August 2, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Beckett’s tramps don’t need Irish accents but they very possibly have Irish ancestors.

Looking back on theatre history of the 20th century, it is apparent that one play has generated more speculation, interpretation, and ambiguity than any other single play as critics, academics, and audiences, troubled but delighted by it, try to extract from it the author’s intent as to meaning and production details.

The play of course is Samuel Beckett’s (1906 – 1989) Waiting for Godot, first production in French in Paris in 1953 and first Broadway production (in Beckett’s own translation) in 1956.

During his lifetime, Beckett refused to elaborate as to the play’s meaning (although he scoffed at the godot/god suggestion, pointing out that did not work in French). “I am no intellectual,” he insisted. “All I am is feeling.”

However, he was intensely interested in how his plays were performed, attending rehearsals (even those in German) and insisting that Alan Schneider direct English language perfomances in America. For Beckett, performance was vital.

Since his death, directors have tended to join the ranks of the seekers for meaning, reveling in how much still seems to lay hidden within the play, the characters, and ultimately, in its style of production.

Although the script has always occasionally referenced the presence of an audience, the productions I have seen were essentially representational—great for the poignant moments that break one’s heart, but also enclosing the slapstick clowning.

In Anders Cato’s innovative, riveting, and magnificently performed production on the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn stage, the presentational style dominates the play, and we, the audience, are pulled totally into what is happening on the stage—which is always a stage, one with a real door and a real doorknob.

And yet, while the Chaplin-like tramps cavort through their incredible sufferings, Cato is able at critical moments to make us forget to be part of the play, to pull us into silence and awe as Vladimir (David Adkins) speaks these chilling lines:

“Was I sleeping, while others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He will know nothing. He’ll tell us about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. Astride a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the whole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too, someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.”

Cato’s version is able to make us forget being audience at such moments. In that lies the amazing side of this performance, despite the fact that most of the time we are a part of the play, the innumerable scenes of hilarity in which the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon (Stephen De Rosa) cope with their infirmities: the weak bladder and the lame feet.

Beckett has written into his script many specific antics; Cato and his two tramps have found many more and gallop away with them. To cite only one, the bawdy antic gymnastics involved as Vladimir helps Estragon put on his shoes are ingenious.

The two play off each other beautifully. And beneath their quarrelling, their cavorting, and their banter there is the sense of an abiding dependency and love as they go on waiting.

The second pair of actors, Lucky (Randy Harrison) and Pozzo (David Schramm) are just as talented. Pozzo with all of his three hundred pound girth oozes onto the stage to dominate with his cruelty and inhumanity. His voice booms with vitriolic passion as he devours his lunch before those starving on stage. He is detestable in his voluptuous greed, his cruelty to Lucky, his inhumanity. During most of his long scene in the first act he dominates and plays to his audience as well as to the actors on stage.

And yet in the second act, blind and helpless, he can, despite all the hilarity in the efforts of others to raise him from his fallen state, have a moment one can never forget in which furiously and angrily he rants in torment only to end quietly “… the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” But it is only a moment before he shouts his over-powering self off the stage. A masterful performance.

Lucky, the speechless dumb servant, weighted by Pozzo’a regalia (and symbolic weight of all man’s inhumanity to man) is marvelously cast in a role far removed from those recent leads on the BTF stage (in Equus and Amadeus). Only allowed one spoken cue, when it comes, it is a torrent of babble without punctuation or pauses, sense but nonsense, a volcano of words that spill from him. As delivered, it is as riveting as is his tormented body.

And when he is ordered to dance, his abilities and the dance he executes combine pain with defiance and a macabre humor. A directorial touch not only has the dance repeated (it deserves repetition) but in the second act Vladimir attempts repeating it—again an insightful addition to the action.

Indeed the play abounds in far more physical action than the script provides. Small moments such as the tenderness with which Vladimir removes his coat and puts it across the shoulders of the sleeping Estragon and the moments when the pair pass the time with a canter about the stage. And then sudden moments beyond laughter when they regard the tree as useless without a rope on which to hang one’s self.

The setting is an innovative nowhere—a seeming room with dirt strewn, open doorways right and left through which these four can pass. But it is also a room with an upstage center door. With a door-knob. Through this door (to another universe, but one that perhaps includes the unseen Godot) enters A Boy (Cooper Stanton).

The part is a small one and directors seem to have trouble dealing with it. (In a long-ago production at the BTF, the lad (Kris Tabori) was dressed in blue and posed as the figure in the Gainsborough painting.) That did not work for me. Regretfully, neither does the current one.

The too-tall lad, in shorts, could scarcely fit under the door jamb and he, a skillful young actor, seemed directed to be wooden and flat. This role is important not only for his messages, or non-messages, but because within Vladimir’s interrogation of him there are lines such as, “ Where do you sleep?” Vladimir, who unlike Estragon, never seems to sleep, seems to almost remember a world in which a boy could sleep, in the hay with his brother.

So for me, he must be a real believable boy of some sort in this unbelievable non-world. But of course I am reading into it something I can’t find.

Besides the door, the set has one other significant feature. The ceiling has a great opening (through which the lone tree can extend,) but more importantly, the moon that rises at the end of each act can appear.

It is an enormous moon and the image of the two tramps, their backs to the audience standing viewing it, is emblematic of the play. A painting by Caspar David Friedrich has been usually given as inspiration. (I happen to root for Beckett’s Dublin friend, the artist Jack Yeats and his stunning painting Two Travelers, which hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.)

What all this amounts to is the inability to put into a few words all the wonders of this play which continues to tantalize.

Obviously, the production is riveting one and not to be missed. Indeed one could see it several times and still not take in all its incredible nuances. Everyone connected with it has exhibited labors of love. Whatever productions of Waiting For Godot you have seen, (or not seen or even read) see this one. It will keeping you laughing, but awe you as well.

Personal note on Beckett:

Reading Beckett and imagining performances, I always find echoes of the Irish Beckett. He was born in Dublin and lived there until graduation from Trinity College. The Abbey Theatre was in its blossoming and he was alive to that inheritance.

One has only to look at J. M. Synge’s tramps in Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding, or the tramps of Yeats in The Cat and The Moon (one blind, one lame), or even at the strange tramp duo in Yeats’ Purgatory, played on a bare stage with a tree and burned house. And of course there is the waiting, waiting, waiting in Yeats’ early neo-Noh play At the Hawks Well, and waiting the theme of Godot.

Beckett’s tramps don’t need Irish accents but they very possibly have Irish ancestors.

July 31, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

“… one of the most hilarious, zany, and rapid paced farces to ever grace the Williamstown Theatre Festival stage.”

Turn David Ives loose on translating Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear and you have one of the most hilarious, zany, and rapid paced farces to ever grace the Williamstown Theatre Festival stage. Evidently each actor auditioning for director John Rando must have had to prove skills in physical gymnastics, vocal pyrotechnics, and the ability to remove clothes with agility.

The play opens in the elegant blue and white drawing room of Victor Chamdebise (Mark Harelik) whose wife Raymonde (Kathryn Meisle), suspecting her husband of infidelity, is aided by her friend Lucienne (Mia Barron) in concocting an anonymous letter that will lure him into an assignation to expose him.

In the wrong hands, indeed several hands, this letter will result in the entire large cast suddenly being whirled out of the blue drawing room for appearances at The Frisky Puss Hotel, where Act 2 takes place in a maze of numbered doorways, stairways that slant upwards and downwards, and even a huge revolving bed that changes one room into another at the touch of button. All amid pink, purple, flowered décor that screams “naughty.”

The flamboyant cast includes in its misunderstandings, frantic chases, and jealousies:

• Lucienne’s husband Don Carlos Homenides de Histangua, given to frequent tirades in Spanish and flourishing a pistol that when fired brings down bits of ceilings;
• Victor’s friend Roman Tournel (Tom Hewitt) a womanizer of talent, with eyes for his friend’s wife;
• Victors’s nephew, Camille Chandebise (Carson Elrod) whose same last name adds to confusions while his speech defect, when not corrected by a bite bar supplied by Dr. Finache, (Brooks Ashmanskas), often makes anything Camille says total jibberish;
• and Victor himself, who is not always who he seems.

If this sounds incomprehensible, do not be alarmed, the whole play speeds merrily along, despite verbal confusions, lines one misses because the audience is a-roar at the antics, or it is impossible, and not necessary, to understand them. It is as though one in the audience is awash in the misunderstandings.

Act 3 gets all safely back in the blue and white drawing room, although some are lacking articles of attire, and all the muddles and confusions are finally resolved.

All the actors in this play romp their hearts out. With two intermissions it runs close to three hours but seems to whiz by gloriously in much less time. Everyone deserves high praise, including the announcer who advised us to turn off our cell phones in a French we could all understand.

July 25, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

In his role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Eric Hill once again gives a subtly nuanced performance of a man of singular learning (and piety), self-true, with a personality defined by his conscience, stoic and brave, but affable, gentle, and loving.

As Chancellor of England, More steadily defies Henry VIII’s decision to sever himself from his wife Catherine of Aragon who has failed to produce an heir to the throne and seeks to to marry Anne Boylyn from whom he expects a brighter future.

As The Common Man (Walter Hudson), in ever changing roles, keeps reminding the audience, when royalty roars and the members of the Royal Court devise their schemes, that it is best to lurk low with bowed head.

Such information, delivered directly to the audience, is a Brechtian device, breaking the 4th wall and bringing the audience into a safe distance from identifying with More too much.

For More does not bow his head. He stands tall until, on the scaffold, he must put it on the block. Where, ironically, that Common Man (who within the play assumes so many distancing garbs) is the executioner.

Hall in the role, although worried even before the King (Gareth Saxe) floats on his great boat into More’s garden, is serene, friendly, and dignified.

It is a delightful scene with a jaunty, young Henry trying to cajole More into admiration of a tune he has composed. All surface friendliness, but suddenly, sensing More’s resistance, he hurries his departure.

It is a result of this encounter that Henry will make sure that More becomes Chancellor, a role in which he hopes to keep him in line.

However, early in the first act, More is essentially untroubled. He knows the law and feels, despite his religious convictions, he can escape the net Henry hopes to throw over him. We see him reassuringly buoyant with his family .

He jokes with his wife Alice (Diane Prusha) about the lavish meal she has prepared for the royal guest who failed to enter the house and devour a bite. She is unaware of how dire the situation can become but still, for some reason, is almost fearful.

Prusha during the course of the play gives us a carefully shaded role as gradually she comes to grips with the true dangers of More’s determination. She is hurt, but valiant, by the reduced circumstances and in her final scene, her deep love for this man, whose conscience she still cannot understand, is in the bowl of custard she brings to his cell, and her hurt grief when he, knowing her despair, praises it and her humble gown. One tiny moment of long-wedded love, beautifully played by both.

And by his daughter Margaret (Tara Franklin), also present in all the family scenes, who, understanding sooner than her mother and more than her mother understands, loves her father so deeply she will reluctantly place around his neck the chain of Chancellor, which will lead to his death sentence. Another role, minor but pivotal, beautifully delineated, full of grace and awareness, fear and love.

But the family scenes do not dominate. More must face the villains of the play, armed with his legal awareness and his conviction of what is right.

The villains are everywhere with the Common Man scurrying among them.

The direst (in terms of power) is the off-stage king, determined to have his way. But he has a diabolical agent in Thomas Cromwell (David Chandler). There is a snake-like playing of his role, agile and deadly.

And he grooms for evil the venal Richard Rich (Tommy Schrider) who, a nobody, but craving corruption, sells his soul gladly, betrayal after betrayal, for a fine coat and a minor post in Wales. Schrider’s ambition and evil is more repulsive than even Cromwell’s.

Even the Spanish Ambassador, (Thom Rivera) in the most elegant of all the elegant velvet coats and supposedly on More’s side, wants to hatch a plot in Scotland, which More calmly rejects.

The political cards are stacked against More from the beginning. The Common Man will keep us aware of that. Dukes and Cardinals will fawn with Kings. And a man must live, as best he can, in a world such as man finds himself in.

In such a world, a man of More’s convictions and fortitude cannot live. Yet the playwright, and Hill’s acting of the role, keep us distanced beyond tears. We can admire the man but not completely understand him, his ability to put his family through so much but having so much moral courage. The role demands a self-awareness, a detachment that keeps him calm in all moments.

All of these actors, and those not named, grace the production, well-directed by Richard Corley. The setting (great movable stone-like pillars, shifted agilely for the many scenes) soar, forbiddingly, over the action on the stage. The minimal staging evokes the river via the oar of the boatman.

The play is well worth seeing. Although its running time is a long, it is difficult to know what could be omitted because all is so worthy. It won a Tony on Broadway in 1962 and has been present often on film, TV, and in revivals. Indeed, as I write, the New York Times announces a revival.

And since New York is a long drive from the Berkshires, we are fortunate to have A Man for All Seasons playing in Stockbridge.

July 20, 2008 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The basic idea behind Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour now playing at the Berkshire Stage Company is a fascinating one.

The action of the play takes place in the incredibly messy office of John (Austin Lysy) just back from WWI (that war they thought would end all wars); the time is April 1919. John’s father is going to back him, minimally, to become a publisher with enough to publish one book. He has advertised for scripts and been deluged with them, stacks and stacks of manuscripts lie everywhere.

Set designer Wilson Chin has not only gone all out on cluttered office, he has created the illusion that the dingy office is high up in a Manhattan loft with the back wall a great slant of windows that look out on the a lofty hotel (the Plaza?) across the street, all giving the feeling of being high above the city.

We soon learn that the deluge of scripts is not what John needs or wants. He already has two scripts he is eager to print. Both are memoirs.

The first is huge, (filling great boxes and obviously far longer than War and Peace.) Its author is Denny, (Brian Avers) best friend from his Princeton days, desperate to have it published because only his success can win for him the woman he loves, the beautiful Rosamund (Heidi Armbruster), a woman whose unusual laugh haunts him.

The second script is a much shorter one, written (she claims without ghostwriter) by the enchanting femme fatale Jesse (Opal Alladin), a gorgeous, mature, black singer with whom John is having an affair. At first glance one would think the play could evolve into a hilarious retake of Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma in which only one of two dying patients can be chosen for the treatment.

However the play is much more complex than that.

The fifth character Gidger (Nat DeWolf) is first aware that something much more significant than John’s difficult choice is going on. Gidger is only the put-upon office menial, but it is he who ultimately alerts John to the dreadful machine that, coming from nowhere, has landed in the outer office and is spewing out typed pages at an alarming rate. This awesome machine is brilliantly brought on-stage by the set, sound, and lighting crew who present it as great shadowed spinning wheels beyond the office door.

This situation and the five characters, all talented and winning actors, wonderfully garbed in 1919 regalia by Jessica Ford, spin about the stage in the first act, one written with witty dialog, strong character roles and a laugh a minute. We learn much about them which will become significantly important in the second act. The play seems to be an hilarious comedy and all is still joyous at intermission. Although put-upon, slighted Gidger is the only one to be sensing danger.

Act two, a longish one, is still to come and in it the hilarity vanishes. That great machine is printing out the future decades, the ways in which these five characters will be remembered in 1990, and the comic tone is gone from the play. The laughs are few or ironic (Gidger’s dog, a marvelous off-stage character who appears only at the beginning of act one, is the subject of many, wrongly attributed, typed pages.)

Thus, the whole tone of the play shifts to darkness – that comes after the violet hour? One becomes confused in this act as to the playwright’s intent. The future is not pretty. Gidger finds himself valiantly singing “Que Sera, sera” and wondering where the song comes from.

The future is not what was planned, not understood by future writers of this 1919 present.

The five actors, still trapped on stage in 1919 but having to face what the century will make of them, could give up, but they don’t. In the end, they are trooping off to see a 1919 play, the lost tickets for which the play began; a play in which they will know the ending when the play begins with the maid coming in to put flowers on the coffee table, but determined to enjoy it anyway.

And they hurry off not to miss the curtain. Herein probably lies the play’s theme.

This has been a difficult play to describe, the mood and tone shift from act one to act two having jolted, as probably the author intended. However, for me, the second act was too cluttered, needing streamlining. The author is talented, having written such moving scripts as Three Days of Rain, and director Barry Edelstein has seen that his actors present the play with grace, agility, even poignancy, as well as all the hilarity.

But the play in the second act tries to give us too much, a bit like the character Denny with his enormous script.

However, it is well worth seeing for its talented cast and excellent staging, but it is not an easy play to untangle despite all the talent that has gone into its making.