Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby
Opening Night: October 7, 2014
Closing: October 12, 2014
Theater: BAM Harvey Theater
In this staging of three one-woman plays by Samuel Beckett, directed by the playwright’s longtime friend Walter Asmus, the obsessive rhythms of abject existence—rambling, pacing, and rocking—are laid bare. Irish actor Lisa Dwan, who drew ecstatic reviews for her performances at the Royal Court Theatre and in the West End, masterfully triangulates the existential void. In Not I, a woman—reduced to a mere mouth, suspended in total darkness—seeks solace in a blisteringly paced stream of her own broken speech. In Footfalls, a tattered soul, drained of life, paces relentlessly outside her dying mother’s bedroom. And in Rockaby, a woman slowly withdraws from the world, rocked to eternal sleep in her mother’s chair.
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October 8, 2014
It’s all over so quickly, and yet while you’re part of it, it seems it will never end. That’s a fair summing up of life, don’t you think? It is also a fair description of the deeply sobering and equally intoxicating experience of the three short plays by Samuel Beckett that opened on Tuesday night at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There, a lone and improbably gifted Irish actress named Lisa Dwan is daring to shoulder what feels like all our human care and woes, from the cradle to the grave. The triple bill of Beckett’s Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby has an official running time of 55 minutes. Everyone involved in this harrowing and beautiful production obviously has such a rigorous respect for detail that I wouldn’t presume to contradict that estimate. But you can be forgiven for afterward having no idea of how long you have spent in Ms. Dwan’s company. Ms. Dwan, you see, is an instrument of Beckett, in that way saints and martyrs are said to be instruments of God. And Beckett as a playwright, properly served, has almighty ways of playing with time and timelessness that even Albert Einstein never grasped.
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