UNAUTHORIZED BECKETT
This did not promise to be the trivial meeting of the minds this description may suggest. Baker is a veteran of several avant-garde productions with Theatre of the Reconstruction, including Shepard’s The Unseen Hand and resident playwright Scott Turner’s Where the People Have No Eyes. Pike’s most recent appearance was in Prop Theatre’s Mass Murder, for which he won a Jeff citation; before that he was in William S. Burroughs’s The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, also at Prop. Most important, the muse both actors invoked was none other than the late granddaddy of absurdism, Samuel Beckett. Clearly this collaboration would be no ordinary sketch-and-blackout revue.
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Unauthorized Beckett includes two playlets, Theatre I, a sort of “prequel” to the longer Endgame, and Ohio Impromptu, in which one person patiently reads to another (possibly an allegorical re-creation of a deathwatch–in which case, may all our passings be as peaceful). Also featured are the “Afar a Bird” selection from Fizzles, a passage from The Unnameable, and the “Hedgehog” anecdote from Company–my favorite piece of the evening, in which Guest poignantly conveys the humor and the horror that result from keeping a wild animal in captivity. More works by Beckett will be added as the show continues, including the dramatic piece Radio II.
