esslin's characterization of the play as an example of "theatre of the absurd." Do you feel that this type of criticism gets in the way of an approach to prcsenting Beckett...
Sklar: I think that kind of enapsulating of Beckett is garbage. Beckett's world is comprchensive and everyone I've read, really, except a tiny little article by Alain Robbe-Grillet, everyone tries to take a slice of the pic and say. "this is Beckett." Ruby Kahn interprets Endgame from a religious point of view, somebody clse says it takes place inside a womb, another says it's the beginning. I find myself enraged cach time I see one of these interpretations as a sort of umbrella that it has to go under...
...which we approached the production was in some ways very simplistic-with an incredible respect for the fact that Beckett has chosen each word as if it were the last word, there is nothing extra and nothing less than there should be. Every word and every juxtaposition of a word is very, very carefully meaningful, so we looked just in a certain way, word for word, at the words, discovering, for example, pattern for pattern, just what the rhythms and the patterns apply...
...Sure, but the problem is that many directors would approach Beckett doing that and limiting the production, limiting what the philosophical views are for the viewer...
...Beckett, a Stoic in a post-Romantic age, strives to find the words to face death with. The words are essential, yet they are impossible; perhaps even silence is impossible. With wrenching beauty at its climax and end, MacGowran's performance makes that terrible paradox its own only consolation. "You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me. until they say me, strange pain, strange sin ... Perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story . . . Where I am, I don't know...