Suggestive Emptiness

EMPTY. The word is printed on publicity posters and hung on bulletin boards. It advertises the current Loeb Ex production of Samuel Beckett's two plays Play and Come and Go. White and uncluttered, the poster seems to defy what an advertisement should be. It suggests nothing of the plot, and offers no commonplace images, not even a prominent name. Just "Empty" and small print. But the poster is appropriate. It informs, Even though his first play was produced 24 years ago, Samuel Beckett's works still seem jarring and bizarre. And no wonder. Although his works may be recognized as masterpieces, Beckett's plays have yet to become familiar to most audiences.

When Beckett presents a comedy of manners, as in Come and Go, he includes three women, gossip, hypocrisy, but no drawing room, and no second or third act. Although the play does have plot reversals, they are less reminiscent of the action in School for Scandal than of the printouts of a computer randomly permutating a basic word pattern. In PlayBeckett gives us the tried but true triangle of husband, wife and mistress and hints of insanity, murder and rape. But the characters are dead in this chamber piece; we see only their heads atop individual funeral urns. The theme of emptiness runs through both of these plays, which seem to be devoid of images but which, like the publicity poster, are enormously suggestive. Nancy Krieger has skillfully realized the implicit imagery of Beckett's plays in an intellectually engaging if emotionally sterile production she directs and designs.

Krieger interprets Play, the chamber piece, like music, setting the three characters to a metronome, and accompanying them with music. Lisa Claudy, Richard Blumenfeld, and Kate Heller speak their lines of complex rhythmic patterns with technical precision. In private existential hells, they are incapable of extinguishing their consciousnesses. "How the mind works," says the wife. "Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one."

Just as silence and darkness are one for the woman, so too sound and light are one for Krieger. Beckett's original stage directions call for one spotlight hung low in front to swing over the faces. Krieger has moved the spotlight according to her own design. She places it high behind the actors to play on the backs of their heads, on and off like the metronome. Since the stage is otherwise dark, the actors' faces cannot be seen. They appear only in outline, like the images of film negatives; or through their partially transparent urns like X-ray pictures of skeletons. These images of emptiness, negatives and skeletons are stunning in combination with the orchestration of sounds.

Yet the play drags in its coda. Because the faces can barely be seen, one hardly can recognize or identify with the characters emotionally. As the tempo lags, the trio slips into acoustical imbalance: Claudy's voice lasts longer, often stronger and more distinct than the other two. Even if slightly bored, one can realize intellectually that the slowdown might be intentional: sonorously and endlessly, consciousness endures. But in that case, the final line of the play is screamed unnecessarily. To be intellectually satisfying, the play needs no punctuation. And because of the nature of Krieger's production, the screaming has no emotional impact, either. It is the metronome continuing to beat on and off after the stage has cleared which gives Play its horror-house creepiness.

THE BIZARRENESS in Come and Go is of another sort. The three women are film positives. Elaborately costumed, they walk and sit and whisper as if they were snapshots from 1910, the play could be an existential joke, a reductio ad absurdam of both comedy and farce. As the three characters, Kathy Bybee, Immy Humes, and Ilana DeBare seem ready to play their parts for laughs. One is haughty, another childlike, the third cute. But all aspects of the five-minute-long play are commendably understated, from the grey lighting to the long poses. It is understandable that a serious minded audience would remain in reverential silence during a play like this. For all its derivation from what are conventionally considered comic genres, the laughs this play inspires are empty ones.