"TEXTS FOR NOTHING" by Samuel Beckett, Stage Managed by Marci Glotzer!
By Ben Brantley
Source: New York Times

October 16, 2000
Wandering in Uncertainty With Beckett
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The head decomposes and recomposes, a flesh- shedding skull one instant and a smooth rubber mask the next. The abruptness of the transitions is scary, matching the tones and rhythms — sometimes primal, sometimes mechanical — that emanate from that long, nearly lipless mouth. Forget about the little girl in the newly rereleased "Exorcist." There's not a special effects man in Hollywood who can rival what Bill Irwin is doing with his own unadorned face and voice at the Classic Stage Company.

The body of course provides an equally compelling vision. Anyone who has seen Mr. Irwin's singular brand of physical theater in shows like "Fool Moon" already knows about his gravity-defying walk and wayward limbs. But in "Texts for Nothing," his magnificent one-man interpretation of four short prose pieces by Samuel Beckett that opened last night, every natural tool at an actor's disposal is enlisted to chart the murky, eternally changing space between the womb and the tomb that is life according to Beckett.

Mr. Irwin is clearly at home in this territory, or as much one can be in a world that denies the existence of home. What's more he makes sure that we identify this landscape as one to which we belong, too. This actor appeared in an earlier version of "Texts" in 1991, adapted and directed by Joseph Chaikin at the Public Theater, and he brings a precision and authority to the material as well as that rich scent of affinity that comes from long acquaintance with a work of art.

There's not a word spoken here that hasn't been thoroughly considered. Mr. Irwin never coasts on the hypnotic musicality of the prose. On the other hand he has obviously and deliberately stopped short of overanalyzing, a process that is fatal to Beckett. To say Mr. Irwin articulates very clearly Beckett's ambiguities is not to say he clarifies them.

Instead he presents the Beckettian state of living in uncertainty as a bizarre, heroic and pathetic spectacle. And if you go with the meandering flow of Mr. Irwin's performance, you'll find the experience less cerebral than deeply emotional.

Composed around the middle of the century, in the period when Beckett wrote "Waiting for Godot," "Texts for Nothing" is a series of 13 burrowing ruminations that elude category. In them, as the scholar S. E. Gontarski observed, Beckett abandoned the "ideology of a concrete presence, a single coherent being" that is traditionally the essence of the monologue form.

You could call them the ultimate exercises in self-consciousness, except that there is no solid sense of self here; consciousness is rendered as something often outside the individual. (When Mr. Chaikin was first considering adapting "Texts" for the stage, Beckett proposed alternating a recorded voice with the live voice of an actor.) They are not, in other words, obvious candidates for strong theater.

All the more remarkable then is Mr. Irwin's ability to give a purely theatrical anchor to his chosen "Texts" (1, 9, 11 and 13) without pinning them down. True, Douglas Stein's setting — a red dirt hill, complete with rocks, holes and bogs — and Anita Yavich's silent-clown tramp costume have a fixed specificity. And Mr. Irwin is of course a very distinctive presence.

Nonetheless he becomes a creature in unending flux, controlled by unknowable forces. At first you aren't even sure that the sounds he makes are coming from him. And it seemed perfect that when an audience member sneezed, on the night I saw the show, Mr. Irwin wiped his own nose. At another moment, when the inevitable hideous cell phone went off, he held open his jacket in mild perplexity, as if the source of the sound might be inside.

That Mr. Irwin was so easily able to accommodate interruptions that most actors choose to rise above is an indication of how truly all-embracing the Beckett world view is. For this critic, in the disorienting throes of autumnal hay fever, what was being done and said on the stage seemed like a straightforward account of an average day: the kind when your body refuses to do what you tell it, and your thoughts seem to have been planted by someone else.

The rhythms of the 65 intermissionless minutes that make up the performance can be summed up in the final words of Beckett's short novel "The Unnameable": "I can't go on, I'll go on." Mr. Irwin is first seen sliding downward, from above, in a small avalanche of red dust.

Throughout the evening he will stumble, fall, splash his foot in a mud puddle, climb up, slide down and lie down. Like the logorrheic heroine of "Happy Days," he won't stop talking either, not even as he sinks into a devouring hole. He may not be in command of what he says or how he says it, but the will to speak is extraordinary.

Nearly every sentence contains its own negation. The evening's opening phrase: "Suddenly, no, at long last." As Mr. Irwin speaks these five words they seem to have been said by two, maybe three different people. This is self not merely divided; it is vivisected.

"I have convictions," says the speaker, "when their turn comes round." And here is an example of what is said about what is being said: "Vile words to make me believe I'm here, that I have a head, and a voice, a head believing this, then that, then nothing more."

That sentence goes on in a crescendo of contradictions, and quoting out of context as I am doing is probably unfair. But here are two more phrases that seem especially appropriate: "What variety and at the same time what monotony"; "what vicissitudes within changelessness."

That's the essence of Beckett according to Irwin: a sense of circular symmetry in which infinite, self-surprising variation is possible. Giving balletic life to the rebellion of arms and legs, finding momentary assurance in a music hall shuffle step, arching his exposed neck as if to some cosmic guillotine: Mr. Irwin finds the eternal in the particular and vice versa, only rarely stooping to too literal interpretive gestures.

His voice sometimes suggests a randomly programmed robot, sometimes a self-admiring lecturer and sometimes an autistic child. The words alternately come with suspicious ease and agonized struggle, and the mouth that gives them form can suddenly stretch to suggest a hole as fathomless as the one by which the speaker will ultimately be consumed. At times the mud- smeared face, with its protuberant pale blue eyes, seems to belong to a corpse.

Which reminds us of Beckett's link not just to classic comedy, which has been abundantly discussed and which comes so naturally to Mr. Irwin, but to the horror stories with which we scare ourselves. The tramp embodied by Mr. Irwin may immediately bring to mind Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, but he also recalls the fearsome creatures brought to movie screens by directors from F. W. Murnau to Wes Craven.

This splendidly funny and haunting evening reminds us that the basic human fear of losing control — or as Beckett suggests, not even having it to begin with — is responsible for our fascination both with slapstick and with fantasies of the living dead. One keeps falling down in life until finally one has fallen for good. You can either shiver or laugh. Mr. Irwin guarantees both responses.

TEXTS FOR NOTHING

By Samuel Beckett; directed by Bill Irwin; sets by Douglas Stein; lighting by Nancy Schertler; costumes by Anita Yavich; sound by Aural Fixation; production stage manager, Marci A. Glotzer; general manager, Rachel M. Tischler; production manager, Ian Tresselt. Presented by the Classic Stage Company, Barry Edelstein, artistic director; Beth Emelson, producing director. At 136 East 13th Street, East Village.

WITH: Bill Irwin.