A Word In Edgewise: Irwin and Beckett: Kinetic Semantics at Play

Don’t let March 24^th slip by without having experienced Bill Irwin’s one-clown Guthrie performance, On Beckett. Full-on aficionado or only a sketchily recall of no-show Godot, you’ll be riveted the full 81 minutes.

Tony Award winner Irwin (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) trained at the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College and played prodigiously from Broadway to Sesame Street; co-starred with Nathan Lane…and Elmo. With slither-and-slide, rubber-bandy physicality Irwin leads his Guthrie audience to deep Beckett waters coaxing them to drink–or sip.

Irwin, he confesses in full disclosure, has been in thrall to Beckett for some five decades, has been quoted as saying “Waiting for Godot has been a spine through my life. I can’t escape it.” There is always more to glean from Beckett’s words, and concerning On Beckett Irwin confides that his “baggy pants comedy and Samuel Beckett’s writing…just seem to connect.”

Beckett, Irwin reminds us, born in 1906, was of the first generation raised in the shadowy flickerings of silent films, a new world encompassing vaudeville, slapstick, broad comedy, chases, and pratfalls. Beckett and family attended the variety theater, outings that emerged in Beckett’s later precision concerning stage direction, costuming, and physical “business.” Beckett made his first–and only–visit to America in 1964 to collaborate with silent film star Buster Keaton on Beckett’s sole filmscript, Film.

Beckett left Ireland for France–Paris specifically–and wrote a great percentage of his work originally in French. Many feel his experiences in the resistance during WWII–having to flee Paris to escape arrest–contributed to the tenor of his works.

Irwin’s On Beckett segues between recitation/performance of Beckett’s writing, including excerpts from Texts for Nothing, The Unnamable, Watt, and Waiting for Godot  (whence my urgings of paragraph one) and personal comments. Hearing Irwin utter aloud texts he’s spoken on stage for decades ignites a spark, a glimmer of their meaning and promise. Whether I understood each passage or not, they came alive with motion and a meaning “precise but undefinable” that Beckett’s language conveys.

This precision of Beckett’s language, the necessary accuracy of its delivery, clarified Irwin’s sly aside referring to the vigilance of Beckett’s estate and the swiftness of its retributive sword:  until the master’s words slip into public domain, they’re to be delivered in the same number and order as they were written.

During the performance, as Irwin recites or explains the importance of bowler hats, dons baggy–then baggier–pants, then, lays an Ariadne’s thread from a Beckett phrase to words of Dante’s and Milton’s and on through William Styron’s Darkness Visible; he is in near constant motion–what one author titled an article, “The Zany Labor of the ‘Physical Intellect’”

Irwin’s deliverance of part of his three-page speech as noosed slave Lucky–performed in the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production of Waiting for Godot– is like witnessing Sasquatch break the fourth wall, squared and cubed by the knowledge that the characters Estragon and Vlaimir, attempting to physically stifle him, were played by Steve Martin and Robin Williams, respectively. Muses Irwin, “I can still see Robin Williams flying towards me in midair.”

My take-home epiphany was that while I may not ever fathom Beckett–even Irwin doesn’t make that claim–Irwin’s spoken cadences of Beckett’s words unlocked the possibility of luring  them within my ken.

Don’t forget: Till March 24, McGuire Proscenium Stage