The Center Theatre Group has two plays on stage, one by filmmaker Ethan Coen, “A Play is a Poem,” at the Mark Taper Forum downtown, and “On Beckett,” a compilation of writings by Samuel Beckett beautifully presented at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City by Bill Irwin, the supreme clown and actor.
BELOVED AND BAFFLING BECKETT
Talk about a contrast in style and substance! Bill Irwin created a glimpse into his inner world where his love for Beckett’s prose and playwriting are brought to life, so we can appreciate the strange genius of one of the 20th century’s most studied, admired, and still not always fully-comprehended writing.
Irwin reminds us that Beckett (1906-1989) was a Nobel laureate who wrote famously difficult passages and he’s haunted by these writings; he’s not a scholar or a blogger, just someone who relates to the language through the lens of an actor and clown, and is committed to sharing his knowledge of it and love for it with others. That he does, and beautifully.
He shares selections from “Texts for Nothing,” thirteen prose pieces published in 1950, the year Irwin was born. He begins with Text #1, page one. Putting on his black bowler hat, he delivers the opening line, “How can I go on,” and shares more of the text.
Irwin speculates, what is it about this language? It is an Irish voice, he says, but ironically, Beckett wrote these pieces in French, later translating them. It is, as Irwin says, exhilarating and exasperating, describing the prose as a “cartoon of consciousness” and the “cliché of the comic Irishman.” Is Beckett a writer of the body or the intellect, he wonders, noting that Beckett was a lover of vaudeville.
That comes in handy for Irwin, the consummate clown, who played Lucky in a storied production of “Waiting for Godot,” with Steve Martin, Robin Williams and F. Murray Abraham. He describes the perpetual question of whether it’s “GOD-oh” or “God-OH,” and shares a story about the argument as it played out in his experience. But more importantly, he performs parts of the famous monologue that Lucky, a man/beast of burden who never speaks until commanded to, blows everyone away with when he finally does open his mouth. It’s spectacular. A tour de force.
He also dons multiple hats, bowlers, porkpie, skullcap, that help define Beckett’s and his own characters, putting on baggy pants and enormous shoes to gear up for further absurd stream of consciousness passages.
So strictly speaking, Bill Irwin’s “On Beckett” isn’t really a play, but it is an inspired meditation on the work of one of the most puzzling voices in literature and on stage.
THE PLAY THAT’S NOT A POEM
Ethan Coen’s play isn’t really a play, and it sure isn’t a poem. And there’s no connective tissue, other than some adorably cute, but hard to hear, songs performed entr'acte by the quirky Nelly McKay.
Five unrelated vignettes have a lot of snappy dialogue and moments of hilarity, some extremely inappropriate but irresistibly laughable (Holocaust humor – “Sobibor my Love” for example). But what is this play really? An opportunity for a renowned Hollywood celebrity to work out some of his thoughts without the intercession of celluloid (or pixels, as the case may be).
I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it—I did, although there were issues with being able to hear some of the actors and song lyrics.
We open on a crazy Fargo-like situation where a murder has taken place, and two moronic brothers appear to have buried their dad under the floorboards. Not sure if I got this right but the lawman who comes in to ask if they’ve seen Dad is apparently is their brother. It ends loudly.
Then it’s the noir piece, set in the office of a private investigator whose partner has died and who hires a clueless new PI to join him. The guy’s a complete loser; the scene shifts between the office (where PI is having an affair with his secretary), to a bar where a client has asked him to investigate whether he’s being ripped off. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the real investigative work is being done by the secretary.
The next scene is long and pointless. It’s set in the South, in some unspecified earlier era when men wore white suits and straw hats, and women high-necked long dresses, and propriety is the watchword. He’s been in Paris where life is more unconstrained, and she’s a girl with the morality of a cloistered nun. His attempt to explain (ahem) a blow job without actually describing it is funny, but everything in this set piece goes on far too long.
In another scene in Brooklyn, a guy with a plan (not a good one) is trying to convince his hard-as-nails wife that all this networking and plying his cab medallion-owning friend with beer is key to getting into a partnership where he can be his own man. Liver and onions will never be cooked again in this house. Except – he fails.
And lastly, the cliché of the Hollywood pitch meeting (“Das Boot on a boat”) speeds in and out as the characters pretend there’s any morality left in Hollywood.
The cast is wonderful but is there a point to these scenes, or a through-line that connects them? Nope. If you go, let it wash over you and enjoy the laughs. Just don’t try to find any meaning here.
Sarah A. Spitz is an award-winning public radio producer, now retired from KCRW, where she also produced arts stories for NPR. She writes features and reviews for various print and online publications.
