Word: beckett
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Artistically, Williams and Martin, as comics of quicksilver intelligence and bleak vision, seem eminently suited to play Samuel Beckett's battered tramps. Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) and performance artist Bill Irwin are nonpareil casting for the pompous landlord and his slavish manservant. Director Mike Nichols, a winner of eight Tony Awards, has an apt gift for seamless transitions from farce to ferocity...
...recalled the 1956 U.S. debut, in which Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell found the laughs, and interpolated a few more, without grasping the work's tragic austerity. Williams and Martin may comprehend the play but do not show faith in it. Although the puns and pratfalls come mostly from Beckett, there are inexcusable interjections, and the emotional force is dissipated in kickshaws and clowning...
...most interesting theater on campus came from outside the College. A troupe of Irish university student actors began their American tour by treating Harvard audiences to strong, unorthodox performances of four plays by modern Irish dramatists, including J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot...
...funnier than he is. The nation he has trod these 75 years, the framework for his antics, is itself a dark and serious comedy, simultaneously rejecting and accepting everything in its midst; a riot, a scream. Sometimes (rarely) Nixon laughs aloud. The gunshot laugh, the "Ha!" It is what Beckett designated as the risus purus: the laugh laughing at itself in the abysmal farce, in which every part is deadly ridiculous, every line as funny as a crutch...
...concert, was an electrified standing ovation. Almost never, that is, until they got an even louder and longer one for their heavy metal, strobe-light and steam extravaganza. This medley, which included songs like "Born to be Wild" and "Back in Black," was arranged in typical Din fashion, says Beckett. "Everybody was involved and threw in something...