Award-winning Actor/Creator Bill Irwin Again Presents His award-winning “On Beckett” for a limited Summer Situation

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Parent Category: Other Festivals

Category: Theater

Published on Wednesday, 10 July 2024 09:24

Written by Brad Balfour

Who: Bill Irwin
What: “On Beckett”
When: July 11 - August 4, 2024
Where: Irish Repertory Theatre
132 West 22nd Street

Veteran actor Bill Irwin did it again. While waiting for his performance to start, I did a phone check and got word of President Biden’s withdrawal from the political race. That stunned me into distraction and then Irwin took the stage. Even the great actor noted the fabulous news and then flowed right into the performance, forcing me to pay attention. Irwin's award-winning exposition, “On Beckett,” captivated since it is so compelling. It’s not so much so through explanation; the 74-year-old doesn’t really offer any explanations or deep deconstruction of the grand Irishman’s enigmatic word-smithing. The engaging but often frustrating syntactical salads that make up much of Beckett’s oeuvre are well exploited by Irwin here. He animates them with quick, even frenetic but never boring expressions.

Now running for a limited summer engagement at the Irish Repertory Theatre, Irwin has been a favorite son of the theatre. This show is such perfect fare for the Rep that even Producing Director Ciarán O’Reilly was in the audience viewing the show again, for maybe the 10th time. He didn’t tell me what permutations he had noticed each time he saw it. But he did say that, of course, each performance has its own quirks, challenging me to attend again. 

Several years ago, I saw this show when Irwin did its 2018 run. I celebrated the performance but admit that I didn't. This time however, I was less concerned with getting it. I’m not sure Beckett would have been so concerned with my getting it. But for an audience, Irwin’s fusing of his clownish nature with Beckett’s fundamental wrestling with the absurd made the experience both enjoyable and somehow more comprehensible.

Conceived and performed by Tony Award-winner Irwin (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”), “On Beckett” explores the Nobel Prize winner’s copious output which included his oft produced “Waiting for Godot,” and “Endgame.” Though Beckett did write novels, essays and more, animating his words through actors makes his work all the more powerful if not quite theatrical.

In this intimate 90-minute evening, Irwin explores one performer’s relationship with Beckett, mining physical and verbal skills acquired in his years as a master clown and award-winning stage crafter. That someone whose sparse and rarified language should provide such fodder for a further extension of his work, Beckett anointed Irwin’s work by granting it approval to be staged at all.

Yes, Irwin just can’t escape Beckett. The MacArthur Fellow has spent a lifetime captivated by the Irish writer’s language. But it’s not just what is said but also what isn’t said. Clearly, Beckett knew the value of verbalized sound. So does Irwin as he ranges on stage with players of baggy pants and multiple bowler hats on his head or otherwise.

Irwin’s approach to the comic, tragic, and quixotic sides of Beckett’s work are filtered through the mindset of a clown — an entertainer who exploits the absurd to often get the laugh. From excerpts of “Waiting for Godot (which also includes sumptuous explication by Irwin of certain key scenes), bits of “Texts for Nothing,” and more — audiences experience this language in compelling new ways. Whether you’re encountering the Nobel Prize winner’s writing for the first time or building on a body of Beckett knowledge, this dynamic showcase is not to be missed. Now here’s a little to supplement and allow me some padding while I further ponder what I witnessed.

“On Beckett” premiered at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2018 to wide acclaim, winning a special Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Alternative Theatrical Experience. Previous iterations of Irwin’s snappy little show have been performed at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco and workshopped at the Vineyard Theatre in New York and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Irwin recently starred in the Irish Rep's much-lauded production of Beckett’s “Endgame,” directed by O’Reilly. His performance earned him nominations for the Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards as Outstanding Lead Performer. 

Couched in his body language and animation of clownishness, there’s an origin story to Irwin, as well to be found online. He was born on April 11th, 1950, in Santa Monica, California. This versatile comedian isof English, Irish, and German descent and spent a year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, as an exchange student. A graduate in theatre arts from Oberlin College, OH, he’s also a graduate of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Clown College, FL, and received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1984.

Irwin began a film career in 1980 and earned credits in more than 20 movies. His best-known film role was in 2000 when he played a perfectly absurd character, "Lou Lou Who,” in Dr. Seuss' “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” He’s also a produced, directed, wrote, and choreographed numerous productions of his own and others. In 2001, Irwin collaborated with renowned Russian mime Vyacheslav Polunin, who organized the New Carnival within the framework of the World Theatre Olympics in Moscow’s Hermitage Gardens. There, Irwin performed in the duo with David Shiner, among some of the best acting comedians of the 20th century, such as Vyacheslav Polunin, Django Edwards, Jérôme Deschamps, Franz-Joseph Bogner, Leo Bassi, Gennadiy Khazanov, Leonid Yarmolnik and Bolek Polívka and over a hundred of other comedians and mimes from all over the world. 

Besides pummeling us with his Beckett, Irwin has appeared on Broadway in "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" and at the La Jolla Playhouse in "The Seagull" by Anton Chekhov, among his other stage work. Irwin won the 2005 Tony for Best Actor in a Play, thanks to his performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" He was also nominated for four Tonys as an actor, author, director, and choreographer

As for Beckett himself, though born in Dublin, he spent much of his life in France, particularly Paris. He accumulated many awards including the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which — in new forms for the novel and drama — in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.” As is noted in Wikipedia, “his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference.”

How that should inspire a whole 90-minute show where a man demonstrates the clown-like nature to life and politics certainly sounds absurd. But Irwin does a fine job in making sense of nonsense — or is it the other way around?