Samuel Beckett’s silent masterpiece comes to New York - “Act Without Words II”

Celebrated Irish actor Raymond Keane will appear in Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words at Theatre Alley.

From Tuesday, June 26 until Friday the 29th, you have a rare chance to catch one of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s most absorbing plays, Act Without Words II, performed nightly at 9 p.m. at Theatre Alley (between Nassau and Centre Street) in New York.

Directed by Sarah-Jane Scaife, one of Ireland’s most preeminent interpreters of his work, Act Without Words II was written in the late 1950s, and is a deeply absorbing and unforgettable meditation on existence that reminds us that although the plight of humanity is ultimately absurd, there’s some consolation to be had in the realization that it is shared.

For Scaife, who has directed and lectured on Beckett all over the world from China to India and Greece to Mongolia, this production is literally the work of a lifetime, as she directed in one guise or another over three decades since she first came to New York to study mime and drama in the 1980s.

Performed live on the street by two superb physical theater experts, Raymond Keane (director of Ireland’s celebrated Barabbas Theatre Company) and Bryan Burroughs (winner of the Best Supporting Actor at the Irish Times Theatre Awards in 2009) it’s always a particular treat to watch Irish actors perform Beckett’s masterworks in his native idiom (or in this case, in his interior idiom).   

Samuel Beckett once said of James Joyce that he had gone as far as it was possible to go with literature.

“I realized,” Beckett said, “that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, being in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”

Stripping things down to their essence, in order to clearly see what was in front of you, freed as much as possible from imprisoning abstractions like faith, belief, yearning and even despair would be his life’s work.

Since the 1980s Irish director Scaife has lived in the world of Beckett’s work like a nun in her faith. From Dublin, Scaife is both a director and performer, and her current production of the play debuted at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2010, before moving on to delight audiences at two major London festivals in 2011.

Scaife’s expertise in movement choreography, coupled with intimate decades long engagement and experience with the subject matter, lends powerful resonances of homelessness and drug addiction to this sensitively directed and very moving production.  

“When I was about 24 I came to New York to study movement and I stayed for about five years. In the early 1980s there were so many homeless people living on the street here in the city,” she says.

“There were cardboard cities in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. I became fascinated with this play and I saw how closely it related to an experience that was universal.”

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Nster.com