B for Beckett
Selected works of Samuel Beckett
Plays
Play
Not I
Endgame
Sept 13-16, 20-23
Ticket Price: $15.00
Dining Seating 5:30-6:45, Theatre Seating 7:45, Curtains at 8:00
Reservations call 859-259-2754 or visit beetnik.com.
Lexington Herald-Leader Review
Play
Directed by Ryan Case
Cast
Missy Johnston
Robbie Morgan
Chris Rose
Play has one of the most confusing linguistic histories of any of Beckett's works. Although it was first written in English in late 1962 and early 1963, Play was first published in German as Spiel in the journal Theater Heute in July 1963, and even its first performance was German, in 1963, at the Ulmer Theater, Ulm-Donau. Faber and Faber published Play in English for the first time in 1964.
Three characters, two women and a man, form a disjointed chorus from their face-forward positions in three large urns. A spotlight targets each speaker in turn (though sometimes all at once) as they together relate and repeat, half-fugue, half-litany, the story of their love triangle.
There is something of Dante's voyeurism in Play, for we are permitted to glimpse and hear souls in a distressing yet comic stasis. Unlike Dante, though, who can accept the tableaux of poetic punishment he beholds, Beckett never affirms that his are just. They just are.
Play is Beckett at play.
Not I
Directed by Natasha Williams
Cast
Ryan Case
Not I is a twenty-minute dramatic monologue that is often pointed to as a stark example of the minimalism as well as the emotional force of Beckett's stagecraft.
Lost in the darkness a woman in her seventies discovers her voice for the first time in her life, a voice that feels so disembodied and out of control that she does not recognize the story it is telling as her own.
Torn between attempt to reason and the immediate sensations, between search for meaning and the platitudes of faith, longing to express and straining to hear Mouth, as she is referred to in the script, is the embodiment of the existential angst as impossible to explain as she is impossible to perform-- only to experience by both the actor and the audience.
Endgame
Directed by Adam Luckey
Cast
Pete Sears
Nick Swarts
Lynn Hungerford
Gene Arkle
Meet Hamm, a master who is blind and cannot stand. Meet his servant Clov who cannot sit down. They live in a tiny house by the sea, although it is suggested that there is nothing left outside—no sea, no sun, no clouds. Hamm and Clov, mutually dependent, have been arguing and fighting for years and continue to do so as the play progresses. Clov always wants to leave but never seems to be able. Also present are Hamm’s legless parents Nagg and Nell who live in trash bins. In Endgame, Beckett illuminates the theme of the repetitive nature of beginnings and endings as well as emptiness and loneliness, highlighting the belief that sometimes life is absurd, beyond human rationality, and is basically meaningless. Or is it what you make of it?
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