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Showing posts from October, 2019

'On Beckett' at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

Bill Irwin | Craig Schwartz On Beckett , created and performed by Bill Irwin, is a celebration of and discussion about the work of famed dramatist Samuel Beckett. Irwin begins his performance, his presentation, by laying out precisely what the evening will entail–a clean summary of the texts that will be dramatized and considered, and for approximately how long the show will run . He speaks to the audience in a friendly, familiar manner. A few times throughout the roughly 90-minute performance, he mentions that he hopes he's not coming off too "artsy." Irwin leaves the audience with this qualification before diving into Beckett's text: He is not a biographer; he is an actor with an intimate knowledge of Beckett's works as one can only possess when one repeatedly speaks a writer's words aloud. The humility is nice. The last thing I want to listen to is a pretentious intellectual tell me how to interpret Samuel Beckett for 90 minutes. Irwin makes it