FOR many of us who live in New York City and enjoy the theatre, the major attraction on Broadway this summer is the supercold air conditioning in the playhouses.
To understand why, you first need to know that, at the time and place this is being written - just after 9 p.m. in midtown Manhattan - the outdoor temperature remains above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is about 75 per cent. (Suspend your face briefly a foot or so above a pot of boiling cabbage to gain an impression of how July air in this fair city feels and smells.)
More importantly you must know what today's Broadway house are offering prospective patrons, other than coolness and comfort. Most current productions fall into three categories. The first which no longer represents a brand new trend but which is still able to appall - encompasses musicals based on films. The most recently opened is Big, based on the Tom Hanks movie about a boy's pituitary wish come true which joins Victor/Victoria, starring a game Julie Andrews, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and Sunset Boulevard. The second group is comprised of splashy, lavishly staged musical revivals such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The King and I, and Show Boat. The last features long running stalwarts like Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, and, of course Cats. In its 14th year on stage, the play looks like it may well make good on the threat contained in its advertising slogan: "Cats - Now and Forever."
Blessedly, many of us in New York will be able to enjoy the dark, delicious chill of a theatre this summer and have our brains stimulated as much as our skins. Indeed, the announcement in June that the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts had persuaded Dublin's Gate Theatre to recreate the Beckett Festival - an ambitious presentation of all 19 of Samuel Beckett's major and minor dramatic works, first mounted in Ireland in 1991 - blew through New York stage circles like a refreshing breeze. "I'm really looking forward to this. It's unique," says former New York Times drama critic Mel Gussow,"being able to see all of Beckett's plays at one time - it's a bit like going to an art museum to see a major retrospective. You can come out having made a rounded assessment of an artist's work."
There is more to anticipate in the Beckett Festival than its scale, of course. In the context of current Broadway theatre, Beckett's works stand out in high relief by virtue of their spareness, clarity and purity. When Big is performed, actors toss toy flying rings into the audience and dance atop a giant piano keyboard a cast of dozens clad in togas, head wreathes and centurion gear, belts out the big song numbers in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In contrast, a Beckett stage might feature only a leafless tree or a mound of earth, or a table and a reel to reel tape recorder. Even when Americans produce Beckett we can't help but give it a touch of glitter. The last major New York staging of Waiting for Godot, in 1989 featured movie stars Steve Martin and Robin Williams as Vladimir and Estragon.
Yet here in New York the Gate's Beckett is awaited keenly as much for the fact that it is the presentation of an Irish company as for Beckett himself. Performances for the major plays - Godot, Endgame, Happy Days - are nearly sold out and sales for the smaller works are brisk. "Irish actors are admired by Americans and held in affectionate regard" explains John Rockwell who beads the Lincoln Center festival program. "Partly its their talent. Partly it's that Americans just love the accent."
Accent or no, on the face of it, there's arguably no deep justification for actors from Dublin to have any special interpretive prowess with these works. Beckett even if he was born in Foxrock and did attend Trinity College, left Ireland at age 26. He lived in Paris, wrote half his work in French - in part, precisely in order to avoid the influence of regional idiom on his language and his stage works take place not in any place in the real world but on the landscape of the modern human soul. As Tom Bishop - a New York University professor who teaches Beckett as a member of the school's French literature faculty and will, in concert with Lincoln Center's staging of the Gate's Beckett Festival, moderate a series of symposia on the 1969 Nobel laureate - points out: "Beckett is too abstract. He can't be thought of narrowly as part of any one culture."
STILL, the Irish can indeed do Beckett better. I had seen, at one time or another, most of Beckett's full length works staged before I saw the Gate performances at the 1991 Beckett Festival. The other productions I saw didn't stick much in my mind - but I have vivid memories from the Gate shows. There was David Kelly in munching a banana as he shuffled across the stage, petulantly kicking the fruit's skin into the orchestra pit. He reminded me precisely of an elderly priest I used to see from time to time as he walked on the strand at Sandymount, where I lived when I briefly attended Trinity in the early 1980s. He scuffed along the sand, booting clam shells - and Kelly gave his same impression of proud, but mean, asceticism.
There was the peerless Barry McGovern, as Didi, alongside Johnny Murphy's Gogo, in Waiting for Godot. Beckett's thin bones of dialogue hardly make much of a menu for actors - yet this pair managed to fashion quite a rich soup. I recall the scene where Pozzo departs, whipping unlucky. Lucky off the state.
Vladimir: "That passed the time."
Estragon: "It would have passed in any case."
Vladmir: "Yes, but not so rapidly."
Other actors might have conveyed the humour. But McGovern and Murphy lent the words a depth of meaning - bitterness, hopelessness, resignation, despair, self-awareness, embarrassment at the way they behaved - and a certain sense that, all in all, the visit by Pozzo and Lucky was nicely diverting.
MICHAEL Colgan, the director of the Gate's Beckett Festival, feels that Irish actors have a "confidence" with Beckett actors from other glands don'ts feel. "While others would approach a foreign writer with awe," he explains, "a Dublin actor takes on Beckett and thinks, `Ah, he only lived down the road'." And that may come close to the nut of it. The Gate's was the only "warm" Godot I've ever seen - the only production that, instead of keeping the audience at a distance, as they observe two tramps talking in some placeless place, invited them to share their pain, confusion and mirth. For Beckett and the Gate's actors, it is all of a piece. Ireland's past - and sadly, its present - demonstrate how quickly and perhaps inevitably, joy and hope give way to horror and tragedy. Ireland is absurd.
For all his pride and pleasure in his company's work in the Beckett Festival plays, Colgan admits to a certain excited uncertainty and transporting the entire enterprise to New York. "It's like space travel," he says. "To boldly go . . ." I believe he need not worry - on this planet, he and his crew will receive a hearty welcome. Then again, space is cold. I nearly weep to think of all those poor, pale Irish lambs sweltering in the Manhattan summer. The only thing for it will be to stay in the cool of the theatre - and perhaps add some more performances.
