Texts for Nothing

San Francisco:
American Conservatory Theater
June 14 - July 15, 2001

textsfornothing
Bill Irwin

beckett
Samuel Beckett
1906-1989

Stories and Texts for Nothing
(1988), Samuel Beckett

Suggested reading:
The Cambridge Companion to Beckett
(1994), John Pilling, editor
Conversations With and About Beckett
(1996), Mel Gussow, editor
Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
(1999), Anthony Cronin

Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (1994), Leo Bersani

    "Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't any more, I couldn't go on. Someone said, You can't stay here. I couldn't stay there and I couldn't go on." These are the first words spoken by Bill Irwin after sliding and pratfalling down the muddy slope which is the only setting of this monologue. Consisting of four sections (#s 1, 4, 9 and 13) of the 13-part Samuel Beckett prose work, Texts For Nothing is, as performed by master clown Irwin, alternately despairing and hilarious, and sometimes both in a single moment. Clad in an ill-fitting jacket, a collarless white shirt, muddy shoes (the better to slip and slide and step in strategically placed puddles) and baggy, grayish trousers, Irwin is the greatest present-day practitioner of the lost art of physical comedy as performed by masters like Laurel and Hardy, or Buster Keaton. Clowning is the prism through which he approaches Beckett, and it's not surprising. One Beckett biography describes his wish to have seen Waiting For Godot’s Didi and Gogo performed by Laurel and Hardy, and he wrote and directed 1964's Film, which starred Keaton. Irwin himself appeared as Lucky in the production of Godot which starred Steve Martin and Robin Williams, and in his notes on Texts he writes "In my mind they [Texts and Godot] are companion pieces. They are bound together in ways I wouldn't try to explain or defend; they are pieces of writing, each of them, that I hope to work with again and again."
    Irwin's delivery of the four-part monologue seems initially bizarre. He accents the "wrong" words in a sentence, pacing the phrases in a jarring, arrhythmic way and emphasizing certain points with a pulled face or a gesture which can seem almost at odds with the literal meaning of the sentence. But over time, Irwin conjures a character with this lurching, almost spastic delivery and demeanor, and the viewer is left breathless with anticipation of what spew of pain, of confusion, of sudden anger will come next. We are no longer watching a clown, or even a performance, but a vagrant, a tramp who is not in complete control of his body or his mind. Coming into the theater from the streets of New York City, this portrayal takes on layers of meaning and tragic beauty that the ranting "street-bum" characters of Eric Bogosian, always safely encased in ironic, performative quotes, never attain.
    Irwin is the perfect conduit for Beckett's vision and message. He manages to retain the attention of a jaded, there-just-to-be-seen-there New York audience through ridiculous pratfalls and mugging, but by the time the lights go down for the final time, after the tramp has sunk almost entirely into a grave-like hole near the front of the mudpile/stage, the impact of Beckett's words is unavoidable. Slicing with the simplest of prose directly to the heart of the contradictions and thousands of tiny torments which consume the human spirit, he makes us understand that we are each sunk in our own pit, and laughter serves only to stave off the darkness for perhaps one moment longer.