2008 -- After Godot * facebook LUL group [adm] -- lul.groups.vox.com : I have to redirect "season.txt" to lul-calendars! * film-blog * 2006 blog Plays Online Shows 3 Sisters Hamlet2001 12night WWWilde Inspector General Mikado D Liaisons Don Juan XXI Glass Menagerie Island Reckless Virginia Woolf Runaways BioMechanics Method for Directors StageMatrix: Directing Script Analysis biblio appendix links list new faq glossary Stoppard'08 blogsearch.google.com acting.filmplus.org books.filmplus.org filmplus.org/classes directing.filmplus.org him.filmplus.org filmplus.org/plays filmplus.org filmplus.org/spectator From My Shows vid.txt -- youtube.com/anatolant www.flickr.com This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called theatre. Make your own badge here. ... beckett.php

* After so many years of webbing I cannot change the nature of my webpages -- they are what they were from the start; notes, thoughts, points I make for myself for classes and productions. Do they have an independent existence? Maybe, somewhere in the future... Mary Poppins Tickets Wicked Tickets Tarzan Tickets Cirque du Soleil Tickets [ advertising space : webmaster ] Stage Directing Theory "Beckett's philosophical muse is, after a dour pessimist—Arthur Schopenhauer, who describes life as a "task" and as "drudgery" filled with …universal need, ceaseless cares, constant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme exertion of all the powers of body and mind….the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything living works wit the utmost exertion of its strength for something that is of no value. But when we consider it more closely we shall find here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or motive." * vtheatre.net act.vtheatre.net direct.vtheatre.net film.vtheatre.net script.vtheatre.net shows.vtheatre.net web.vtheatre.net method.vtheatre.net biomechanics.vtheatre.net GeoAlaska: Theatre & Film Theory of Spectatorship Mailing List & News -- subscribe yourself * Method for Directors? 2007 -- web year? new -- google.com/groups my eGroups NEW: new: 2009 LUL 2005 total directing & total acting + CHE'05 : cast and crew @ groups.yahoo.com/group/wwwilde * * March 2006: Go.dot -- 100 years since Sam Beckett's birth * Theatre UAF new: 2003 * ShowCases: 3 Sisters, Mikado, 12th Night, Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest, Dangerous Liaisons, Don Juan Summary Directors Lab Lincoln Center Theatre Mikado Questions Don Juan and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics) This selection of seven of Moliere's prose plays includes "Precious Provincials," "The Would-be Gentleman," "Don Juan," "The Reluctant Doctor," "Scapin the Schemer," "The Miser," and "George Dandin." 2005: Total Acting & Total Directing * * one act fest Waiting for Godot was written in French in 1949. In the first scene, two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait on a lonely country road for an appointment with Godot. After a while Pozzo enters, leading Lucky on a rope. They talk. Waiting for Godot a play in which 'nothing happens, twice'. channel4: Graphic version -- Includes layout and images. "Like Ibsen and Brecht before him, and even more radically, Beckett completely changed our expectations for what can happen on a theater stage. Until Beckett audiences expected the "well-made" play, though they had learned to accept Ibsen's "problem plays" and had even experimented, perhaps, with Brecht's "alienation effect." They were even hip to a "theater of ideas," though these plays could be dull. Most people, even today, are pretty conventional in their expectations for drama, for what they expect to see when they go to the theater or to a film. They expect a well crafted, clever plot with interesting foils, intrigues and sidestories that amplify the main narrative. They expect narrative, storytelling. They expect characters they can "relate to" or "identify with"—people who are constructed to resemble people in real life. These people can be unusual, eccentric, quirky and interesting, but they should be life-like characters. It's an expectation that goes all the way back to Aristotle, who demanded that the hero of tragedy be, among other things, "life-like." People going to the theater expect elaborate scenery designed to evoke an illusion of reality. They expect verbal inventiveness, dialogue that "reveals character" and "provides exposition." By all of these things have audiences traditionally been wooed into believing that the fiction they are witnessing is real." * Notes THR331 Fundamentals of Directing 2005 * Wedding: class project -- finals * This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. There are several Chekhov's one-act comedies I use for class projects in my acting-directing projects (finals): Wedding, On the High Road, Proposal, Bear. [public domain] chekhov.05 -- Fall 2005 Theatre UAF main stage. From Chekhov to Beckett -- Chekhov's Absurdism and Beckett's Realism (reality and reality of mind). The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett John Calder ISBN: 0714542849 Price: £19.99 beckett sources If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death. That’s where liberty lies: to see oneself dead. –Eleuthéria the churn of stale words in the heart again love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words –Cascando Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself. –On Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce, 1929 ...music is the idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena, existing ideally outside the universe, apprehended not in Space but in Time only, and consequently untouched by the teleological hypothesis. –Proust, 1931 livin-high.mid le-bon-roi-dagobert.mid kids-yankdood.mid kids-twinkle2.mid kids-twinkle1.mid kids-london-bridge.mid kids-im-a-little-teap.mid kids-hilo.mid kids-head-shoulders.mid kids-hbd.mid kids-gladtr.mid beer-polka penn-polka polka-time polka1 polka2 polka3 polka4 polka5 trumpet-polka mid kids-glad.mid kids-frere-jacques.mid capital-ship.mid kids-entry.mid come-back-to-sorrento.mid kids-eency.mid kids-dingdong.mid kids-chopstik.mid kids-abcs.mid kids-abc.mid kids-3mice.mid kids-3hush.mid katy-hill-sblive.mid irish-washerwoman.mid garry-owen.mid indiana.mid far-away.mid dixieland.mid darktown-strutters-ball.mid Happy Days Godot Endgame Many ingenious theories have been advanced to provide satisfactory interpretations for the characters of Beckett's play. Religious or mythical interpretations prevail. The two tramps Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi) may be Everyman and his conscience. Gogo is less confident and at one moment is ready to hang himself. Vladimir is more hopeful, more even in temperament. One thinks of the medieval debate between the body and the soul, between the intellectual and the nonrational in man. Certain of their speeches about Christ might substantiate the theory that they are the two crucified thieves. Pozzo would seem to be the evil master, the exploiter. But perhaps he is Godot, or an evil incarnation of Godot. The most obvious interpretation of Godot is that he is God. As the name Pierrot comes from Pierre, so Godot may come from God. (One thinks also of the combination of God and Charlot, the name used by the French for Charlie Chaplin.) Mr. Beckett himself has repudiated all theories of a symbolic nature. But this does not necessarily mean that it is useless to search for such clues. The fundamental imagery of the play is Christian. Even the tree recalls the Tree of Knowledge and the Cross. The life of the tramps at many points in the text seems synonymous with the fallen state of man. Their strange relationship is a kind of marriage. The play is a series of actions that are aborted and that give a despairing uniformity to its duration. * Go.dot Beckett's Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures, 1990 by Christopher Ricks; Oxford University Press, 1995 * Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot by Harold Bloom; Chelsea House, 1987 - Modern Critical Interpretations - Waiting for Godot - Contents - Editor's Note - Introduction - Bailing out the Silence - The Search for the Self - Waiting - Waiting for Godot - The Waiting Since - The Language of Myth - Beckett and the Problem of Modern Culture - Beckett's Modernity and Medieval Affinities - Chronology Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse Westview Press, 1998 The Death of God and the Meaning of Life by Julian Young; Routledge, 2003 Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context by Enoch Brater; Oxford University Press, 1986 Samuel Beckett by John Pilling; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976 Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity by Richard Begam; Stanford University Press, 1996 All That Fall by Samuel Beckett; Grove Press, 1957 Directing Beckett 0472084364 Lois Oppenheim Interviews with and essays by twenty-two prominent directors of Samuel Beckett's work. Waiting for Godot Genre? A poem! Stagematrix.4: Directing Public (Notes): time manipulation. Each talks to himself; staged alienation = they are in two (many) different time frames... Directing Actors. [Godot is a showcase for 2006 THR331] Less directing! Actor-Text-Public = theatre. Actor-Public = circus. Costumes (new window): Vladimir * Estragon * Pozzo * Lucky * Boy * by Tara Maginnis and Kade Mendelowitz ...

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Doing Beckett -- Shows

Read a couple pages from script.vtheatre.net: Absurd and Beckett -- and come to auditions! Anatoly

Waiting for Godot, tragicomedy in two acts by Samuel Beckett, published in 1952 in French as En attendant Godot and first produced in 1953. Beckett, an Irish-born playwright who lived in France and wrote in French, translated his own works into English. Waiting for Godot was a true innovation in drama and the Theater of the Absurd's first theatrical success. Nobel Price britannica [ ]

"Fifty-years ago this Sunday, Samuel Beckett's masterpiece, Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris. The play where "nothing happens" on a stage with next to no scenery or props; enjoyed instant success and has become one of the most important and universal theatrical pieces ever. After seeing Godot, the American writer William Saroyan praised it by saying "It will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in theatre". Over the last 50 years, Waiting for Godot has been performed on the four corners of the earth, on Broadway, in summer stock, and even in San Quentin Penitentiary. Tonight, we look into what has made this theatrical masterpiece stand the test of time." listen * scenes from "Waiting for Godot" in the On Point studio

We are all born mad. Some remain so. –Waiting for Godot

He stopped crying. You have replaced him as it were. The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased. –Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Go.dot

The tree (of Life) looks like antenna... Metallic?

Arena setting. (Theatre) cube as a stone. Painted road?

Cuts?

Pauses = commercials?

The tree = a stamp. A few dead branches.

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down: Ropes, Belts, and Cords in Waiting for Godot Roger C. Schonfeld

Surrealism > Absurd > Conceptualism

[ Beckett and Foucault: Some Affinities ]

http://samuel-beckett.net/Godot_Act1_with_audio.html

Waiting for Godot (Acting Edition S.) Samuel Beckett 0573040087

... "Heartbreakingly poignant and outrageously funny, Waiting for Godot is at once an existential vaudeville, an anatomy of a marriage, a plea for resistance, and an actor's playground." (?) *

Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Series: Plays in Production
David Bradby
Royal Holloway, University of London
Paperback (ISBN-10: 052159510X | ISBN-13: 9780521595100)

"When I visited the gravesite on a cloudy Paris afternoon no one was there, and the one flower in a small planter in front of the site was wilted and drooping, which seemed appropriate. So too did the simplicity of his rectangular slab, flat on the ground (and easily missed, which I did at first), inscribed only with the names and dates-his wife "Suzanne Beckett, nee Dechevaux Dumesnil, 1900-1989," then a space, then "Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989."... " * = the stone they are sitting on!

The piedistal without a sculpture... "... The cemetery itself was criss-crossed by many concrete roads, and was too crowded with tombs for grass to grow."

"... the rest that is silence." (Hamlet's last words) Life = prison.

Hope -- "action" is waiting.

[ Traffic of our stage: Why Waiting for Godot? The Massachusetts Review; Amherst; Autumn 1999; Normand Berlin http://www.samuel-beckett.net/BerlinTraffic.html ]

... Who are these tramps? of what nationality? did they ever work? go to school? do they have families? why are they meeting here? (Where is here?) Etc. Possessing no history, connected to no naturalistic background, they seem to slip into the universal or archetypal. They are just there, on stage, in the same way that Gogo's boots are there, on stage, during the intermission. Those boots also have no known history. They don't fit Gogo, but then again, perhaps they do. Are they Gogo's boots or someone else's? (Chaplin's?) Lee Strasberg, the notorious teacher of American Method acting, told his students, "There are times when you pick up your shoes and see through them your whole life."

... Like a sculptor who chips away at the superfluous stone that hides his figure, so Beckett chips away at almost everything we thought was important to theater in order to reveal his own distinctive figure. What emerges seems narrow, as though he chipped away too much, but is, in fact, remarkably expansive. It is interesting to note that Giacometti, who knew Beckett personally, designed the tree for a 1961 Paris production of Godot. Giacometti once said that he was sculpting not the human figure but "the shadow that is cast."

His favorite word, Beckett once said, is "Perhaps."

Staying with Shakespeare, it seems impossible, now that we have Godot behind us, not to feel Beckett's presence in that graveyard in Hamlet, with the clown/gravedigger singing while he digs up skulls. In a scene mingling death and comedy, when Hamlet is taken aback by a singing gravedigger who seems to have "no feeling for his business," how can we avoid Beckett's observation: "Habit is a great deadener. " More important, Beckett's ghost hovers over Hamlet's last moments of life. Seeing that his friend, stabbed by the poisonous sword, is approaching death, Horatio, more antique Roman than Dane, reaches for the poisoned cup in order to commit suicide. Hamlet, in a final burst of activity, grabs the cup away from Horatio and utters the by-now familiar words, "Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story." A memorable, and interesting, stage moment. Notice that Hamlet is not telling his best friend, his only friend, not to commit suicide. He's saying, don't do it now because I need my story to be told. That the told story, that reputation, is important to the prince called Hamlet is an unequivocally Shakespearean idea. That death is "felicity," that the "rest" that is death will be "silence," well, that's both Shakespearean and Beckettian. One can almost hear Beckett playing with that word "felicity." How trippingly on the tongue the phrase "Absent thee from felicity awhile" proceeds as contrasted to those heavy monosyllables that describe our daily lives, "in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain." Think of the exchange in the beginning of Godot when Gogo, referring to Didi's difficulty in urinating, tells Didi, "You always wait till the last moment." Didi replies "(musingly) The last moment." Beckett's stage direction, "musingly," gives us the tone of the phrase. "The last moment" is what one wishes for in Beckett, the last moment when we can be sure the willow leaves are dead so that there's "no more weeping," the voices are dead so that there's no more talking about it. The last moment is the desired conclusion, the welcome night after a lingering day. It's a moment that puts its Beckettian pressure, I believe, on Hamlet's "felicity." The prince who fondled the skull of death, whose whole stage life is filled with death of all kinds, now, at the end, could have said with Didi, musingly "the last moment."

These examples of Beckettian influence on how we experience Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of any century, can be multiplied. The spare Beckett forces himself into the comprehensive Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's plays are richer and more immediate because he does so. Beckett's Godot can be felt even if we go further back in the western dramatic tradition than the Renaissance, as far back as we can go, to Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. I do not pretend to understand Aeschylus's difficult play but I find it is more accessible and immediate because of Beckett. Prometheus Bound is perhaps the purest dramatization of the tragic condition. At the end of the road at the end of the world, where Prometheus is nailed to the rock-having himself reached rock-bottom even though he is on a mountain topwe have the clearest view of what happened on that road. Alone, tied to his condition, puzzled by the arbitrariness of a god, filled with blind hope, suffering from physical punishment and the mockery of the gods, Prometheus, despite his god-like activity and height, seems very close to Beckett's tramps. He, like Didi and Gogo, would like to die but cannot; not dying means that he has no relief from the pain of living. He, like Didi, could have said musingly, "The last moment." Prometheus, like Beckett's characters, is filled with desperate hope, waiting for something to take its course. Uncannily, because Beckett is with us, when we contemplate Prometheus we see both Aeschylus's towering figure and Beckett's lowly tramps. Godot deepens our response to the ancient tragedy and opens it up to further interpretation.

Originally at http://www.lion-colleges.co.uk/static/proquest/x2576/46388399.htm/

http://www.themodernword.com/beckett/beckett_papers.html

Godot online text for the cast and crew only.

Theatre UAF Spring 2006 -- http://samuel-beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part1.html (source)