Theater:
Bill Irwin’s solo show built around Irish playwright’s words
Bill Irwin’s solo show is built around Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s words.
Bill Irwin doesn’t want to appear “too antic.” Irwin, one of the nation’s most respected clowns, reveals his worry as he arrives for a photo shoot for “On Beckett,” his solo show that mixes excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s plays and prose with his own commentary and anecdotes.
He’s right to be concerned. Irwin, 66, has Bay Area clowning roots that date to the 1970s, when he performed with the influential Pickle Family Circus. Though he’s been based in New York for years now — winning a 2005 Tony Award for his performance in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” — Irwin returns frequently to perform at ACT, most recently with a shorter run of “On Beckett” in 2015, “Old Hats” in 2014 and “Endgame” in 2012.
To represent “On Beckett,” which runs through Jan. 22 at ACT’s Strand Theater, he says he wants to make sure the focus is on the Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright’s language.
And that’s when he takes a giant stack of hats out of a plastic grocery bag, places one at a jaunty angle on his head and leans at an even jauntier angle against the wall to pose for photos.
That same contradiction is manifest in the Beckett passages Irwin selected to perform in his solo show, drawing from “Texts for Nothing,” “Watt” (a novel, one of Beckett’s most cryptic works), “Endgame” and “Waiting for Godot” (in which Irwin performed in 1988 with Robin Williams and Steve Martin, at Lincoln Center OffBroadway).
The passages are at once morose and laugh-out-loud funny, linguistically simple and philosophically lofty. Sample line: “Personally of course I regret everything.”
“He’s darkly funny,” Irwin says after the photo shoot, “and he’s funny about — the word ‘existential’ is so fraught. You can see students’ eyes glaze over, anybody’s eyes — my eyes glaze over when people use the phrase. But it is so exciting to see somebody take on the really basic questions of what is human existence, and take them on fearlessly, but with mordant humor. A lot of us try it, and we’re not successful.”
One of the recurring features of the selections is direct contradiction. “On Beckett” begins with the first “Text for Nothing” (Beckett wrote 13 of these short, genre-defying prose pieces): “Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on.”
Irwin says those contradictions are “wonderful” for him as an actor because “they’re active; it’s like an argument with yourself.”
“One of the ways (Beckett) holds the mirror up to nature is he talks about the different parts of the self almost like the old ‘me, myself and I’ riddles. ... That’s how consciousness holds itself up, almost like nattering, arguing back and forth.”
That notion guides how Irwin finds intention, physical and mental, in lines that can seem opaque. “Texts for Nothing,” he points out, can seem especially impenetrable, because there’s almost no indentation; it can seem like a “wall of words,” and as an actor, he really has to “play with stopping” to help give those pieces shape.
“You’re looking for the way that you’re actively working out something, and you’re saying these words for the first time,” he says. That idea also helped him select which texts to perform in the first place; he looked for “an active process of investigation that the speaker is going through.”
“The way we organize language literally and conversationally, and the way he plays with that — it’s like nobody else. It drives me crazy, and it makes me — like I say in the evening, I have to get away from it sometimes, it’s claustrophobic and oppressive sometimes. But I’m always drawn back within minutes or sometimes hours.