The Price of Being Classic

UNLIKE THE many great playwright who never lived to see posterity linker with their masterpieces. Samuel Beckett is paying the price for being the living author of a classic.

Eventually, classics of the theater--the plays of Shakespeare, for instance--become artistic public property to be molded and twisted according to the dictates of times and directors. Peter Sellars' recent production of Macbeth, with its cast of one women and two men who both played Macbeth, would certainly shock Shakespeare, were he not dead.

Not dead and not flattered to be treated like Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett was furious that the American Repertory Theater had reset his 1957 classic, endgame, in an abandoned, debris-filled subway tunnel.

Beckett's literary representatives in the U.S., after having licensed the ART's production and without having seen the show, demanded that the ART remove Beckett's name, call it an adaptation, or halt the production completely. Throughout the ensuing controversy, the representatives repeatedly addressed public complaints to the press before speaking with ART Artistic Director Robert S. Brustein, failed to contact the ART's legal counted about impending court action until the day before opening night, and--bending over backwards for an imperial opinion--sent the producer of a competing New York production of Endgame to preview the ART's production.

ALTHOUGH BECKETT'S representatives intervened at the wrong time, with the wrong people, and in the wrong manner, they did raise an important issue. How far should a playwright's control of his work extend? Some states and some European countries have laws to protect the integrity of a playwright's creations and reputation. But theater is a collaborative art which ends on the stage, not on the page; the playwright rarely has the last word. For those playwrights who know more about literature than the facts of life in a theater, this is often a blessing.

For others, like Beckett, it seems to be a curse; not only is theater a collaboration, but to license a theatrical production is, in effect, to license interpretation. Verbatim fidelity to the text exists only in the playwright's imagination, and often not even there, Practical and artistic considerations invariably necessitate deviations from the printed page.

Ideally, directing is an art of imagination and emphasis which brings the heart and meaning of a play to life on stage. The director must decide what the tone and message of the play are; since playwrights rarely carve this massage in agree it most be inferred from the text-from the characters, plot dissolved and stage direction. Thou the director emphasizes those criminals that make this moaning clear and powerful for the audience. The best directors may Incorporate fresh Mights from the texi. In the case of Endgante, Brokott's text implies that the action occurs after a nuclear holocaust, Director Joanne Ahalnitis emphasized this by setting the play in a make-shift fall-out shelter.

Of course, not only the director, but also the set designer, the lightning designer the musical coordinator, and especially the actors make crucial artistic decisions in the course of a production. Under the director's guidance, actors are constantly interpreting the text, expanding and making human the character sketched on the page. If actors interpret badly, they are criticized and perhaps ridiculed, but not banned from the stage. The same should be true of directors.

Although this protection leaves authors at the mercy of both actors and directors, the directors pace the biggest danger because, by changing the setting, pace and tone, they can disguise the very nature of the play. In the playwright's mind, there is a point, undoubtedly difficult to define, at which such changes over to be direction and become perversion.

FROM THOSE grossly distorted productions which misrepresent his work and endanger his reputation a playwright does deserve protection. But the only way to ensure this protection is to state in acceptable limits of interpretation explicitly in contracts with literary agents. If Samuel Beckett felt so strongly about the setting of Endgame, the licensing agent could then have warned the ART of Beckett's criterin and prevented an unnecessary controversy.

Unfortunately, drawing the line between illegal distortion and just plain bad distortion probably impossible. Such contracts run the risk of outlawing appropriate improvements and adjustments, crippling creativity, and sapping the vitality of theater for future generations. If, to protect themselves, authors must state detailed production criteria, it is better to grant generous production rights rather than handcuff directors. Such artistic freedom will, in the long run, benefit theater. And it is worth the risk of an occasional wayward production.