Beckett Shorts (review)

The last time JoAnne Akalaitis directed a Samuel Beckett play was Endgame at the American Repertory Theatre in 1984. The stage directions call for a gray room with two windows, but Akalaitis set the production in a dingy New York subway station. Beckett threatened legal action to halt the production and finally settled on a note in the program stating his dissatisfaction. In December 2007, Akalaitis returned to Beckett, this time at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). The production, Beckett Shorts, challenged the tension between director and playwright—specifically Beckett and Akalaitis—in determining who has creative authority.

Beckett Shorts consisted of four short plays: Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Rough for Theatre I, and Eh Joe. The plays represent different periods and mediums in Beckett’s oeuvre. At a talk-back with the audience, Akalaitis claimed that she had no clear intention in her selection of these four plays and the order in which they were presented. Even if her choice was instinctive, however, the order of the plays, all featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov (with additional parts performed by David Nuemann, Bill Camp, and Karen Kandel), produced a narrative. As one play unfolded into the next, they traced a character’s disjointed journey through life without a sense of who the man is, where he came from, or why other characters and things torment him. Akalaitis managed to create a meta-narrative of futility, driven by repetition, without ever seeming to trespass too far from Beckett’s scripted intentions.

Music by Philip Glass, a recording of electronic violin, drum, and harpsichord, greeted the audience upon entry to the NYTW. About eleven strips of white scrim hung downstage, separating the stage from the audience. As the music played in an endless loop, projections of light danced on the screen. The music and patterned lights suggested progression, but the loop was just short enough to make the audience aware of the repetition. The house lights dimmed as the music faded and the strips of scrim were raised to reveal a vast playing area covered with sand. In the first play, Act Without Words I, designer Alexander Brodsky surrounded the stage with white window blinds stretching from floor to ceiling; two openings, or doors, on each side of the stage were like two unblinking eyes peering back at the audience. The sand created visible traces of the actors’ movements, giving a sense of past as it moves forward. A moment happened onstage and lingered on even as the next moment occurred. This effect was amplified: between each of the plays the scrim came back in, and on it images of the play that just finished were projected, creating another loop of repetition.

A man in a crumpled suit was thrown out of the door stage right into the sand. Garishly colored trees, boxes, and other items—--painful to look at against the white sand in the bright light—lowered from above and whistles heard offstage all frustrated the man. Baryshnikov elegantly executed the movement of the wordless play, but he occasionally seemed rushed. A video of the action, designed by Mirit Tal, appeared on the backstage wall left of center. The video’s point of view shifted from each of the side doors. This doubled the effect that the actor and audience were not alone; someone else was watching, and the image of what he/she/it saw was made visible.

Mikhail Baryshnikov in Act Without Words I.

Photo: Joan Marcus.

The next two plays, Act Without Words II and Rough for Theatre I, developed the premise that “something is out there—--but you can do nothing” even further. Akalaitis’s visual choices supported and followed Beckett’s directions in the script. The goad, a mechanized arrow, appeared from a small opening in the blinds stage left. Harsh music accompanied the action of the goad, which created humor even as the eerie yellow lighting, by Jennifer Tipton, resisted it. Music gave the goad a...