Word: macgowran
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...between movies. Last week's premiere featured Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach in Murray Schisgal's The Typists, a talky tragicomedy about two white-collar mediocrities spilling out the empty cup of their lives. The high night of the season should come next month with Jack MacGowran's readings from Beckett; instead of remounting the show on the stark set designed for its off-Broadway run last year, PBS is spectacularly but improbably staging the work in the Mojave Desert...
...Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett. What do you give to a man who has the Nobel Prize? Answer: the love, beauty, truth and artistry of Actor Jack MacGowran...
...this is admirably conveyed by Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett. A fellow Irishman, MacGowran can claim a friendship and affinity with Beckett attested to by a BBC play, Eh, Joe, specifically written for him by the Nobel-prizewinning playwright. With a seamless unity MacGowran has assembled a one-man reading session, principally from Beckett's novels (Malone Dies, Molloy, The Vnnameable) and plays (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame). Cloaked in a black-spattered coffin of a coat, head and body shaken with keening tremors, and eyes stony with grief, MacGowran...
...Words have been my only love," says Beckett. This show is abundant proof of that. The word as dance, as flame, as dirge, as echo, as whip, as caress, as cosmic howl-they are all here, and MacGowran catches every cadence perfectly...
...Beckett, a Stoic in a post-Romantic age, strives to find the words to face death with. The words are essential, yet they are impossible; perhaps even silence is impossible. With wrenching beauty at its climax and end, MacGowran's performance makes that terrible paradox its own only consolation. "You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me. until they say me, strange pain, strange sin ... Perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story . . . Where I am, I don't know...