Word: beckett
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...Lois E. Beckett...
...narrative, a skilled playwright can find in just such a conversation all the action an audience needs. The result can be poignant and elegiac, like David Storey's Home, or salty and burlesque, like David Mamet's Duck Variations, or full of rage and silences, like many of Beckett's dramas...
When Alan Schneider died in London in 1984 as a result of injuries sustained in a traffic accident, the American theater lost a director who had staged the U.S. or world premieres of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tennessee Williams' Slapstick Tragedy. Schneider personified the central virtue, and failing, of serious American stage artists: he so prized his integrity that he generally disdained Broadway and mistrusted popular success. He spent most of his later years directing novices at regional or university theaters, rather than have to contend...
...second half of the book is a captivating record of 1956 to 1966, when the director's collaborations with Beckett and Albee brought all three to the pinnacle of esteem. Schneider, a born pessimist, details the missteps and agonies of doubt that led up to each landmark production and makes every victory seem as surprising in retrospect as it was to him at the time. Few books have so vividly portrayed the initial fragility of what now seem eternal works of dramatic writing. Schneider specifies some literate imbeciles who offhandedly dismissed the talents of Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco...
...immediately judged the top gun, misery-wise. "Oh, yeah," says Jess. "That's a no-brainer. Don't change your mind. You'd only regret it.") They decide to put off jumping and instead form a bickering, wary, ad hoc fellowship. It's like The Breakfast Club rewritten by Beckett...