On Stage

...But, as in most testimony from one lover to another, the embellished construction fails to hide the essential clumsiness, the justification of self that never really persuades...

...Distilling his means, choosing his theatrical language with remarkable economy, Beckett has dramatized what is perhaps the one constant available, whether in life, death, or even beyond death— the motion of the mind that has lived...

...Then a cold, white spotlight turns on one of them, at which moment he or she speaks, sometimes cut off in mid-sentence as the light turns on another, bringing forth words, phrases, explanations, descriptions, exclamations, reasonings, pleas, observations—indeed, all the paraphernalia of our daily verbal relationships...

...Three heads backed by hellish halflight, facing merciless spotlight: Not three bodies with hands, feet, or any means of locomotion as we know it on earth, just three isolated, exposed heads...

...Pinter, neither dishonorably nor ineptly, deals here in charade, a lightweight game in which husband and wife change identities for the convenience of each other...

...Judge then of my astoundment," says the mistress, or "There was no denying that he continued as assiduously as ever...

...In the best of times—and these are the worst—defining the theatrical occasion has been more a matter of conjuring than definition...

...The tree, in effect, disappears under the weight of one fragile branch...

...After a moment of absolute silence, resonant with the memory of isolated phrases, the spotlight reappears, once more commanding the attention of the remembering heads...

...In this way, I present you with a Beckett, my Beckett at this instant in time, remembering always that each instant shifts my vision...

...If the light, as it continues to bear down upon these testifying heads, seems harsher now, it is because the seeds of doubt have been so carefully and selectively planted...

...But the boundaries of my success with truth, my hope for accuracy, are circumscribed by the limited area of my head and my head alone...

...The lines leading to them, the shape of the torso, the shadings were selected to tell the story of that body in that space at that time...

...Three heads —two female and one male— appear in what Beckett calls "hellish half-light" above the mouths of three huge urns...

...But like the lives remembered by the heads, it is not rendered futile...

...Thus, I am a comic figure if I think I am ever presenting you with Beckett's Beckett...

...But there the resemblance ends...

...the husband's "We were not long together...

...Only one's head seems real, yet the evidence of its reality convinces nobody, least of all the light trained cruelly upon it...

...Beginnings, middles, and ends had to be extracted from the literary texture of the object, and if it could be accurately determined that they existed and that they occurred in the appointed places, then the definers safely and sanctimoniously defined...

...and "I could not credit...

...On the part of an insecure poet, selections and absences can be willful and perverse...

...It appears before us as a clever idea, vaguely predictable, and so transparent that it finally disappears with ease from the memory...

...What, then, do these surfaces suggest about the interior vision of the play...

...and the hands and feet were unselected for the same purpose...

...Telling us almost everything about the way we might submit to the peculiarly theatrical theater experience, they confound those experts who, at all costs, would have the theater only on its bastard, borrowing, hybrid terms...

...In doing so, he has written yet another play belonging only to the theater, a play severely beautiful and serenely at peace with itself...

...Stark Young, the first American critic to concern himself passionately with the idea of the play as play, suggested a variety of definitions, each related to his conviction that the form of theater can uniquely express its content...

...among other possibilities, is partially disarmed by such a suggestion...

...The second half of the play, only another nine minutes, repeats the pattern...

...What we see, in a strange sense mirrored by the character tricks of phrase, is an abstracted courtroom drama in which light is the judge...

...The effect, however, is like that of those drawings by Cézanne where hands and feet are not quite drawn, possibly because Cézanne could not draw them, but more likely because their actual presence is not quite relevant...

...A great dramatic poet, his influence on others is likely to touch only the shadows in their creative corners...

...His way, so completely his own, could never be the precisely charted way of another dramatist...

...Perhaps the first point to stress is that beyond the subterranean regions of his art, Beckett is telling the story of a rather sordidly comic and disastrous marriage triangle...

...The tricks keep emerging, almost foolishly formal, from the denser, more directly emotional fabric of their testimony...

...For one thing, they suggest that vision is, in fact, wholly interior...

...There are no easy explanations, no reasons clever enough, no convenient channels of escape...

...I doubt it...

...In this production, and in the production of Harold Pinter's The Lover which accompanies Play on the program, Alan Schneider has served both writers with a fidelity to their intentions that is rare in our current theater...

...Beckett offers Stark Young's space, time, and oral values, but he is less generous with the personal medium of the actor...

...As Joyce and Proust affected the modern novel, so Beckett's effect on the modern play: Nothing, it would seem, can ever follow him, yet everything will...

...From the maze of words, several heard earlier spring suddenly within hearing range: the wife's "Get off me...

...They speak first in muttering chorus, from which only an isolated word or two can be extracted...

...Pinter's play, however, suffers somewhat by its inclusion on the same bill, despite the stylish facility of Hilda Brawner and Mr...

...It should go without saying—but it never does —that both the painter and the viewer know that the hands and feet are there...

...A play, he said, "is a play in so far as the idea, the content, of it is expressed in theater terms—the space relationships, the time elements, the oral values, the personal medium of the actors, and so on—as distinguished from the terms of literature.'* For a population of reviewers and audience educating each other about a theater seen only as literature or theme, these words retain the sound of revolution...

...Differing from the first half more in its impression than its expression, it furnishes additional information about the affair...

...Presumably it is joined to Play by the fact that it, too, apparently concerns adultery...

...While tangential to his central concerns, it remains, even after two viewings, only an outline, revealing its detail with considerable reluctance...

...This is a play, or This is not a play...

...The critical act...

...Part of the trouble lies, of course, in the collaborative nature of the medium: With so many criteria to choose from—words, story, character relationships, morals, décor —it is easier to describe the occasion as the sum of one collaborative part rather than in its own embracing terms...

...Michael Lipton and Marian Reardon enact roles which might well be considered ungrateful, yet they do them with a submission to the spare demands of the material that is completely admirable...

...Surfaces, for a start, tell much of what we need to know...

...Lipton...

...That a play may be like other works of art in certain respects, but distinctive within itself—a personal form commanding its own needs, defining its own landscapes, its own limits—never occurred to those gentlemen who have categories where their responses ought to be...

...Peppered by wit, salted by charm, and tinged with ascorbic acid, The Lover is only superficially related to the aesthetic world of Beckett...

...Written originally not for the theater, but for television, it betrays its origins in a manner that would not be so readily discernible on another program...

...In Play, Frances Sternhagen...

...Everybody tells a truth as he has seen it, but nobody is telling the truth, the whole truth, nothing but...

...But in its echoes, it suggests limitless energies yet to be released by anyone who dares as he has dared...

...Still, without hands or feet, having only heads, faces, voices, and words, there remains a vital hold on life and a startling kind of motion on stage...

...The mysteries in Play arc unerringly expressed by its formal outlines, its roughly objective exteriors...

...I may describe, I may even judge, and I shall certainly continue my efforts to explain...

...The life within these heads, the pressure clamped beneath the surface of the brain, is the real life of these people wherever they may be feeling things now...

...He has, above all, chosen his actors well...

...The characters' snatches of story reveal their individual, obtuse, personally directed needs more than they reveal anything believable about the actual three-way events...

...After about nine minutes of this, the hellish half-light returns, once again surrounding the choral whispers in its own ghostly, reflective silence...

...One waved a fashionably tipped wand and declared...

...Play, Samuel Beckett's latest excursion into the "impossible," accepts the fact of theater, and in so doing redefines what is possible...

...Is Beckett, then, a non-existent or ineffective influence, a temporary artistic spasm and a theatrical dead end...

...In Beckett's work, they assume importance not only because they spring from secure deliberation, but also because they constantly reflect back on the specific reality of the work itself...

...His redefinition of theater does not mean that he has arisen from his dark, cavernous, existential agony with a set of new formulas for playwrighting...

...This time, however, it is clear that the facts as we receive them could be termed accurate only by the involved person uttering them...