Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Irish Rep’s pristine production of BECKETT BRIEFS expertly navigates the playwright’s intentions and specifications

• By drediman
• February 5, 2025
• No Comments

For its current main stage offering, Off-Broadway’s reliable Irish Repertory Theatre has mounted Beckett Briefs, a beautifully-calibrated collection of three short plays by Samuel Beckett. Appropriate fare for these dreary, chilly days of winter, these austere, fiercely idiosyncratic plays — Not I, Play, and Krapp’s Last Tape — by and large examine the relationship between memory and existence as only this singular playwright can. The evening also makes for an ideal companion to the Chelsea-based theater company’s well-received production of Bill Irwin’s On Beckett (which has been presented three times over the course of the last five years).

Aptly subtitled “From Cradle to Grave”, the set begins with the shortest play Not I, which can be interpreted as a depiction of an untethered soul (prior to birth? after death? in between?) in search of a body. Set in a black void and lasting mere minutes, the piece features an exhilarating turn by Sarah Street as, quite literally, a disembodied mouth/voice. Despite the relentless speed and intensity of her delivery, Street manages to maintain astonishing clarity in her mini tour de force, riding the wave of Beckett’s dense text with both scalpel-like precision and the ferocity of a banshee on the hunt. Then there’s Play, Beckett’s quirky examination of our earthly human foibles — the piece also functions as a distillation of theater into its rudimentary elements — in which the trio of Roger Dominic Casey, Kate Forbes, and Sarah Street lobby (twice) backstabbing dialogue with dexterity and mischievous glee. But perhaps the centerpiece of the evening is Krapp’s Last Tape, by far the lengthiest and most oft-performed of the trio. It’s also the most traditional “play” of the bunch — a meditation on memory and loss that’s put across with detail and subtle heartbreak by Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham playing an elderly man at the end of his days.

A large part of the evening’s success must be credited to Ciarán O’Reilly, whose pristine, meticulously executed production expertly navigates Beckett’s intentions and notoriously specific requirements. O’Reilly clearly understands the material and the assignment. Indeed, each segment is presented with its own sense of logic and spacial dimension (kudos to the gorgeous lighting throughout), seamlessly progressing from the utter nothingness of Not I, to the symbolic tableau of Play, to the emerging — albeit, rough-hewn — naturalism of Krapp’s Last Tape. As staged and performed, the works that comprise Beckett Briefs are sobering pills that still retain their unique power to shock and disorient (or re-orient?).

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

BECKETT BRIEFS
Off-Broadway, Play
Irish Repertory Theatre
1 hour, 15 minutes (without an intermission)
Through March 9