Beckett, Samuel

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    ‘Dance First’ Review: Beckett Encounters Himself

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    Samuel Beckett’s life is reduced to mommy and daddy issues in a biopic that offers simple explanations for the career of a complex writer.It may well be that the happiest day of Samuel Beckett’s boyhood was when he flew a kite with his father. It may also be that one of his great regrets was not winning the approval of his disciplinarian mother.Even if true, these details argue for printing the legend. “Dance First,” a Beckett biopic from James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”), offers simple explanations for the career of a writer whose output famously resists explaining. The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.This largely black-and-white film opens in 1969, with Beckett (played at that age by Gabriel Byrne) receiving the Nobel Prize. Beckett, uncomfortable with the event, climbs a ladder up the proscenium and escapes, only to encounter … himself, also played by Byrne. As a framing device, Beckett will interrogate Beckett. The back-and-forth owes more to Freudian psychoanalysis than “Waiting for Godot.”We meet Beckett’s mother (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), who disdains his writing. In Paris, where Fionn O’Shea portrays the playwright as a young man, Beckett butters up James Joyce (Aidan Gillen) and becomes an unhappy companion for Joyce’s daughter, Lucia (Grainne Good). Beckett’s affection for his eventual wife, Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine, and then Sandrine Bonnaire), is seen as complicated by a long-running affair with the translator Barbara Bray (Maxine Peake), who lies in bed with Beckett praising the genius of that new play in which “nothing happens.”The film attributes its title to advice that Beckett ostensibly gave a student, but the line also appears in “Godot”: “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” Estragon says. This movie — snazzy but empty — embodies those words all too readily.Dance FirstNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Waiting for Godot’ Review: Old Friends Falling in and Out of Sync

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      Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks star in Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Samuel Beckett left as little as possible to chance when he wrote “Waiting for Godot,” a play that, 70 years after its first production, usually looks substantially the same: the country road, the withered tree, the battered boots arranged at the top of Act II with “heels together, toes splayed.” In his stage directions, Beckett spent 195 words choreographing some horseplay involving hats.Live performance itself, then, would be the wild card. And so it proved on Saturday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where Michael Shannon is starring as Estragon (a.k.a. Gogo) opposite Paul Sparks as Vladimir (a.k.a. Didi). The two actors are old friends playing old friends, yet through the whole first act there wasn’t the faintest glint of chemistry between them.It was deadening to the production, and baffling for anyone who has admired Shannon’s and Sparks’s work separately or together, onstage or onscreen; I, for one, treasure the memory of them in Craig Wright’s “Lady” Off Broadway 15 years ago. Here their performances sprang into three dimensions only with the arrival, shortly before intermission, of a Boy (a lovely Toussaint Francois Battiste), who brings a message from Godot.I have no idea whether I caught the show on an off night, or if after merely a week of previews the production was still somewhat underbaked. But the inertness of Act I gave way to a high-energy Act II — rather denting the idea that one day in the nearly featureless void of Didi and Gogo’s existence is practically indistinguishable from another, but thank goodness anyway.From then on, Shannon and Sparks were in sync as scruffy, aimless, quarreling clowns who fail anew, by each fresh sunset, the test of being human. Buffeted by love and loathing, Didi and Gogo prefer to do their languishing together.“We always find something, eh Didi,” Gogo says, “to give us the impression we exist?”Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production for Theater for a New Audience lacks a discernible interpretation that we can grab onto, or that can grab onto us. But it does make striking use of the space, with a paved, two-lane road (by Riccardo Hernández) running downhill from the middle of the upstage wall to the back of the auditorium. The double yellow line in the center of the road — denoting a no-passing zone — could also be decoded as a no-dying zone. From the first moments of the play to the last, Didi and Gogo speak of ending their lives, but their passing is not to be.Under merciless sunlight (by Christopher Akerlind), Shannon is a crabbed and shambling Gogo, fidgety and peckish, bedeviled by ill-fitting boots. (Costumes are by Susan Hilferty.) Though Shannon does a bit of comic tumbling on the road, he also sometimes barely has to move to land a laugh, his remarkable gestural efficiency combining with a marvelous dryness of tone.Sparks, meanwhile, brings buoyancy to Didi’s roughness, and a palpable, if bizarro, human center. Inspecting the amnesiac Gogo’s legs for proof of an attack the day before, Didi is ebullient when he finds it: “There’s the wound! Beginning to fester!”A chunk of a scene in Act II, involving Didi, Gogo and their only passers-by — the vicious Pozzo (Ajay Naidu) and the man he has enslaved, Lucky (a vivid Jeff Biehl) — would get bigger laughs if the blocking allowed more than half the house a view of the actors’ faces. A sightline worry throughout the performance is the road itself, whose incline puts some audience members at an awkward angle to the action.This “Godot” comes at a time so fraught that real-world resonances ambush us in the most unexpected shows, so it’s odd that that doesn’t happen here, or didn’t to me. Yet in some ways we are all Didi and Gogo, victims and onlookers — perpetrators, too — in the barbarism of the world.Weary of brutal cycles that keep repeating, they despair of their ability to alter the course.“I can’t go on like this,” Gogo says.And Didi tells him: “That’s what you think.”Waiting for GodotThrough Dec. 3 at Theater for a New Audience, Manhattan; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      The Last Days of Beckett’s, a Smoky New York Literary Salon

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      About a year ago, a literary salon sprang to life in a run-down townhouse in the West Village of Manhattan. Dozens of young writers, critics, artists, theater actors and filmmakers started going there almost nightly to drink, smoke, talk, dance and argue, much like their bohemian predecessors in the days before sky-high rents priced poets out of the neighborhood.The venue had the clandestine air of a speakeasy. Notice of its existence was passed along by word of mouth. Guests stuffed cash into a cardboard box marked “donations” to receive canned Modelo from a fridge. There were readings, screenings and music shows in the grand, loft-like ground-floor space. Neighbors complained constantly about the noise. The police barged in once during a play.“This place has given us a taste of an older New York we never saw,” said Christian Cail, a jazz guitarist who visited the space. “This isn’t meant to exist.”The host was Beckett Rosset, a 53-year-old writer with a rocky past who lives in a book-cluttered apartment upstairs with his 18-year-old tabby cat, Micio. Mr. Rosset was named after Samuel Beckett, the 20th-century literary giant who worked closely with his father, the publishing maverick Barney Rosset. Gradually, his salon became known as Beckett’s, and its happenings included a debate about Shakespeare’s identity, a showing of the 1972 pornography classic “Deep Throat” and issue release parties for Dirty Magazine and the Mars Review of Books.The writers Rachel Rabbit White, left, and Nico Walker, in the townhouse stairwell with Mr. Rosset.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLate in the fall, as rumors swirled that the building was about to be sold, word went out that there would be one last gathering. On a November night, some 100 devotees shoved past the townhouse door to attend a rowdy wake inside. Poets in scarves sipped Fernet and writers in denim jackets drank cheap red wine. Others hung out on tattered sofas, flipping through the works of Henry James.In the rear, a hushed crowd sat on the floor of a dark theater space equipped with a piano and a disco ball, waiting for the evening’s entertainment to begin. Acts included the blind soprano Nafset Chenib, who sang Verdi, and the literary critic Christian Lorentzen, who read his old humor columns from The New York Observer. A woman in the audience wearing Converse sneakers kept coughing as she smoked a cigarette.Mr. Rosset, nervy and thin, wearing a dark suit, stood up and faced the crowd. “It wasn’t so long ago I was sitting here by myself and I didn’t even know any of you yet,” he said. “Now the building is getting sold, but I’m just thankful to so many of you for what this place became.” Some of the regulars started sobbing and hugging each other.To its adherents, Beckett’s had become a downtown sanctuary for the city’s creative underclass. It started last spring, when the playwright Matthew Gasda, who is known for staging his works in lofts and apartments, was looking for a place to mount his satire “Dimes Square.” So an actor in his play, Fernanda Amis (the daughter of the novelist Martin Amis), approached her cousin, Pablo Marvel, who lives in the townhouse and is related to the family that bought the building decades ago, to ask about renting the ground floor. Mr. Rosset soon started managing things. During the run of “Dimes Square” performances, a scene was born.Partygoers at the last Beckett’s gathering.OK McCausland for The New York TimesA poster for Evergreen Review, the literary publication run by Barney Rosset.OK McCausland for The New York TimesAfter Mr. Rosset thanked the crowd on that November night, the gathering turned into a drunken send-off to Beckett’s. Guests danced to Oasis beneath the disco ball while others chain-smoked beside space heaters in the host’s bedroom.Among the mourners was a writer named Jonah Howell. “I’m from a swamp town near New Orleans and haven’t been in New York long,” he said, “but I’ve already learned the bar to entry to literary scenes is high here. You got to know the right people to get anywhere. But here, you just come and you’re in.”“To read at those places like KGB Bar or the Franklin Park series it’s like you need a National Book Award or something,” Mr. Howell added. “There’s no segregated class here.”The playwright Matthew Gasda at the piano, with the artist Alida Delaney.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Cail, the jazz guitarist, was standing near the bathroom line.“Where are we supposed to go now?” he said.As things shook out, Beckett’s wasn’t over quite yet.‘It Ain’t Pretty’Because the sale of a debt-ridden building in New York can be sluggish, the salon survived a few more months, resulting in a series of farewell parties with names like “Afterlife” and “Resurrection.” Amid the cigarette smoke haze at these bashes, the conversation often turned to Mr. Rosset and what would become of him once the townhouse was sold.“I think this place will come to signify its era,” said Anika Jade Levy, a co-editor of the indie literary publication Forever Magazine. “Now that it’s ending, I hope Beckett knows he’s more to us than just a man with a cool loft.”Cassidy Grady, an actor and playwright, whose “Fire Wars” was staged in the townhouse, shared the sentiment. “Beckett has never lived an ordinary life,” Ms. Grady said. “He’s been trying to figure out who he is through all this, but I think he thought he’d have more time.”Mr. Rosset had become a subject of fascination to his acolytes, some of whom accosted him for selfies. They had heard whispers of a troubled life — that he was a scion of literary royalty who had been in and out of jail. And they wondered about the framed Richard Avedon photograph hanging in his bedroom, a 1979 portrait that shows him, at age 10, standing next to Samuel Beckett.Late on a recent night, as yet another party emptied out downstairs, Mr. Rosset stood in his room, looking at the boy in the picture. “I still remember that day,” he said. “I flew to Paris with my father, and we all met at a cafe. I remember Beckett didn’t seem to like Avedon much. He said he’d only do the portrait if I was in it.”“When I look at this picture,” he continued, “I feel sad for that kid. That’s not a happy child. He looks in pain. It’s like he’s looking at his future and it ain’t pretty.”The host holds his 18-year-old cat, Micio.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Rosset had a privileged Manhattan childhood. His father, the founder of Grove Press, was a towering figure who published writers like Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs. He changed the course of American letters with his crusade against censorship by publishing works including D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” His legal slugfests resulted in landmark First Amendment cases.The younger Mr. Rosset grew up in a townhouse not far from the one where he lives now. As a boy, he sat on the staircase to get a view of the cocktail parties attended by the likes of Norman Mailer and John Lennon. He spent weekends at a house in East Hampton, where the novelist Kenzaburo Oe stopped by for visits, and he sometimes encountered his father’s first wife, the painter Joan Mitchell.“She overheard me learning how to say curse words,” he recalled. “She called me over and told me, ‘Your language, it’s beautiful.’”Mr. Rosset’s struggles began in his teens. He said that he was expelled from two private boarding schools, Rumsey Hall and Blair Academy, and started experimenting with hard drugs at night in Central Park. He described his father, who married five times, as an absent parent, but said that, as his drug use worsened, so did their rift, resulting in a strained relationship that lasted until his death in 2012.“It was easy to tell I was going down a bad road,” he said. “I always felt abandoned by my father, and that feeling came to define my life. But in fairness to him and my family, I was unmanageable.”By his 20s, Mr. Rosset was using heroin and living in Bowery flophouses like the Providence and the Whitehouse Hotel. In the mid-1990s, he was charged with selling narcotics and petit larceny, putting him in Rikers repeatedly. Inmates nicknamed him “the Brain,” he said, after he taught a cellmate how to read.“At the Rikers library, I found a rare first-edition Beckett book,” he said. “I shoved it down my pants and stole it. I sent it to my father to try and make amends. He mailed me some cigarettes after that.”The actor George Olesky stood up from his place on the floor to the delight of the Beckett’s crowd.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn his 30s, Mr. Rosset worked as a bartender, a proofreader and an assistant at a small record label. He befriended a West Village eccentric, Mary Kaplan, who took an interest in him. “She told me: ‘I feel sorry for your cats. Why don’t you all come stay at my home for a week?’” he said. “Well, I’m still here today. Mary saved me.”He moved into her townhouse, the same building that would become the site of his underground salon. As his stay expanded from weeks to years, he realized he had been taken in by a den mother of sorts. Ms. Kaplan’s father ran the Welch Grape Juice Company, and she used her largess to provide shelter for artists. Mr. Rosset helped take care of her until her death at 85.One of her great-nephews, Mr. Marvel, lives on the fourth floor, helping manage the building for his family. “I think what’s happened here with Beckett was guided by Mary’s bohemian spirit,” he said.In March, the building was put up for auction, and Beckett’s shut down indefinitely. Whatever happens next, Mr. Rosset said he was grateful for the ride, although he won’t exactly miss cleaning up after a bunch of hormonally charged poets and artists.Two Beckett’s regulars, Heather Simington, left, and Kitty St. Remy.OK McCausland for The New York TimesCasualties of another evening at Mr. Rosset’s salon.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Lots of them are privileged, highly educated, bored kids, but I’m not knocking them,” he said. “They’ve desired to become part of something, and that touches me, because I’ve felt like an outsider my whole life. For the first time, I feel like I belong.”Mr. Rosset declined to discuss the specifics of the Beckett’s business model, but said the money that guests kicked in had allowed him to make “enough to feed me and my cat.” The downtown scene that sprouted up around him, he added, also helped him make sense of his life. He’s even starting a publication, Tense, citing as its inspiration his father’s literary journal, Evergreen Review.“There’s an irony that I’m now channeling my father with this space and this magazine,” he said. “I’ve tried to be a lot of things in my life, but doing this finally feels right, because it’s in my blood, and that’s because of him.”The Last Last PartyMr. Rosset threw one last bash, billed in his email blasts as “The Rear End.” On the night of the party, March 18, the townhouse was packed. A group of women in fur coats stepped out of a black S.U.V. and tried to talk their way inside, only to be told by the volunteers at the door that Beckett’s was over capacity.“But I know someone reading tonight,” one of the latecomers said.Some of the guests were wondering where the scene would go now.The ballet dancer Ellen Frances in Mr. Rosset’s apartment on the night of her solo performance.OK McCausland for The New York Times“People are already trying to make new places a thing,” said Meg Spectre, an artist who had a Tamagotchi tied to her purse. “I heard at Manero’s in Little Italy people tried staging a play, but the restaurant got too loud. A scene has to happen organically, like it did here. You can’t force it.”The variety show that evening featured a reading by the novelist Nico Walker, a solo ballet performance by Ellen Frances and a pole dancing routine by Ella Wasserman-Smith. Mr. Rosset took part in a staging of a short Samuel Beckett play, “Catastrophe.”Around midnight, Ray Laurél, a musician from London, left the party and approached Mr. Rosset on the sidewalk, saying, “I just want to thank you, Mr. Beckett. I’m a theater kid from London and I was trying to find the scene here. Someone told me to come here because it might be closing. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”Mr. Rosset, in his apartment at the townhouse. “For the first time, I feel like I belong,” he said of his time as the host of the literary salon that took his name.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Rosset gave a smile. Then he went back to picking cigarette butts off the sidewalk.Two days later, Mr. Rosset was awakened by a call informing him that the movers had arrived. He rushed downstairs to watch them take away the piano, the chandeliers and the rows of antique chairs.Then the moving truck drove off, hauling a scene away with it.Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. 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      ‘Endgame’ Review: A Laugh at the Apocalypse?

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      There’s plenty of pleasure to be found at the end of the world in the Irish Repertory Theater production of Samuel Beckett’s play.The dog is a small, stuffed toy, pathetic and adorable all at once. A sewing project in progress, he has a patchwork coat, three legs so far — and zero genitals, because those are going to be the finishing touch.Hamm, the volatile, unseeing tyrant in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” has ordered the creation of this cloth companion: one more creature to shrink from him in the dreary, age-worn room that is his realm.“Can he stand?” Hamm asks.Placed on the floor by Hamm’s much-abused attendant, Clov, the pup promptly falls over — right on his snout at the performance I saw the other afternoon at Irish Repertory Theater. It’s the silliest bit of slapstick, and (with a vital assist from Deirdre Brennan, who made the dog) it works just as well as it must have when Beckett dreamed it up in the 1950s. You can almost feel the playwright, a great fan of physical comedy, winking from beyond the grave.It’s not the only time you get that sense in this revival, starring the Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson as Hamm and the actor-clown Bill Irwin, a Beckett aficionado, as Clov. When Clov points his telescope at the audience and tells Hamm, “I see a multitude in transports of joy,” that’s Beckett having a little joke with us.Joy is hardly the operative word, of course, in this post-apocalyptic play about the direness of the human condition. But pleasure? There’s plenty of that to be found in Ciaran O’Reilly’s main-stage production, whose requisite grimness is edged with the gorgeousness of performances that are sly, vivid and pulsingly alive.On a set by Charlie Corcoran, this “Endgame” looks just as the playwright meticulously specifies: the bare room with two meager windows so high up that a ladder is needed to reach them; the armchair on wheels, in which Hamm, who cannot walk, spends his days; the two trash cans off to the side, in which his parents live.Around Hamm’s neck hangs a whistle, and when he blows it to summon the beaten-down Clov, it is piercingly shrill — a sound to cut through far more noise and distance than ever separate them. Really, a dulcet bell would do. But this is how Hamm prefers to punctuate the dreary sameness of his days: with bursts of unprovoked aggression that send Clov scrambling to placate him.“Why do you stay with me?” Hamm asks — a fair question, as he is capricious and cruel.“Why do you keep me?” Clov counters.“There’s no one else,” Hamm says.“There’s nowhere else,” Clov replies.They can’t go on. They go on.Likewise Hamm’s parents, Nagg (an endearing Joe Grifasi) and Nell (an exquisite Patrice Johnson Chevannes). They pop up from their respective garbage cans to bicker, joke and flirt with each other, though they’re just too far apart to share a smooch. They laugh raucously at the memory of the accident that claimed their legs and reminisce dreamily about a boat ride they enjoyed in Italy. Whatever bleak horror they’re enduring now, pain is old hat to them, and they did know beauty once.“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that,” Nell says.It’s one of the play’s most famous lines. Still, is it accurate?Amid the bleak horror of the play, Hamm’s parents, played by Patrice Johnson Chevannes, left, and Joe Grifasi, happily reminisce about the days when they still had their legs.Sara KrulwichClov is miserable, but that’s not what makes him comical as he hauls his stiff-legged body up and down his ladder. Dressed in calico-cat colors by the costume designer Orla Long, and looking like he’s stepped out of a Vermeer canvas that’s browned with age, he has the manner of a captive sprite and a physicality that is pure clown. His muttering rebelliousness is clownish, too.And Hamm, seated in a chair that’s as much a throne as the one Thompson occupied when he played the title role in “The Emperor Jones” at Irish Rep, is funny because he’s ridiculous, vain and at ease with his own disgustingness. The grossest comic line in “Endgame” — a joke that feels like a nod to Beckett’s luxuriantly crude friend James Joyce — belongs to Hamm. What fun it is to watch Thompson, so often cast in somber roles, land it impeccably.This is not to say that the play is a laugh riot. In 1956, as Beckett was writing it, he described it as “Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than ‘Godot.’”All true, yet in the humor he built into that text, he left more space for humanness than the play’s reputation suggests. Despair is the dominant note, but where there is laughter there is hope. This is not sheer nihilism.“We’re not beginning to, to, mean something?” Hamm asks.“Mean something! You and I, mean something!” Clov says, and breaks into a smile. “Ah, that’s a good one!”EndgameThrough March 12 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Textplay,’ Stoppard and Beckett Get Snarky, FWIW

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      An imaginary electronic conversation between the two playwrights falls somewhere between a ❤️ and a 🤷.The game is Guess That Play and the first round is a gimme. Among the clues one player texts the other are emojis of a skull, a goblet, crossed swords and nine tombstones. The answer is obviously “Hamlet,” but the next round isn’t as easy. What to make of a glass of milk, some trees and, yes, another tombstone?If you can solve that one, you’re probably the right kind of audience for “Textplay,” a witty two-character, no-actor sketch, conducted entirely in the world’s latest lingua franca, complete with emojis, emoticons, ellipses and erasures. (The virtual NYU Skirball presentation is available on demand through Dec. 3.) On the screen of your choice, you watch as a pair of playwrights amuse themselves electronically: teasing, bickering and generally debunking their reputations, or having them debunked.That the playwrights are Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard (it’s Stoppard’s phone we supposedly see) makes “Textplay” a somewhat Inside Theater experience, with untethered references to the two men’s works, styles and obsessions. That the credited author, Archer Eland, is clearly a pseudonym, deepens the atmosphere of esoterica.Could Stoppard himself be Eland? Anonymity might be just the kind of publicity he prefers as an amuse-bouche for his latest real-world play, the uncharacteristically personal “Leopoldstadt,” which opens on Broadway on Oct. 2. For that matter, could Eland be Beckett, so existential he seems to exist even now, an avant-gardist more than 32 years after his death?Yet neither Stoppard nor Beckett, as scripted here, seems sure of his stature, pre- or post-mortem. They complain that some playwrights, like Pinter, got the classier adjectival ending “-esque” even as they each wound up with “-ian.” (“It’s really unfair,” Stoppard whines un-Stoppardianly.) They worry more seriously that their work came to nothing, perhaps deservedly. “All we did was tart up a hole and claim it was an abyss,” Beckett types. “And NO ONE read our novels.”In compensation, they get to preen over their “genius” hair, certainly compared with Pinter’s. Beckett praises Stoppard’s as “Messy and brilliant, like your mind.” Stoppard returns the favor: “And you have those beautiful silvery rows. Like sharks.”After live theater shut down in March 2020, and in the two and a half years since then, we’ve seen lots of experiments in digital dramaturgy. Those that succeeded did so by offering apt substitutions for in-person performance or by abjuring it completely in favor of a frankly virtual experience. In the middle ground lay boredom — and the reflex, born of so much streamed television, to watch only until another show or a snack beckoned.“Textplay” might seem to fall into that middle ground; it’s both live (you can’t pause it) and unlive (the entire “conversation” is preprogrammed). Unlike “Hamlet,” it makes little claim on your soul, and unlike “Under Milk Wood” — the answer to the clue with the glass of milk and the trees — none at all on your heart.Indeed, the playwrights haunting “Textplay” aren’t Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, or even Beckett and Stoppard. Instead, I thought of Edward Albee, for the merciless wit, and Sophocles, for the Oedipal anxiety. Cutting one’s forefathers down to size is an entertaining, if dangerous, endeavor. The cleverness of the writing comes, to some extent, at the expense of honor.Still, at about 35 minutes, “Textplay” is a snack in itself. There’s even a blink-and-you-miss-it Easter egg at the end. (I missed it.)Theater types might also derive from the stunt a little encouragement about the uses of technology. Humans now send six billion text messages a day, most of which, data scientists say, are read. If the ever-dying theater could access even a fraction of an audience as large and willing as that, it might just perk up. Beckett and Stoppard and even poor, average-haired Pinter may one day be more immortal than ever. Who needs tombstone emojis?TextplayThrough Dec. 3 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 35 minutes. More

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      Immersed in ‘Stranger Things,’ Then Strolling to Beckett

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      Our writer checked out two very different experiences in New York. In Netflix’s TV re-creation, you fight Demogorgons. In “Cascando,” you walk off your existential angst.Before the pizza parlor, before the arcade games, before the ice cream shop and the merch kiosks (so many merch kiosks!) and the photo op with a fiberglass-and-silicone Demogorgon, “Stranger Things: The Experience,” at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, puts on a show.Netflix, which has created other immersive entertainments based on its “Bridgerton” and “Money Heist” properties, co-produced this 45-minute experience with Fever. Based on the teen-horror pastiche “Stranger Things,” it plunks participants, many of them dressed in 1980s finery, into tens of thousands of square feet of Hawkins, Ind. Some rooms have an unfinished feel (did the budget not include ceilings?); others suggest a theme-park-quality buildout. The most fully realized ones are nestled inside Hawkins’s cheery state-of-the-art lab. Ostensibly, ticket holders have signed up for a sleep study. An interdimensional rift soon complicates study protocols. Will these test subjects survive? Of course. They have tote bags to buy afterward.“Stranger Things: The Experience” is a piece of fan service that adopts the vocabulary of immersive theater. While legible, barely, for those unfamiliar with the series, this story has been built for devotees, allowing them to enter into the fictional world. Enterprises like this used to be lower-budget affairs of the do-it-yourself variety, the province of live-action role-players and tabletop gamers. Now for about $58 — less for gutsy under-17s, more if you book on a weekend — Netflix and its partners will do the doing for you.“We look at live experiences as providing fans another way to see themselves more in the stories they love,” Greg Lombardo, the head of live experiences at Netflix, told me in an interview a couple of days after my visit.This show, which runs for about 45 minutes, chugs along like a reasonably well-oiled machine. What eldritch fluids comprise that oil? Best not ask. The cast members who circulate are trained improvisers, skilled at eliciting responses, practiced at batting those responses back. At one point I was harangued by a journalist character — sweaty, anxious, overconfident. Ow.The Upside-Down World of ‘Stranger Things’After a three-year wait, Netflix’s sci-fi series returns with a fourth season.Season 4 Guide: As in seasons past, this go-round is full of nods and Easter eggs to 1970s and ’80s pop culture. Here are the major highlights.Review: “Stranger Things” has gone from lovingly echoing 1980s touchstones to industriously copying itself, our critic writes of the show’s fourth installment.The Duffer Brothers: The “Stranger Things” creators seem to share a brain. But they could never lock themselves in a writing cabin together.David Harbour: While “Stranger Things” was on hiatus, the actor tackled a string of strangely compelling deadbeat characters.While immersive, “The Experience” doesn’t really depend on you. The Demogorgons will eventually explode, whether or not you deploy your extrasensory powers. Which is a letdown. Because there is a fantasy that many of us entertain about the art we love — that we might matter to the art as much as it matters to us. Still, the teenagers and young adults in the room gasped and screamed and unleashed their psychic abilities with apparent delight.“We’re trying to give fans a chance to be the hero of their stories,” Lombardo said. This is pushing it. Eleven, the psychokinetic phenom played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears via hologram, is the real hero here. The motivating factors of “The Experience” owe less to art than to marketing, and its ultimate goal suggests a branding ouroboros: devotion to the show encourages consumption of the experience, consumption of the experience urges re-engagement with the show.After “The Experience,” with the rift safely sealed, you can consume without the distractions of a plot — which is when “Stranger Things: The Experience” achieves its final and ideal form. There is pizza to be eaten and ice cream to be licked and cocktails to be drunk. Bertolt Brecht used to rail against the culinary theater, a theater that delivered only emotion and sensation, rather than intellectual engagement. Brecht probably never had a drink with a stroopwafel as garnish. I didn’t buy a tote bag, but I did play through the “Stranger Things”-branded pinball game. I think I did pretty well.“Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play, comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater. Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo wander the streets of Manhattan dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNo amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine — I imagine a gloomy palette, defective flippers and a high-score list that reads GODOT GODOT GODOT. But those eager for a Beckett brand extension can instead arrive at New York University’s Skirball Center for “Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play from the early 1960s. It comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater, an Irish company with an insouciant approach to the classics.Originally created in conjunction with the composer Marcel Mihalovici, “Cascando” is intended as a passive audio experience. But this “Cascando,” directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Aedin Cosgrove, adds a participatory element.Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones. Loosed onto La Guardia Place, a quiet street adjacent to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, participants begin a single-file walk around and through the neighboring blocks. As they stroll, they listen to the text, prerecorded here by Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon.To wander the Village dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind. But there are no stops along the way, no interactions, no activations. The choreography — a sharp turn here and there — is minimal. At one point, I wondered, with almost breathless excitement, if we would sit. We did not sit.While it makes sense to encounter Beckett’s text via headphones — there are references throughout to a story existing only in someone’s head — the alone-together walk doesn’t illuminate or galvanize the text, which is, like so much of Beckett’s work, heavy on repetition and ellipses. On the rainy sidewalk, meaning slid away.In another city, at another moment, a show like “Cascando” might at least have ornamented the street life. But New York’s typical street life is already a variety of theater, druids or no. As we re-entered the park, I saw a clump of skateboarders look us up and down. We had become part of their story, I thought for a moment, part of their experience. Then they shrugged and returned to their conversation. Just another Wednesday in the Village, bro.Stranger Things: The ExperienceThrough Aug. 21 at Duggal Greenhouse, Brooklyn; strangerthings-experience.com. Running time: 45 minutes for the show, then mingling.CascandoThrough July 3 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 30 minutes. More

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      A Beckett Play Comes Home to Paris, as an Opera

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      “Fin de Partie,” an opera of “Endgame,” will be sung at the Palais Garnier in French, the language it was written in.That grim and giddy slice of existentialism called Samuel Beckett Land doesn’t exactly scream out to be musically adapted, but the world of opera, where tragedy and comedy coexist, is exactly where at least one of his plays fits in.“Fin de Partie,” the opera of Beckett’s masterly “Endgame,” makes its French premiere on April 28 at the Palais Garnier in Paris. It is a sort of homecoming for this adaptation of the four-person, one-act play that he wrote in France, where he lived much of his adult life, after leaving his native Ireland.“Fin de Partie” reveals how Beckett’s play may be ideally suited to operatic interpretation and can now be appreciated anew since his original French words will now be sung, bringing the opera full circle four years after its 2018 premiere to a rapturous reception at La Scala in Milan.The esteemed Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, known mostly for extremely short works, sometimes only minutes or seconds long, wrote the opera — his first — in his late 80s. He also wrote the French libretto, which will now be sung for the first time in France.The same libretto was used at La Scala and in subsequent productions in Amsterdam and in Valencia, Spain. La Scala’s general director at the time, Alexander Pereira, persevered for a decade to bring the work to the stage, saying Mr. Kurtag is “probably the most important composer in the world at this moment.”It’s been a thrilling journey for those involved — and for those watching from the sidelines — to bring the piece to France four years later.“Beckett did not want this play set to music because he felt they were music as they were, and to add music would affect the impact, but Kurtag has a very special status in the musical world,” said the French-Lebanese director Pierre Audi, who is helming this production, which runs through May 19, as he has the previous three. “He has a very singular language that is very clearly compatible with Beckett.”The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag was in his late 80s when he wrote the Beckett opera. He also wrote the French libretto.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesThe play premiered in 1957 at the Royal Court Theater in London in Beckett’s original French, which he later translated into English. While it was not as successful as “Waiting for Godot” (also written in French, its premiere was several years earlier in Paris), it is considered among his finest works.“Endgame” tells the story of Hamm, a blind and belligerent man who uses a wheelchair; his befuddled companion, Clov; and Hamm’s elderly parents, who live in trash cans (and are therefore about as happy as you’d imagine them to be). In a stark and empty room, they await some sort of finality, quarreling and reminiscing in the way Beckett characters do: desperate, sad and remarkably funny.“Fin de Partie” is the first musical or operatic adaptation of any work by Beckett, who died in 1989, since his estate has long guarded against adaptations.The French composer Pierre Boulez, who died in 2016, had for years expressed interest in adapting “Waiting for Godot” as an opera. That never came to fruition, but Mr. Krutag’s proposal to adapt “Fin de Partie” apparently made sense.“Edward Beckett, Samuel Beckett’s nephew, has a very astute sense of what his uncle would and would not have wanted,” said Jean-Michel Rabaté, an author, professor and Beckett authority. “Through music, this play takes on a new relevance, because what Kurtag has done through composing is interpret the play.”But interpreting Beckett is akin to interpreting, say, Eugène Ionesco or Harold Pinter. Absurdist theater is so tied to its language and a nuanced humor that it’s not an obvious, or simple, choice to interpret. Tone is key, Mr. Audi said.“Kurtag is faithful to Beckett and has done something that you can argue goes in a sense the way Beckett wanted his plays to be performed,” he explained. “A musical version is by definition an interpretation. You are making interpretive decisions.”Beckett was no stranger to interpretation himself. He translated French poetry into English, and wrote many of his early poems in French, long before he began writing plays.“What is interesting is that he decided to write in French, first in poetry,” Mr. Rabaté said. “French is much simpler and lyrical. He translated a lot of the French Surrealist poets, and in English they were opaque and full of illusion. But in French it was simple and you just heard the voice.”Samuel Beckett, at a 1961 rehearsal of “Waiting for Godot” in Paris, did not want his plays set to music as he believed the words were already music as written.Boris Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet, via Getty ImageBeckett’s ties to France, and the French language, are legendary. He could have fled France when the Nazis invaded in 1940, but, as he was quoted as saying, “I preferred France in war to Ireland in peace.”He joined the French Resistance, and even though he was fluent in French, he had an Irish accent, which made him vulnerable to being discovered. After almost being caught by the Gestapo in Paris, he lived in rural southern France in hiding for many years until the war ended.“His French was oral French learned in the countryside when he was hiding from the Nazis,” Mr. Rabaté said. “‘Fin de Partie’ has a few untranslatable moments in French, because the jokes are funnier in French and the French text is much more bawdy.”This toggling between the languages proved interesting when his plays, usually written in French, became sensations on the English-speaking stage, despite not only some humor lost in translation but also the severe censorship laws in England in the 1950s (cue the bodily functions and anatomical references of “Godot”).Over the decades, Beckett’s works became standard repertory, but perhaps it was time for the first opera based on one of his works, Mr. Audi pointed out, especially since Mr. Kurtag saw the original Paris production of “Fin de Partie” in the early 1960s and was awestruck.“You need a very special kind of a composer to capture the essence of Beckett, but I don’t see many composers who have that kind of passion for Beckett,” Mr. Audi said. “You need to be obsessed with Beckett. Mr. Kurtag has had that for much of his life.”Mr. Kurtag, now 96 and living in Budapest, was unable to travel to see any of the previous productions and is not expected to go to Paris. Two performances that were planned in Hungary were canceled because of the pandemic. But, Mr. Audi said, Mr. Kurtag has seen a video recording of the original production and attended a concert version, which included the original cast, in Budapest in 2018.For Mr. Audi, it’s a career high to see an original piece of work be so seamlessly adapted.“My role as a director is to arbitrate between the composer’s vision and the writer’s vision,” Mr. Audi said. “In the end what he has composed is the essence of the play. For me the opera is complete.” More

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      Review: ‘Waiting for Godot’ in the Bleakest Zoom Room Ever

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      Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo star as Beckett’s tragicomic tramps — minus the comic part.Early audiences were baffled by “Waiting for Godot.” Even Peter Hall, who in 1955 directed the first English language production, claimed not to understand it. When actors with access to its author, Samuel Beckett, demanded explanations from him, he usually professed himself helpless to answer.Now, though some of the references have become more obscure with time, it’s hard to imagine anyone not fathoming the play’s gist. Decades of high school lit seminars, let alone the gradual opening of the playgoing class’s eyes to the world’s inequities and terrors, have transformed it from an enigmatic museum piece into an existential tchotchke.But there is more to “Waiting for Godot,” which the New Group has just released as a lugubrious film starring Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo, than its status as a modern classic suggests. Its portrait of life as a charnel house may be half the story but in this case, it’s the only half.After all, Beckett called “Godot” a tragicomedy, presumably with emphasis on the second part of the word because the first part speaks for itself. The thumbprints of Buster Keaton, and especially Laurel and Hardy, are all over its main characters, the broken-down migrant workers Vladimir and Estragon. (Estragon was first played on Broadway by the great vaudevillian and erstwhile Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.) The undercard, Pozzo and Lucky, are no comic slouches either; together, the four wanderers, with their long-honed routines and jags of passive-aggressive mayhem, outnumber and upstage the Three Stooges.But of the New Group’s cast, which also includes Tarik Trotter as Pozzo and Wallace Shawn as Lucky, only Leguizamo, as Estragon, could really be considered a clown — and not just because he called himself one in his 2011 one-man show “Ghetto Klown.”A theatrical being to his core, he has the quick-twitch reflexes and papered-over wounds that can make injury funny. The best parts of this “Waiting for Godot” mine that duality, and also Leguizamo’s heritage; when Hawke, as Vladimir, discredits Estragon’s account of being beaten for no cause, we get a new, white-privilege angle on their recurrent miscommunication.Hawke, left, and Leguizamo mask up when approaching the other two tramps in the play.via The New Group Off StageBut even Leguizamo is done in by a production, directed by Scott Elliott, that is almost entirely — and, it would seem, deliberately — humorless. The actors are shot in separate gloomy interiors, and from stationary positions, so as to appear in Stygian Zoom-like frames as if at a virtual meeting of hobbits.And though Beckett did say, in response to a proposed in-the-round production, that “Godot” needed “a very closed box,” I doubt this is what he meant. In any case, a play that famously takes place outdoors, with its sole scenic element a barren tree that for Act II sprouts five leaves, is now mercilessly interiorized, and a relationship that is meant to test the limits of intimacy is unhelpfully kept at arm’s length from the start.To the extent this comments on our pandemic moment, it’s at least intriguing; a lot of thought seems to have gone into Vladimir and Estragon’s decisions to mask up, mostly when they approach Pozzo and Lucky. But this and other contemporary intrusions, including the use of cellphones for texting and black screens when the characters apparently disable their feed, don’t actually illuminate anything, let alone emphasize the play’s humor as they seem to intend. It’s hard to laugh when you can hardly see.That problem encourages a certain degree of overacting, especially from Hawke, as if he were trying to make himself visible from a distance. (He has lovely moments, though.) Trotter, who under the name Black Thought was a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, uses his terrific stage voice to capture Pozzo’s first-act bluster without resorting to flailing, but has a harder time with the humbled version of the character who returns in Act II.At least Drake Bradshaw, in the small role of Godot’s young herald, is sweetly effective in both his appearances. And though Shawn, delivering Lucky’s impossible speech — nine minutes of gibberish — is able to make convincing emotional sense of the moment, the production as a whole doesn’t support his efforts. Vladimir and Estragon check out of the Zoom call for much of the harangue, encouraging us to think we might do so as well.It’s not that you need to be literal with “Waiting for Godot”; it’s anything but a naturalistic drama. I liked the designer Qween Jean’s past-midnight cowboy look for Hawke and Mets cap and tank top pandemic ensemble for Leguizamo. But if Elliott, working with the Academy Award winner John Ridley’s Nō Studios and the Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, has avoided excessive fealty to Beckett’s instructions — the estate approved the socially distanced production — he has not provided anything as coherent to take their place.For one thing, the action is awkwardly staged, even beyond the necessity of executing comedy bits when the actors, if not the characters, are calling in from different locations. (The passing of Lucky’s hat, a clear lift from Laurel and Hardy, is totally botched.) At three hours, the show is also long, even bloated. Most problematically, Vladimir’s and Estragon’s embraces, so necessary to the play’s emotional equilibrium, are about as warm here as octopi suckering up to opposite sides of a glass wall.Far from seeming too modern, though, this “Godot,” especially coming more than a year into the pandemic, seems too passé. Other companies, even no-budget ones like Theater in Quarantine, have long since figured out ways to make an aesthetic out of the limitations of lockdown. Why only now, just as those lockdowns are lifting, is this first-gen take on pandemic play production emerging? About the only expressive use of the medium is in the processing that gives the film the appearance of a dodgy video feed, with freezes and glitches that imitate a poor signal.You could argue that a dodgy feed is exactly the way “Godot” depicts life: as a poor approximation of what it should be. But in Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett also finds poignancy, humor and the last dregs of physical love, where Elliott and company find only horror. If they are right, what kind of pass have we come to, in which even Beckett’s vision is not bleak enough?Waiting for GodotThrough June 30; thenewgroup.org More

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      Battered but Unbowed: How Beckett Speaks to a New Era

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBattered but Unbowed: How Beckett Speaks to a New EraAdaptations of “Happy Days” and “First Love,” works by the master of existential wheel-spinning, show us how to live in place.Tessa Albertson is a younger-than-usual Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” directed by Nico Krell.Credit…via The Wild ProjectPublished More