Word: beckett
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...play. You go to have a Theatrical Experience. Once the directors have locked you into that cramped little room under the pipes, with its black drapes and grilled slits of windows and 25 rickety wooden seats at most, all bets are off. They might perform one of Samuel Beckett's plays. They might blow the place up. They might just turn out all the lights and make you sit in the dark for an hour. Then again, that might be the Beckett play...
...original version of Krapp's Last Tape, one of those Beckett masterpieces which do not number accessibility among their many virtues, the audience did essentially that--sat in the dark--while the 69-year-old Krapp listened to his own voice on a tape. The audience listened to him listen to himself, replay himself, and tape his reactions to the replays. Mercifully, by skillful use of some impressive high-tech equipment, director Adam Cherson has somewhat embellished the purity of this experience. In this new version, Krapp (David Gullette) sits facing a hidden video monitor, and his reproduced image faces...
...scene opens in pitch darkness, except for the flicker of some electronic indicator and the calm cobalt face of the monitor. When time begins moving, it is with a queer jerky stylization, folding in on itself. Beckett's characters on paper are so surrealistic, so utterly removed from normal constraints or modes of reference, that it's an initial shock to see one walking around. The fifty-is Gullett, white hair frizzed, eyes bugged out, toddles and grumbles like a Monty Python animated character, and it's a long while before he talks...
Gullette, forced to create the difficult illusion that he and taped actor O'Neill are the same person, echoes the young man's mannerisms with fairly convincing results. Both of them speak in one of Beckett's crazy derived dialects, a mishmash of cliches and rhetorical fragments, the refuse of a language long cut off from creative input. Both speak despairingly of (literally) endless struggles to break the same habits, particularly a fierce predilection for eating bananas; Gullette eats two at the performance's start, in a display that moved one audience member to bubble enthusiastically to him at intermission...
Even talking to himself, Coward avoids garishness, vulgarity and commonness of mind, and references to his own sex life are usually oblique and always discreet. In one entry, in which he takes a splenetic swipe at Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot ("pretentious gibberish"), he goes on to attack Mary Renault's The Charioteer. "Oh dear," he says, "I do, do wish well-intentioned ladies would not write books about homosexuality. It takes the hero - soidisant - 300 pages to reconcile himself to being queer as a coot, and his soul-searching and deep, deep introspection is truly awful...