Dark Plays Find Light in Actors

Samuel Beckett is not a cheery playwright, and “A Few Rags of Love: An Evening of Samuel Beckett’s Shorter Plays,” the set of his short plays (“Catastrophe,” “Rough For Theater 1,” “Footfalls,” and “Rockaby”) which ran from Mar. 2-4 at the Loeb Ex, was no exception.

Despite the brief show—the whole program was less than an hour long—producer Mark P. Musico ’07 managed to convey a deep sense of unease that lasted long after you left the theater—a marked departure from his usual lighter musical fare. While this was the goal, it meant that enjoyment of the play was directly proportional to one’s tolerance for and enjoyment of depictions of the darker side of human nature.

All of the plays recycled actors and directors, with each person taking multiple roles. For directors Daniel J. Wilner ’07 (who also was the artistic director for the entire production), Jennifer L. Brown ’07, and Nick J. O’Donovan (KSG), this also involved shifting between directing and acting.

“Catastrophe,” directed by Wilner, portrayed a director (O’Donovan) frantically ordering his assistant (Catrin M. Lloyd-Bollard ’08) to make adjustments to the pose and attire of the perfectly passive figure of the Protagonist (Jack E. Fishburn ’08).

Fishburn’s role entailed him to stand perfectly still first as the audience filed in and then throughout the piece, and he succeeded in demanding the audience’s attention despite the activity of the other characters. As the director, O’Donovan’s manic and deranged demeanor lent the play humor and also created a contrast with the silent stillness of the Protagonist.

The first play segued without pause into “Rough For Theater 1,” with the transition marked simply by a lighting change and Fishburn making his slow way down from the pedestal to the stage to play the blind fiddler A. He was joined by Wilner as B, a crippled beggar. The two try to make a connection, wedding B’s sight with A’s mobility, but ultimately B becomes cruel to A, and both are left alone.

This was the most humorous of the plays, despite the subject matter—as well as the most familiar to those who have read or seen “Waiting For Godot”—and both actors played up the physical-comedy aspect, providing some welcome comic relief, even if, at times, it seemed a little incongruous with the overall tone.

The feeling of isolation was brought to an even greater level in “Footfalls,” as May (Lloyd-Bollard) paced up and down the stage in the glare of two horizontal spotlights which served to narrow the stage to a single strip. She occasionally interacted with the offstage voice of her mother, but mostly engaged in a monologue about her increasingly isolated life and her act of pacing, ultimately ending with a story that imitated the beginning of her monologue.

Lloyd-Bollard delivered her lines with great intensity, but the lighting (co-designed by Allison B. Kline ’09 and Josh Randall), while effective, kept the audience from looking at anything but the first few feet of stage. Also, the rhythmic pacing became somewhat lulling after a time and made the scene a bit hard to follow.

“Rockaby” was arguably the strangest and most disturbing—but because of this, also the strongest—of the pieces. A woman (Brown) rocked back and forth in a rocking chair as a disembodied voice recited a repeating and vaguely sing-songish description of the action of coming upstairs, sitting in a rocking chair, and looking out the window. At each pause, the woman said “More” and the sequence was repeated with slight variations and increasingly sinister shades to the voice’s story, leading to an eerie payoff and possibly the best two-word encapsulation of the four plays: “Fuck life.”

While the plays were discomfiting, they were all interesting, even when it was hard to know exactly what to make of them. They hung together surprisingly well, partially because they all dealt with themes of loss, isolation, decay, and circularity, and partially because the transitions between plays were seamless, to the extent that nobody clapped after the first or third plays because it was difficult to pinpoint the moment that the first play became the second and the third the fourth.

While the performances were universally strong, some effects of the plays were inevitably dulled by the staging. Many, if not most, of the characters are people decaying physically and mentally at the end of their lives. When college students portray these characters, there is a certain amount of unintentional irony, and a bit of the power is lost. On the whole, however, “A Few Rags of Love” was a strong exploration of some extremely difficult and interesting works.

—Staff writer Elisabeth J. Bloomberg can be reached at bloomber@fas.harvard.edu