Word: beckett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dramatic tension and variation is complicated by the fact that this play treats itself with frank absurdity and insouciance. As Rob remarks at one point, "Even when something happens here, nothing happens." The text seems to strive for the bizarre comedy of nothingness epitomized in Waiting For Godot. In Beckett's work, though nothing happens, the audience is satisfied and even amused. But these characters lack the magnetism and originality of a Vladimir or an Estragon...
...indisputably at the top of her profession. The problem is that no one, including the Manhattan-based choreographer-directo r herself, can easily describe what that profession is. "If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't do it," says the avant-garde artist, paraphrasing her idol Samuel Beckett. Her productions are always an evocative blend of dance, music, words and light, but to her latest piece, Endangered Species, she brings something + entirely new: live animals, including Flora, a baby elephant, and Clarke's own horse, Mr. Grey. She maintains that they're being used as "sentient creatures" rather...
This minimalist approach succeeded last year in Hill's bleak staging of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, because it reflected the barrenness of Beckett's verbal landscape. But in a show about the foibles of human emotion and the intricacies of deception, more natural and sympathetic direction is required. The audience may laugh at the characters in Betrayal, but Hill ensures that we will never empathize...
...treating every alien he met -- even an American -- as an unintelligible buffoon; and his John Bullish contemporary Evelyn Waugh all but enunciated a Blimp's Code by asserting that no man who knew more than one language could express himself memorably in any. (Take that, Nabokov! Et tu, Samuel Beckett...
...World War II, but it enjoyed a modest revival in the '70s and '80s, when restaurantification became the new fad (and source of higher profits). Old-timers still mourn the fate of the Coupole, a barnlike old brasserie that had served as home to Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Samuel Beckett; it was acquired by a restaurant chain, torn down and rebuilt in 1988 into a sort of yuppie grazing center. More felicitous was the 1986 transformation of the Cafe du Dome, a plain, bare sort of place, where an impoverished writer used to be able to get a saucisse...