Moreness or Lessness
By Jonathan Kalb
Beckett/Albee
By Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee
Century Center for the Performing Arts
111 E. 15th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Henry IV
By William Shakespeare
Brooklyn Academy of Music
(closed)
Once in a while, a production arrives
in New York that is custom made for the venerable if dubious tradition
of "second acting." (For the uninitiated: "second acting" means
slipping in at intermission to see the second act of a show one
is curious about but can't afford.) The multi-play evening Beckett/Albee,
directed by Lawrence Sacharow, is just such a custom job. Counting
the Ways, the Albee one-act in the second half, is the sole
repository of artistic facility and discernment in the evening.
The three short Beckett works performed before it--Not I,
A Piece of Monologue, and Footfalls--are woefully
misconceived, spoiled by the very extrovert sensibility that makes
the Albee glisten.
Albee is an important and gifted dramatist,
but he is not the soul mate of Beckett he is made out to be in
this pairing. In 1960, when the American premiere of Krapp's
Last Tape was coupled with The Zoo Story at the
Provincetown Playhouse, producers and audiences could be forgiven
for thinking that the two were fundamentally similar. They seemed
then to have comparable preoccupations with futility, comparably
dark senses of humor, and comparable tendencies to obsess over
language. All true and apparently decisive four decades ago. It
wasn't yet clear then that Beckett would go on to strip his works
down to even leaner ghostly essences until he seemed to be striving
toward silence. Nor did anyone yet know that Albee would eagerly
pursue a much more worldly path toward mainstream avant-gardism.
Whatever one thinks of the purportedly subversive edge that Albee's
partisans insist he has retained, he has clearly made crucial
compromises with celebrity culture in his very American
career. His sitcom-flavored quippiness, his hammy star-turn set
pieces, his deliberately heavy-handed metaphors: Albee is no monastic
artist, and to set him up as Beckett's twin now out of nostalgia
for some imagined moment when he might still have become that
(the program contains adjacent photos of the two writers as young
men) is to risk diminishing him with an absurd conceit.
Marian Seldes and Brian Murray were born
to play Albee. They are constitutionally hammy in complementary
ways, and both radiate powerful egocentric innuendo onstage even
when sitting and saying nothing. They know how to accentuate the
sort of seemingly gratuitous histrionic moments on which Albee
builds his dramas, peppering nonchalance with a solemnity that
reads as gravitas. I did not join the critical cheerleading for
The Play About the Baby in 2001--I found that play trite
and obvious--but I understand why many praised the chemistry between
Seldes and Murray so highly. They have the knack of transforming
stagey sardonicism into a strange sort of earnestness. Written
in 1976, Counting the Ways contains some of the same
basic elements as The Play About the Baby--vaudevillesque
set-pieces (it's subtitled "A Vaudeville"), digressions where
the actors address the audience directly--and Seldes and Murray
make these seem like the original that the later play copied.
Counting the Ways consists of
twenty-one scenes in which a husband and wife probe the quality
of each other's love both directly and through discussion of side
issues such as flower-petals, newspaper headlines, and food. They
spar, cajole, wheedle and nag one another in a portrait of marital
persistence and yearning with an unmistakable shadow over it (consciousness
of death), always poised to darken the levity. Interestingly enough,
when the author directed this play as part of the Signature Theater's
all-Albee season in 1993, he did it deadpan and with younger-looking
actors, and it came off as dull and dated.
The freer and more seasoned performers
here give it weight, humor, and grave specificity. One never questions,
say, the legitimacy or universality of arranging a supposedly
quintessential situation around a wife's burning of her crème
brulée, as one did in 1993. For one thing, these actors really
are of a generation where such a faux pas might mean everything.
And for another, the nuances they cull instinctively from the
text redound entirely to Albee's credit. They're wholly plausible
both as a charming couple and as histrionic monsters of self-involvement
whose inability to transcend trivial annoyances (or even to keep
within the confines of the fiction--"IDENTIFY YOURSELVES," shouts
a deep voice from the wings, which sounds like Albee's) take on
metaphysical resonance.
Beckett, for his part, had no use whatever
for this or any kind of actorly showboating--at least that was
his attitude from Play (1962-3) onward. His later works
(and the ones in the Beckett/Albee program are all from
the 1970s) approach his signature themes of nothingness, the imagination,
and the void ("nothing is more real than nothing," says Molloy)
through extreme actorly restriction. Expressive freedom is possible
in these plays, but it can be exercised only from within the circumstances
of real physical and vocal limitation he prescribes,
if the works are to retain their haunting effect. The actor's
self-abnegation, one could say, is the crucially non-metaphorical
part of Beckett's metaphor. Beckett writes, in this later phase,
from that inner voice we all possess which never yells or flaunts
emotion but essentially drones as it shows us, unembellished,
what and how we think.
His flow of introspective words, emanating
from his punctiliously crafted stage tableaus, operates in counterpoint
with the strange actors' dilemmas (speaking from urns, frozen
on a plinth, or with one's head strapped to a masking apparatus),
and these elements together force performer and spectator onto
a shared plane of heightened concentration about the "mine" of
emptiness Beckett drolly called "what not." If actorly denial
is false or absent, if comfort or vanity are obviously held more
dear than artistic sacrifice, then the whole operation collapses.
That's why productions that follow the author's instructions to
the letter can fall flat as easily as ingenious productions that
try to improve on Beckett with directorial gimmickry: in either
case, the play is ruined by excessive worldliness.
In Sacharow's production of Not I,
Marian Seldes is not masked narrowly around the mouth as the text
indicates, nor does she speak Mouth's torrential, self-denying
monologue in a hurry. The whole of her head and chin from the
nose down is visible beneath a black hemispherical hood resembling
a beauty-parlor hair-drier, and light reflected off her whitened
face reveals enough of the high, black-draped platform on which
she sits to destroy all illusion of disembodiment. Seldes speaks
in a slow, steady, deliberate manner that sounds wholly rational
and allows her to color every phrase with impressively "understood"
inflections and insinuations. When she pauses to deny the first
person to Mouth's unheard interlocutor ("What? Who? No? She!")
she seems to be speaking on a cell phone. One result is that the
central theme of hysteria and feminine protest (against received
language and the dominion of logos, involuntary sex, the notion
of an integrated self, and more) has no place in this performance.
Seldes's Mouth is not a surreally self-sufficient, figural organ
but rather the glimpse of a wholly integrated, securely self-possessed
woman telling herself wry, amusingly disconnected stories in the
dark.
Similarly in Footfalls, Sacharow
and Seldes have added personality and thespian sparkle to May,
a character Beckett deliberately depersonalized with "disheveled
grey hair" and a "worn grey wrap" trailing behind her as she paces
methodically to and fro. The stage light here is brighter than
I have seen it in ten viewings of this work ("dim, strongest at
floor level, less on body, least on head," writes Beckett)--the
better, I suppose, to illuminate the 75-year-old Seldes's beautifully
brushed, shoulder-length tresses and low-necked multi-color gown
with matching neck ribbon. She looks about 50, her cheerful voice
sounds about 35, and when she turns at the end of each pace and
gazes sunnily upward, wheeling round with her arms spread wide,
she resembles Marlo Thomas in "That Girl." The play also has another
character, a female voice, putatively May's mother, speaking from
the darkness upstage, and Sacharow has transformed her into a
visible woman (Delphi Harrington) who speaks to May from behind
an upstage scrim, framed in attractive purple light.
Not that it matters much given Seldes's
thoroughly un-ethereal May, but the result of giving the voice
a visible source is to eliminate doubt about the number of characters
truly present in the play. The other visible actress implies that
May's mother is unequivocally there, even though the text contains
numerous hints that one or both characters may be dead, that the
distinction between mother and daughter is to an extent arbitrary,
and that both may share aspects of the spectral character Amy
whom May describes. Footfalls, like so many of Beckett's
later writings, deals with ghostly presences, shades who interact
crucially with voices in the dark, who may in fact be
voices in the dark themselves. Hence the importance of the sound
of May's repetitive footfalls, with their reassuring implication
of continued physical presence, echoing against the indeterminate
solidity and reality of everything else. Seldes's May is discouragingly
grounded in the literal self.
As for Brian Murray, his Speaker in A
Piece of Monologue doesn't even attempt humility or self-abnegation.
Barreling onstage in a grey nightshirt and holey socks, he grimaces
at the audience for a moment, shouts the word "BIRTH!" as if horror-struck
("Birth was the death of him. Again."), and then delivers his
entire monologue with the grandiloquent phrasings and expressions
of an old Shakespearean actor. Activities described in the speech,
such as striking matches or turning to face the wall, are duly
performed or mimed, and this juggernaut of illustration, fueled
by the force of Murray's personality, overwhelms all thoughts
beyond the literal. When this play is performed by a stationary
actor speaking in even tones (as Beckett preferred), its incantatory
descriptions of lonely nighttime routines, artifacts of memory,
and repetitive graveside rituals take on deep ritualistic overtones
for the audience. Murray leaves one pondering only the magnitude
of his stentorian delivery and the extent to which celebrity itself
is simply incompatible with this author.
The beefing (Albeefing?) up of Beckett
is unfortunately common nowadays. The plays after Godot
and Endgame just aren't done very often in America, so
ignorance combines with fear and the assumption that a certain
atextual razzle-dazzle is needed to accommodate the impatience
of media-age couch-potatoes and mouse-clickers. Jeremy Irons's
mugging for the camera in Ohio Impromptu and Damien Hirst's
sensational interpretation of Breath as the adventure
of a fugitive satellite are good examples (from the well-publicized
Dublin Gate Theater's "Beckett on Film Project," released on video
in the U.S. last year). Rejection of just that buzz-and-hype-centered
mindset is actually the basis for Richard Maxwell's whole artistic
enterprise. Disgust with theater akin to Sacharow's star-burned
Beckett is what Maxwell says drives the notoriously flat, emotionally
uninflected performance style that has made him an avant-garde
star over the past several years.
Mostly, Maxwell has employed this flatness
in directing his own plays, such as Cowboys and Indians, House,
Boxing 2000, and Drummer Wanted. He believes it
isn't really a style but rather the absence of one, a ground of
subtraction that allows both spectators and actors freer access
to possibilities of meaning than other theater provides. It would
be wonderful if Maxwell's results really matched this quasi-Beckettian
intention. Unfortunately, most of what I've seen from him so far
has been worryingly broad-brushed and rough--a sort of one-size-fits-all
via negativa.
This is certainly the case with his much
anticipated production of Shakespeare's Henry IV at BAM.
Maxwell got little out of Shakespeare by having his actors speak
blandly and move stiffly in front of childishly painted backdrops.
The whole exercise seemed like a mistaken effort to puncture some
Shakespearean tradition that isn't really overinflated (not on
this side of the Atlantic at any rate). Maxwell came off as rebelling
against the very idea of vocal and physical competence in actors,
and few spectacles are duller than that sort of generalized adolescent
defiance. Provocative flatness certainly was employed as style
in this Henry IV, no matter what Maxwell says, and the
production was thus an important reminder that it's actually no
easier to "put on" true humility and restraint than it is to "put
off" carefully cultivated worldliness.
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