Diving Into Beckett and Absurd Theatre
Westmont Theater performs “PlayBeckett,” six short plays by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, one of the most widely discussed and highly prized of 20th century authors, Thursday, Jan. 28, and Friday, Jan. 29, at 7 and 9 p.m. Ticket are $7 general admission, $5 students/seniors for one bill of plays; $10 general admission, $7 for students/seniors for two bills of plays. For tickets or more information, please call
(805) 565-7040.
“The plays are poetic, haunting and searingly vivid,” says John Blondell, who directs the performance. “They create incredible challenges for actors, since Beckett places actors in incredibly difficult situations.”
Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, is one of the great names of Absurd Theatre with Eugéne Ionesco, who wrote “The Bald Soprano,” which Westmont performed in October. Beckett’s plays explore human suffering and survival in a meaningless world.
“He excises typical notions of character, since we don't really know anything about the figures we are watching,” Blondell says. “We don't know who they are, where they came from, or what brought them to the states they are in. The plays, rather, show deep states of being — feeling states and psychic states in predicaments that we might term apocalyptic.”
Blondell says in some cases the actors don’t speak and can only express their predicament through movement. In other cases they only speak and cannot move. “The actors are diving into this material, doing an excellent job meeting and surpassing the challenges and creating work that I am particularly proud of,” says Blondell, who was named Local Hero by the Santa Barbara Independent in November.
Blondell was inspired to direct Beckett during a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “As I was walking through room after room of modern masters, my mind turned to Beckett,” he says. “He, like the visual artists I was looking at, had re-envisioned the art form, had made it new.
“I started to think of several of his short plays, theatrical installations one might call them, which depict fractured and fragmenting consciousnesses poised on the very brink of existence.”
The plays include “Footfalls,” “Act Without Words,” “Rockabye” and others. “They depict thoughts reeling out and through time, memories captured and lost, consciousness bubbling forth, only to sink away again.”
Plays and Times
Thursday, January 28 and Friday, January 29 at 7 p.m.
- Act Without Words, Directed by Victoria Finlayson
- Rockaby, Directed by Diana Small
- Come and Go, Directed by Joyelle Ball
Thursday, January 28 and Friday, January 29 at 9 p.m.
- Not I, Directed by John Blondell
- Footfalls, Directed by Diana Small
- Catastrophe, Directed by John Blondell