Word: godot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...problem of 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...
Dorf and Williams have created a play with the form of absurdity, but lacking in the witty and poignant content that makes Godot so appealing. The audience drowns in a verbal melange that finally forces us to ask, along with Rob, "Is this story going somewhere...
Carlisle is still waiting. And waiting. It might as well wait for Godot because Knight, an economics major from Kirkland House, doesn't see himself as just a soccer player anymore. He's about to graduate from Harvard and he's no longer...
Through the '40s, Beckett kept writing, shifting, for reasons he never explained, from English to French as the language in which he created. He remained obscure until a spectacular burst from 1951 to 1953, in which Godot and three novels appeared to acclaim. The plays Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days followed by 1960. Thereafter he produced fewer and fewer, shorter and shorter, bleaker and bleaker pieces but never quite lapsed into the ultimate despair of artistic silence. His last work, Stirrings Still, a fiction of less than 2,000 words, was published in March...
Beckett's images have transfixed countless theatergoers, who watched the tramps in Godot wait for a savior who never comes, or heard the old man in Krapp's Last Tape review recorded fragments of his life as he murmurs, over and over, "Spool," or shared the haplessness of the elderly couple in Endgame as they face the end of the world while encased in trash cans. Beyond his own art, Beckett shaped the vision of countless others. They emulated, if never equaled, his simplicity of means, philosophical daring and ability to engage vast ideas in tiny trickles of closely guarded...