Sam I am

A cerebral romp with Beckett

by Bill Rodriguez

. . . and then you go on. Directed by Peter Wallace. With Bob Jaffe. At Perishable Theatre through January 30.

Beckett needs to be performed smartly or not at all. That's why we don't see even his classics staged a lot. Take the monologue set pieces. It's too easy for an actor to simply uncork and let us ride along on the stream-of-consciousness torrent. How fortunate that Bob Jaffe, in his anthology . . . and then you go on at Perishable Theatre, manages to turn the opportunity into something more like river rafting, with the actor as a fretful guide supplementing the stock spiel with artfully timed paddling and loquacious body language.

Take Jaffe's negotiating the rapids of Lucky's lengthening speech in Waiting for Godot. Without a clever guide, we're lost within the unpunctuated parenthetical within parenthetical remarks about a God who "loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell." Far more disorienting than the syntactical boxes within boxes are the Existential ones, as Lucky constantly hedges, qualifies, backtracks and verbally rubs out prior observations in an ill-fated attempt to figure out why he's been left here, a jabbering skull in a skin.

If the above suggests that this delightful one-hour one-man performance is a dour, artsy-fartsy endurance contest, let me correct the impression. While . . . and then you go on is a cerebral romp, it is a romp nevertheless. Jaffe and director Peter Wallace understand and emphasize that Beckett's heartfelt aim was to write comedies.

As the playwright has Nell say in Endgame, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."

Beckett's genius, in scratching his head about our situation through his characters, was to get us to see that there is nothing left to do after we confront life's absurdity but to laugh and carry on. God knows there's plenty of material for gags. At one point the performance becomes a tour de farts worthy of the Blazing Saddles campfire scene, as a panhandler tallies 319 little billows in one day.

Jaffe steps out in bowler hat and tie, an image we associate with Godot as much as with the silent film comedies from which Samuel Beckett drew inspiration and technique. On a circular platform, scenic designer Jeremy Woodward has placed an evocative sculpture for a seat: upended split cord wood corralled with metal bands into a rectangle. Our seats are on three sides. Jaffe had worked as stage manager on a previous anthology of Beckett material, Jack McGowran's Beginning to End, in the early 1970s. But he chose to assemble his own collection of excerpts, with the permission of the Beckett estate, for this production. He drew from a dozen poems and prose pieces as well as plays for . . . and then you go on, and they fit together quite well.

No dry reading, this. Jaffe physicalizes it all thoughtfully. I particularly liked one moment: his hand extended to the sky as the speaker describes a full moon, but when he tells of his mother's dismissive retort about the view, the hand drops; he stares at it for only a beat under the narrative and clenches it into a fist as he cheerfully goes on describing his mother. Nice touch.

Jaffe pumps life into the words with contagious energy, from antic gestures to stripping to an undershirt to magnify the vulnerability in a love poem. In addition to love, beauty pops up now and then, such as with "the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse" in a description of the year's turning, which concludes with "the endless April showers . . . and the whole bloody thing starting all over again." A reluctant acknowledgment, but an acknowledgement nonetheless.

Irony is what gives dimension to many of the remarks and speeches here, which would be flatly simple-minded without our observing the comforting self-delusion. Yet throughout the production, encouragement and affirmation gets the last word. We get the sense, without looking up his bio, that Samuel Beckett's death in 1989 was not from suicide. More than many authors, Beckett's personas speak autobiographically, so Jaffe's selections suggest a portrait of the man as well as the work. At one point, the Chaplinesque figure is especially childlike, playing gayly with a toy soldier-sized white figure, addressing it in a particularly dolorous and depressing little lecture. Yet the lights come up as he concludes "so there's nothing to be afraid of," to make sure that we don't hear the line as just another arch zinger deflating such hope. Too optimistic for Beckett? Perhaps not.

Beckett begins his 1952 novel The Unnamable with the words "I say I. Unbelieving." In its name as well as content, this fascinating production is a thought-provoking reminder that the playwright chose to end the grim book with eyes uplifted, writing: "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."