Tag: Samuel Beckett

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Opinion The Last Word

My Dog Is So Bright …

If I get fired from my day job, it will be because I was looking up “dog sunglasses” on my computer. I’ve looked at our electronic devices usage policy, and I didn’t see anything specifically prohibiting using my lunch break to find my poodle some eye protection, but you know how corporations are. Picky, picky, picky.

Now that I think about it, it might be because I always forget the company blocks access to Pandora. I don’t know why I can’t remember that. I like a little music in my office, and, as much as I love public radio, sometimes I need music with words. So I try to pull up Pandora and get this red and black warning that I am perilously close to the third rail of internet surfing and if I do it again, corporate minions will show up at my office to haul me out. I think about this when I remember I can’t stream my big band station. Oh, sure. I could listen to Benny Goodman on YouTube. YouTube isn’t blocked. Go figure that one out, and let me know what you come up with.

Sometimes I daydream that on the 13th time I forget that site is blocked, air raid sirens will start screaming, and men in tactical gear wielding frothing German Shepherds and Tasers will show up at my office. Then I’ll be put in a small room with nothing but a metal table and two chairs and a one-way mirror.

Interesting tidbit. When writing that last sentence, I couldn’t remember if I meant a “one-way mirror” or “two-way mirror.” Turns out THEY ARE THE SAME THING. It’s like flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing. I don’t understand the need to make English our official language. I’m a native speaker, and it makes me drink. When all native speakers can explain why one-way and two-way mean the same thing, we can discuss a national language.

Now that I think about it, it might not be the dog sunglasses (I went with the bright yellow, by the way). It might be how the other day I called everyone into my office to see the video of a rooster wearing turquoise pants running around the chicken yard. That’s right. The rooster was wearing pants. Bright turquoise pants. I had no idea how much my life needed a video of a rooster in britches. Just trust me. You need that rooster in your life, too.

Ebay is also blocked on our corporate network. Amazon is not. Maybe that one was a “pick your battles” decision. We are not prohibited from looking up the score from last night’s game, but we are prohibited from clicking any links to any sites discussing said game. My job requires me to be familiar with approximately 16,923 government ordinances, requirements, and statutes. I am not blocked from any government website, but I did try to order an informational poster from the one.gov website and was kindly reminded if I tried that crap again, the Stormtroopers would show up with thumbscrews and a pink slip. One becomes unsure how one is to comply with statutes requiring the posting of certain information if one cannot obtain the method of delivery for said required information. Working for corporations is often like unknowingly starring in a Samuel Beckett play.

Americans don’t take vacations. We spend our weekends checking our work email accounts. But I keep reading about how much time we waste at work on the internet. Doesn’t it all wash? I lose my vacation every year, but spend 20 minutes a day clearing my brain by looking at dog-shaming websites and trying to find a really good casserole recipe. I’m not saying I’m owed it. I’m saying six of one, half dozen of the other. Like how there’s only so much T-ball an adult can possibly be expected to endure, so taking a call from work is a welcome respite from watching your kid miss a stationary ball literally two feet away for the 394th time in a row. Work/life balance has gone electronic.

My company gives its employees a little elasticity, but I know people who have been fired for checking March Madness scores and downloading pictures of Land Between the Lakes for a child’s school project. I know a rule is a rule, but c’mon. Not being able to check March Madness scores might possibly be classified as cruel and unusual punishment by the Geneva (Kansas) Convention.

I know you have one burning question: How did my dog like the sunglasses? Not as well as I’d hoped. He likes wearing mine, so I thought he’d love a pair of his own. As it turns out, I think he just likes being a diva in my oversized Jackie O. tortoise shells. He does look fabulous.

Susan Wilson writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband Chuck have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.

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Film and Notfilm at the Brooks

In 1965, Waiting for Godot playwright Samuel Beckett visited New York to make a short motion picture with his friend and longtime collaborator Alan Schneider. There was only one problem with the plan. Beckett and Schneider were both men of the theater, and, for all their many notable accomplishments, neither of them knew the first thing about movie making. The result was an absurd, mostly silent, 24-minute chase scene, laden with existential dread and featuring early film icon Buster Keaton, who knew quite a lot about making movies but was utterly baffled by Beckett and his screenplay.

Beckett, who was nearing the height of his fame and only four years away from winning the Nobel Prize for literature, didn’t always understand Keaton, either. He’d originally wanted Charlie Chaplin or Zero Mostel, but the famously stone-faced comedian was available and needed the work.

Beckett called his project Film and considered it to be a qualified failure and strong evidence that his peculiar brand of performance didn’t translate well to the screen. Nevertheless, the curious artifact functions as a kind of movie trailer, teasing images and themes Beckett explores more thoroughly in plays like Endgame and Rockaby. It does so beautifully thanks to cinematography by Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman.

Ross Lipman tells the story of Beckett’s struggle to understand the language of film and of his difficult relationship with collaborators like Keaton and Kaufman in Notfilm, a narration-heavy documentary screening alongside Film at the Brooks this week.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

“Film” and “NotFilm”: Buster Keaton & Samuel Beckett visit Brooks Museum

Buster

It should have worked. It should have been amazing. 

What could be better than a team up between absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett, and cinema’s great clown Buster Keaton? Add to that, a story that’s nothing more than a chase scene boiled down to essence? What could have possibly gone wrong?

The rather preciously named Film— screening at the Brooks Museum this week — should have been a spectacular cinematic event, not some footnote and fascinating curiosity. But Beckett had no idea how to make a movie. His friend and longtime collaborator Alan Schneider didn’t either. Worser

Sam

  still, neither of these grand men of the theater knew how to talk to the poker-faced (and minded) Keaton, a certifiable master of the form.

Beckett and Keaton couldn’t have been more different. The former was a heady, experimental philosopher, the latter more interested in technical details and visceral pleasures. Keaton had previously turned down the role of Lucky in the American premiere of Waiting for Godot, because, like so many American theatergoers, he just didn’t get it.

Ironically, Beckett described Keaton as impenetrable. 

Keaton didn’t understand Film either, and said so publicly. He took the gig because he needed the work. 

Visual essayist Ross Lipman tells the story of Beckett’s struggle to understand the language of film and of his difficult relationship with collaborators like Keaton and award winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman in the documentary Notfilm, also screening at the Brooks this week. Lipman’s digital feature (not film) is narration-heavy, and contemplates itself into some un-cinematic corners. It also contains fantastic interview footage with actress Billie Whitelaw, who’s widely regarded as the definitive interpreter of Beckett’s work.

As a teenager, Leonard Maltin visited the movie set hoping to meet Keaton, whom he idolized. With starry-eyed fanboy zeal the popular film critic recounts his story of an uneventful meeting that, nevertheless, made a lasting impression. He knows Beckett was probably on location too, but Malton only had eyes for Keaton.
 

‘Film’ and ‘NotFilm’: Buster Keaton & Samuel Beckett visit Brooks Museum

Beckett regarded Film as a qualified failure, and strong evidence that his peculiar brand of performance didn’t translate well to the big screen. Still, the curious artifact functions as a kind of movie trailer, teasing images and themes the playwright explores more thoroughly in plays like Endgame and Rockabye. It does so with lots of stark visual appeal thanks to Kaufman’s cinematography.

NotFilm, by contrast, is a qualified success that could take a lesson from Beckett’s show-don’t-tell ethos. 

On a side note, Kaufman was the younger sibling of Russian film pioneers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman. He worked as cinematographer and director of photography on a number of Hollywood features including Tennessee Williams’ gorgeously-shot The Fugitive Kind. That was the story’s third title. It had originally been staged as Battle of Angels, then rewritten and staged as Orpheus Descending. 

New Moon Theatre Company’s solid production of Orpheus Descending is currently on stage at Midtown’s Evergreen Theatre. 

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South

Tony Isbell is Krapp. I mean that in the best possible sense.

A question that is seldom asked: What does Samuel Beckett’s mini-masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape have in common with poop porn? Consider the “reaction video,” a digital-era phenomenon that came of age following the release of Two Girls, One Cup, a pornographic short depicting two women enjoying a pint glass full of human chocolate. Here’s a classic reaction video of somebody showing the infamous TG1C clip to their grandmother. As viral content goes, it’s horrible. And a stone cold classic. 
 

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South

So, what’s the point of this strange comparison? For starters, I want to demystify Beckett, whose work is often characterized as being difficult and detached. Also, in both a formal sense, and as a piece of entertainment, Krapp’s Last Tape functions identically to a reaction video. If granny makes you laugh, blush, cringe, or shake your head, you’ll have no trouble at all engaging with Krapp. In both cases the comedy and the pathos are are rooted in the relationship between a candid observer and the content stored on his/her technology. Only instead of watching girls go wild, Beckett’s titular curmudgeon sits at an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and listens, in real time, to a decades old recording of himself reviewing an even older recording of himself. It’s an Escher portrait of a mirror selfie, reducing one man’s entire life to 40-minutes of covert clowning. It is, by turns, hilarious and hateful, and in a masterful performance that lives up to that description, Memphis actor Tony Isbell hits every single note, high and low.

Krapp’s Last Tape hasn’t just aged well, it’s become even more resonant in the age of Instagram and #TBT. Contemporary audiences are primed to sympathize with a solitary man interacting with his device.

Me

Update: I’m in my kitchen writing a review of Krapp’s Last Tape. And I need a shave. Also, even though you can’t see it, there’s an entire bunch of overripe bananas hanging behind my head.

Toward the end of his opening night performance Isbell struggled to detach a spool of tape from Krapp’s antique recorder. That’s all part of the show. But when the spool finally released something seemingly spontaneous and wonderful happened. The actor reeled backwards, hitting a pendent lamp hanging above his head. Planned or not, the result was more effective than any expensive special effect ever could be. The lamp swung like a mad pendulum, casting the protagonist in light and leaving him in darkness over and over again until, at last, all potential energy was spent. Action, reaction, etc. Visual metaphors don’t get much better or more basic than that. 

Krapp’s Last Tape shares the stage with a neatly packed production of Beckett’s rarely-seen micro-drama, Ohio Impromptu. The show’s action consists of a stationary “reader,” (Adam Remsen) reading a book to a similarly stationary “listener,” (Isbell), who remains silent but sometimes knocks to indicate he’d like to hear a passage repeated. Remsen’s interpretation is smart and sympathetic but, through no fault of his own, it’s never all it could be. Beckett wrote for unique voices. Krapp’s Last Tape, for example, was inspired by a radio performance given by British actor Patrick McGee. While Remsen did his job beautifully, Ohio Impromptu cries out — like a strange disembodied mouth — for a special voice that paints vivid pictures in the surrounding blackness. That’s why I’m looking forward to a repeat performance when age and experience have seasoned the soft-spoken actor’s pipes. 

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South (2)

A strange disembodied mouth

My favorite thing about this night of independently produced theater is its origin story. The nutshell: a couple of actors realized they both loved a play that’s easy and inexpensive to stage, so they staged the damn thing. Because, why not? More like that, please.

Big things really do come in small packages. I should probably use that line to connect this closing graph to the poop porn in my opening. But, in spite of having just typed the words, “poop porn in my opening,” I’m not that kind of critic. It’s hard to imagine a more modest production than Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu. It’s equally hard to imagine a more satisfying night in the theater. 

Standing. Clapping. 
Me

Picture, or it didn’t happen!

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Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at First Congo

What started as an obscure joke on Facebook has turned into a rare treat for Memphis theatergoers and fans of actor/director Tony Isbell.

Isbell created a lively Facebook discussion when he posted a status update saying, “I’ve just eaten, I regret to say, three donuts and have only with difficulty refrained from a fourth.” Some commenters liked donuts. Others liked them a lot. But Isbell wasn’t really casting about for snack affirmation. He was dropping a nerdy hint to fans of absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett.

Actor Adam Remsen, who’d been directed by Isbell in productions of Glengarry Glen Ross and Six Degrees of Separation, recognized the allusion and answered, “Oh Krapp.” A conversation started that has resulted in an independently mounted production of Beckett’s mini-masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape.

Tony Isbell as Beckett’s Krapp

“It’s like one man’s entire life in 40 minutes,” says Isbell of a play that finds its elderly title character listening to a tape of his somewhat younger self talking about an even earlier tape of his much younger self. It’s not quite 60 years old and maybe even more relevant thanks to Instagram and Facebook.

“When people think of Beckett, they think of Waiting for Godot,” Isbell says. “They think of abstract characters dealing with huge issues. But this play is the most naturalistic thing he ever wrote. It’s exactly what it is: An old man sitting at his tape recorder listening to old tapes of himself and making a new one. It happens in real time. That’s it.”

Remsen shares directing duties with Isbell and joins him onstage for a production of Ohio Impromptu, another rarely seen Beckett sketch with similarly nostalgic threads.

“I’m not really doing that much directing,” Remsen says. “For me, the best part of the process has been getting to watch Tony Isbell perform Krapp’s Last Tape three or four times a week.”