Triple Take

THE American Repertory Theatre is currently putting on three one-act plays--two of them by Beckett--amorphous enough to make Waiting for Godot seem full of plot. Only after a good deal of thought does the substance of Beckett's Footfalls and Rockaby become ap parent: Footfalls explores a mother-daughter relationship, while Rockaby portrays a woman persuading herself to die. The third play, Eugene O'Neill's Hughie, provides a more concrete setting for the very abstract emotions which characterize the evening.

Monologues dominate the first two plays, which contain almost no sustained movement on stage. When Waiting for Godot was first produced thirty years ago, reviewers called it boring and meaningless. Today, it is a staple in most dramatic repertories; it remains to be seen whether these two pieces of 1976 and 1981--though tedious and difficult--will attain equal popularity. Certainly an open mind is essential for any viewer of these plays, with or without any familiarity with Beckett's other work.

In Footfalls, May (Karen Macdonald) calls her mother (Marianne Owen) back from the dead. Clad in flowing scarves and a long skirt, May reminisces about life before her mother's death. In the second part of this three-part development, the Voice (of May's mother) speaks for itself, and for the finale, May refutes her mother's speech. May, who later becomes Amy in a word-game switch typical of Beckett, seems to be attempting to put her mother, finally, to rest.

Six slits of light on an otherwise bare, black stage emphasize the gulf between the living and the dead, between May's presence and her mother's physical absence. The dialogue begins as May questions her mother: "shall I inject you? shall I straighten your pillows? sponge you down? pray for you?" The Voice answers, "Where is she?...where it began, it all began, in the old home, where other girls were out there playing lacrosse, she was already there."

In a play with very little action, Macdonald and Owen use voice inflection and, in Macdonald's case, restrained movement to dramatize the poem as much as possible. Nevertheless, the success of the performance seems to rest entirely on Beckett and the emotions he evokes from the audience. The play ends abruptly with the question "will you never have done revolving it in your poor mind?" Is the exorcism complete? Has anything been accomplished? Perhaps, but the audience will never know for sure.

Rockaby is a beautifully written monologue whose excruciatingly bitter message becomes very hard to endure even in such a short performance. Owen rocks herself to death, coordinating her rocking with the rhthym of her repetitive, sing-song phrases. "In the end, the day came, time she stopped going to and fro, high and low..." As she rocks more and more violently, and finally falls over, the repetition becomes unbearable. Yet the play also has a peaceful quality which, when juxtaposed against the underlying suicidal throbbing, stimulates the imagination. Although the director provides little in the form of lighting or props on which to fix the eye, Beckett gives us much to think about.

O'NEILL'S Hughie developes three characters, although only two of them actually appear on stage. Set in the seedy lobby of a third-rate Broadway hotel during the summer of 1928, the play features an aging gambler who lost his luck when Hughie, the night clerk, died. Erie Smith (John Bottoms) tells his tale to the new night clerk, Charlie Hughes (Richard Spore) who also appears near death. Erie's monologue is interrupted briefly throughout by Charlie's thoughts, spoken aloud, and by off-stage sounds like fire engines and subway rumblings.

Bottoms powerfully conveys this depressing drama of a vulnerable man in a cold, modern city. His inflections and movements all speak of a person in desperate need of companionship. Rolling his dice, tapping his shoe against the floor, rocking in his baggy pants and chain smoking, Erie narrates his entire life.

"Hughie saw me as a sort of dream guy...I'll bet he lived a kind of double life...when a sucker cries for more you're a dope not to give him more." Although he's now broke because he donated money for the clerk's funeral, he maintains his sense of humor. "It sure was worth it to give Hughie a big send up."

It's almost as worth it to watch Bottoms and the ART give Hughie, Footfalls and Rockaby the same sort of send up.