Working with Beckett

Summary

Through twenty theatrical seasons, I have happily carried a typescript by Samuel Beckett with me to rehearsals through more than that number of productions—in Washington or Texas or San Francisco, in New York's off-Broadway, and twice even on to Broadway itself. On three occasions, those scripts had never before been performed—Happy Days (1961), Film (1964), and Not I (1972). On four others—Waiting for Godot (1956), Endgame (1958), Krapp's Last Tape (1959), Play (1964)—the scripts were receiving their first production in English and/or in the United States. And more than a dozen other times, I have carried these same or other scripts of his through a proscenium arch, onto the thrust stage, or out directly into the middle of an audience—something Mr. Beckett had neither expected or entirely understood. In these twenty years, there have been few times when I had not just finished directing one Beckett work or another or was not actively planning to do another one.

Did I gravitate to Sam at once, immediately recognizing his dramatic genius? Truthfully, I'm not sure. When I first read Endgame in manuscript, I told Barney Rossett, Beckett's American publisher, that it seemed to me like a combination of Oedipus and King Lear.