Word: neeson
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...Liam Neeson sits on a bed on the left side of the stage; on the right side is a blank wall on which his face is projected in closeup, as a woman's voice softly, insistently works its way into his head. "Anyone living love you now, Joe? Anyone living sorry for you now? That slut that comes on Saturday, you pay her, don't you? Penny a hoist, tuppence as long as you like." Once another woman did love him, and he shrugged her off, and she tried killing herself several ways, until one worked. And Neeson stares ahead...
...Happy Days to the 40-second Breath. That two-week event provided New Yorkers with what may have been their greatest theatrical experience of the decade. This time the Gate's artistic director, Michael Colgan, presented three pieces from Beckett's writing for other media: TV, for Eh Joe (Neeson), the short story, for "First Love" (Fiennes) and the novel: Barry McGovern's tour-de-force I'll Go On, a distilling of the Beckett novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable...
...Beckett's characters may never understand the harm they've caused or allowed, until "the agenbite of inwit" - a medieval phrase, often used by Beckett's mentor, James Joyce, to refer to the remorse of conscience - forces them into self-knowledge, into an act of contrition. In Eh Joe Neeson's face hardly moves a muscle; the play's director says the performance is "the longest reaction shot in movie history." Yet by the end of the half-hour play, his face is creased into something like penance...
...Laughing wild certainly abounded in the hour-long Saturday matinee of readings from Beckett texts by Fiennes, Neeson, McGovern and Julianne Moore. Among the readings was a passage from the short story "The Expelled," published, like "First Love," in 1946. Its protagonist is a dour brute not far from the nameless necrophile in "First Love," and Fiennes again took the role. He describes walking down a city street when "I had to fling myself to the ground to avoid crushing a child. He was wearing a little harness, I remember, with little bells, he must have taken himself...
...What won Beckett his Nobel Prize - the grim death gargling at you from every page - may also keep audiences away; they think he's a sanctified chore, homework for Mensa members. But as McGovern, Fiennes and Neeson demonstrated, with their considerable artistry, Beckett was a mesmerizer, a spellbinder, who held a cracked mirror to humanity and saw the humanity in it. We're pitiable creatures, no doubt, and birth is just the first step toward death, but funny in our cruelties and yearnings. At least that's what this Beckett fan thought at the end of the Gate marathon, Laugh...