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.

Beckett’s two characters in the play are awakened by long poles and slowly begin their day.

“Once you break the frozen reverence that academics have placed over his work, you begin to realize how incredibly deep it is. In Act Without Words II we have gone by his directions right down to the way he wanted the lighting,” Scaife says.

“Yet every time I direct this is a new place it’s a completely new play. It’s because each place has its own pulse and aesthetic. It’s also because it’s performed in a street, not in a theater.”

The show is designed by Ireland’s most sought-after designer, the Irish Times Theatre Award winner for 2011 and 2010 Aedin Cosgrove, whose work continuously travels all over the world. It’s the final part of an unforgettable all-Irish production.

“Beckett’s Irishness is only now receiving real attention by academics,” says Scaife. “It’s because the idea of universalism is finally being seen a ridiculous idea. The universal can only been seen in the specific. Beckett was writing for the body.

“I know that all theater is from the body but he was actually writing from his. He absorbed all of this stuff growing up in Ireland so of course his Irish body reflects all the things that are beyond words.

“All of those things would have been picked up from his past, the sound of his mother walking above him in the house, the grayness of the landscape, the disenfranchised paupers that were everywhere he looked, I do believe he had their bodies and voices in mind, and many of them spoke in the Irish idiom.”

For tickets visit rivertorivernyc.com/node/1039.

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Nster.com