Is Beckett Bunk or What?

Bleak? Maybe. But I think the play is hysterically funny. Honestly, I do. Even considered mounting it in public with three drunken friends one summer, but we never uite sobered up enough to get it on it's feet. I mean, I suppose it's bleak, but to me their responses to their own hardship, their inability to act in spite of their determination (like our own, I suppose) are hysterical. Pozzo and Lucky are a little grim, but if you set your jaw and look at them cruelly (not with intention to increase suffering, but just viewing them as phenomona, without empathy, as Artaud might have suggested) they're funny, too. This'll sound absurdly pretentious, and maybe it is, but it's like stepping back and laughing at the entire human condition. Like whoever's comment (might even have been Beckett, but certainly one of his ilk, at any rate) about life essentially being equivalent to a mother giving birth astride a grave. It's just an idea, and it can be funny in itself.

I dunno. I was thinking about recently while watching Amelie (French film, was playing on Sundance or IFC) about this compulsion we apparently feel (or Hollywood seems to think we feel) that we have to like characters, that we have to identify with them, that they have to be intensely human, only moreso. What's wrong with caricatures? What's wrong with symbols? What's wrong with exaggerated features? What's wrong with laughing at people. The movie's not a great example, but it's what brought this up for me. "Withnail and I" is a film that comes to mind where we are free to laugh at, to scorn, to deride our heroes in their folly. We are constantly reminded that these characters are human because they're played by human actors. Why should the character also be have to be so "real"? That's redundant. Far more interesting to me when the character bucks against the humanity of the actor, when they are clowns, buffoons, types, features...

Okay, just ranting through my waking up process here. Maybe there's some sense in it somewhere.

There, that's more like it

The "Godot" effect!
Meaningless inaction.

Well put, patio, and you got an endorsement by Bo and Gudot.

Still think "Breath" was dumb, however.

Maybe. But watching the audience come out must have been hysterical.

Course, there were all those radio "plays" the guy did. Like Cascando. Rubbish, if you ask me -- and no possibility to savor the adverse reactions, so there was probably something altogether less humorous in his head...

Letty; "Breath" was brilliant; it was the people who paid full"box office" to see it that where a little "short changed" in the bonnet, perhaps. Or maybe not, after all "they" were there!

And since you realy like slamming your head against brick walls; get a copy of Edward Albee's "Tiny Alice", and read it (pay careful attention to "Julian").

The most meaningful words in theatre - "accept Julian, accept!"

patiodog--your comments on "Godot" and "Withnail" are right on. Seems like people prefer films, plays, novels when there's someone to identify with or root for. I dig Don DeLillo and lent one of his novels ("Running Dog") to a friend. She didn't enjoy it because no character was likeable. Well, maybe not in any conventional way, but they sure were interesting!

Though getting back to "Godot", the last time I saw it, I sort of identified with the two leads. Maybe a sign of my aging and a changed world view, but they made a lot of sense to me...

I agree that they're identifiable, and they are pitiful, but they're not really "likeable." At least one of them smells like piss and probably has gonorrhea. Their social habits are horrible.

I guess what I like is some degree of monstrosity in my characters. It's more interesting. (I made the mistake of going to see that Jim Carrey becomes God movie -- what a trite piece of garbage, but the people are just so, so, so nice!) And we get that when we make movies like Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, but then we make the monstrosity something completely other, so aberrent and abhorrent that we don't (or can't) recognize it in ourself. But with something like "The City of Lost Children," you can come in the end to see where this crazy scientist dude is coming from. He's lonely, like we sometimes are, and that's what drives him and becomes distorted in him. But it's not done in this realistic, soft-psychological manner. Everything is overblown and distorted so that it actually takes an act of imagination to see where we might be like him. And at the same time, the absurdity of it distances us enough that we can laugh at it and look at it analytically and aesthetically; Brecht stole the idea from Eisentstein and called it verfremsdungeffekt (distancing or alienation effect), but it's much older than that. It's in the fables, it's in the stories of Coyote, it's in all the mythologies, really.

Okay, I'm rambling again. Sorry. Trying to avoid work as much as possible today, yesterday turned out to be crap.....

It just occurred to me that New Haven and Mac have left Letty all alone in a man's world. Uhoh!

(ok, Bo. The first nighters and "Breath" were both dumb. How's that)

Sorta got Tiny Alice mixed up with A Doll's House so I read a review. Julian was the sacrificial lamb, huh. ?Something tells me that Albee was questioning his own beliefs or lack thereof.

D'art and patio. Sorry that I can't comment on most of your references. Don't know 'em. Of course, Jim Carey is crazy. Everybody knows that.

letty, I was suggesting you read the play, not the reviews;

I would be more interested in your opinion, than that of most of the drivel written about plays by people paid to criticize.

I prefer Happy Krazy to Intence Angst. Popular v Epic

I wish I could communicate mad hand gestures through these wires...

I know, Bo. I was just trying to jog my memory about whether or not I had already read it. OK, so I'll read Tiny Alice. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Well, I'll be damned. Here's John Oak, angstless. (exhale) :wink:

Didn't mean to desert you, Letty.

I know Albee's work fairly well. I've even worked with the man. (Stage-managed for him when he directed two of his one-acts a few years ago.) But I must confess that I don't know Tiny Alice at all...

At this rate it'll soon be out of print; should I look for a royalty?

Wow, Mac. The only notable that I've ever worked with was some clarinet player from England called Bobby something. Don't think he had read Tiny Alice, either

Patio, to whom was the mad hand directed? Yikes!

Letty ------- I'm getting a new delivery of Hi-Grade Angst delivered by UPS (united piss shakers).. It'll fall off the back of their truck probably and I'll get real mad. I might have to resort to temper tantrums though.

Not angry -- mad, wild, uncontrolled, expressive hand gestures...

ask Craven; he'll help you to add them to your signature!

Mind you there may be no room for a comment!

UPS performs a valuable service for society: they remind us that time is relative, that we must take responsibility for our own destinies, and that haste is counter-productive.



Thanks, Bo. I'll see if Craven can make my virtual self more Italianate...

old and......;

I wouldn't count on a service who's very name is pronounced oops!