Homage to Beckett Theatre

OBSCURITY is usually annoying: if someone has something to say, he should say it, and not hedge around with poetic hemmings and hawings, cute blushes, inarticulate murmurs, and so forth. A lot of what I'm supposed to admire is stuff that bores me and that I can't understand and that I can't understand and that its adorers can't explain. Ho hum.

Samuel Beckett's message comes across clearly, but not through the exponential words of an essayist or even the straightforward narrative of a conventional playwright. And last weekend at Sanders Theatre, Earl Kim relayed it with music.

Kim, a composer teaching at Harvard and long an admirer of Beckett (whom he and his wife met in Paris), has succeeded in creating a production, using Beckett's words, that does not orchestrate but instead amplifies. For the one thing always true of Beckett is that he is all essence: over the years he has pared down his work until there is nothing left but the bare message of indomitable life-without obscuring fuzz. Accordingly, of the ninety-odd minutes of Exercises en route, not one was superfluous.

Kim used music, which he has been working on for the past eight years; dance, which his wife Mimi Kagan choreographed with the same fidelity to Beckett's spirit that Kim shows throughout the work; film; and actors. But this is no multi-media mishmash. Each medium, sparse and perfect, is fully capable of transmitting on its own Beckett's humble yet invincible commitment to struggle. Only rarely does more than one of the seven fine musicians-two of them percussion-play at a time. With them, and alone, sings an incredibly clear soprano, Benita Valente. Her voice rises out of the pit like a tiny emission of life from the obscurity of the set, which was designed by Franco Colavecchia. He was more concerned to build something that would hold the lights than to design a work of art, but it is no accident that the backdrop is grey and not pink. A bare stage for a bare world.

BUT THIS is not only Beckett's world-it's everyone's. Later on Kim presented Beckett's play Come and go in its entirety. Three women are seated on a bench and one by one each leaves and returns, while the other two say a few words. Each set of two shares a secret about the third: "Doesn't she know?" "God hope not!" but each is oblivious to her own predicament as she returns. At the end they all three clasp hands-a superficial closeness, each alone with her memories, each having said little and communicated nothing. It is not so much Beckett's words as his silences that count; and Kim knows beautifully just how long a silence can last before the audience gets restless. The words sink in: they do not link in a conversation but are tentacles thrown blindly out into the dark.

Whether we know it or not, we're all in the same boat. Pain is a common but not a shared experience. When one of the four dancers sinks to the ground, the others sidle away. Each character on stage can communicate only to the audience, not to the others down there with him. And, of course, there's the question, IS there an audience-or is that just a convention? Certainly no one gets up to help the sufferers on stage. A second dance follows a voice over a loudspeaker. Colorless, but with scrupulously correct intonation, it says: "Well, well so there's an audience . . . ." The two dancers draw back in surprise. But is it here for pleasure? Perhaps it is a compulsory show. They are waiting for it to begin. Each one is sitting, waiting . . . "waiting for something else but themselves." This dance is beautifully executed, following the voice, moving slowly and deliberately but without much purpose-just keep moving, keep waiting, keep hanging on.

BECKETT himself once said, in the days when he still talked in sentences, "There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us . . . Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous."

Kim, who masterminded all the "exercises," has caught this feeling completely. There is no sense of a flow of time. but rather of wandering about within it. In the small segment of film (by Alfred Guzzetti), each image is followed by its after-image in optical illusion. The framed faces cannot be left behind. The slow turns of the head are repeated. The film mesmerizes the viewers, stops them in time.

We are on route, nothing is finished, and mean-while-as if pinching ourselves to make sure we're alive-we must perform exercises. Gamely, in her extraordinarily sweet soprano, Benita Valente sings on. "where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on, I'll go on."