The Open Theatre: An Interview

(The following is a transcript of a conversation between the author-a sophomore in Adams House - and Judith Sklar, co-director of the Open Theatre. The Open Theatre recently presented Serpent, Terminal, and Endgame at the Loeb.)

Bernstein: There have been innumcrable interpretations of Endgame, perhaps the most famous being Martin Esslin's characterization of the play as an example of "theatre of the absurd." Do you feel that this type of criticism gets in the way of an approach to prcsenting Beckett?

Sklar: I think that kind of enapsulating of Beckett is garbage. Beckett's world is comprchensive and everyone I've read, really, except a tiny little article by Alain Robbe-Grillet, everyone tries to take a slice of the pic and say. "this is Beckett." Ruby Kahn interprets Endgame from a religious point of view, somebody clse says it takes place inside a womb, another says it's the beginning. I find myself enraged cach time I see one of these interpretations as a sort of umbrella that it has to go under.

The way in which we approached the production was in some ways very simplistic-with an incredible respect for the fact that Beckett has chosen each word as if it were the last word, there is nothing extra and nothing less than there should be. Every word and every juxtaposition of a word is very, very carefully meaningful, so we looked just in a certain way, word for word, at the words, discovering, for example, pattern for pattern, just what the rhythms and the patterns apply.

Right now, your breathing and my speech have a pattern to them and if we were outside of ourselves, listening. we could interpret something about how and why things were going as they were just from the rhythmic sense of what's you. That kind of consideration was made repeatedly, over and over and over again, as we worked on the piece. We tried also to look at what is actual, like at the simplest level, there are two men talking to each other, talking to two other people in trashcans, sometimes talking to the audience. sometimes talking to themselves. These few little facts are actual, you can discover certain actualities of the situation, such as one man cannot sit, the other cannot stand. It seemed like it would be extremely limiting to get very involved in the question of whether Hamm and Cloy are two parts of the same men-which I've heard a thousand times, Esslin is one of the people who says this, the divided self - you know -

Q. But those are philosophical comments. When you are talking about acting it becomes difficult to play a role as if you were only half a person-

A. Sure, but the problem is that many directors would approach Beckett doing that and limiting the production, limiting what the philosophical views are for the viewer.

Q. So, in other words, it is not up to the director to make a specific interpretation, but rather to make a presentation.

A. Right.

Q. All right then, how did you approach the production of Endgame? -I guess I should say evolve the production. I know that the Serpent took over six months to evolve, but of course in that case you started without a script.

A. We began in an extremely traditional manner of having a first reading of the script and a second reading of the script and one of the things that was set up from the start was to have the actor consider the words without becoming involved with philosophical interpretation and to try and tell everything that was actual that could be found without fabricating. Anything that was not understood was not to be laden down with motive and situations, etc., but with what could be understood in very actual terms and let things build from there. Then we proceeded to look at the script in terms of certain small units. Unlike most scripts where you look at unit after unit, we looked at these units with real separation because we concluded that these units were not based on each other in the way that say, a Tennessee Williams script can be broken down in units, each unit logically following the previous one in motivational terms. This was not so. What we came to discover is that there are unit worlds, for example a six line exchange which is the total entering of nostalgia which is immediately followed by a unit which is the total entering of anger or the total entering of violence or exhaustion. . . .

Q. What kind of acting mode did you use in the production?

A. I am loath to put a name on it. It is definitely not the Chekhovian motivational mode. and it's not the special bodily technique of the Serpent. In Endgame. the route we took certainly involved motivational relationship and interaction. The product as one sees it is involved with theatricality by which I mean the consciousness of the presence of the audience.

Another very important aspect of what one sees when one sees this production is. as I mentioned carlier, a consideration of communication through rhythm, vocal patterns, inflection as really integral to meaning. When we look at the script we come to the conclusion about the importance of verbalizations as Beckett has it, then we must consider how to yerbalize in a way that is special to that material. We looked into the expression of character through vocal elements very, very extensively. Another element of communication is a kind of series of icons, not frozen images at all, but ones in which one watches and every so often a picture hits you in some way and tells you a whole story just by the physical arrangement of the characters. Again, these things came not by laying them on but rather a kind of letting the motion evolve and then eventually paring it down so that rather than starting with images one came to images and selected them out of many. That's pretty much as much as I can describe it.