Performance Notion: Beckett & Bion

I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.

A two-person piece about Samuel Beckett’s relationship with his psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. At age 27, Beckett was in a deep depression after the death of his father and had an uncomfortable relationship with his strict mother. As psychoanalysis was illegal in Ireland, he traveled to London where he became Bion’s second patient ever. There’s ample source material (Beckett wrote about Bion and Bion wrote several essays that some speculate were about Beckett), and as long as I could keep the Beckett estate out of it, it could be a really beautiful, strange piece – genius, melancholy, friendship, healing, and the murky workings of the unconscious mind.

Thin as Foil

“Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.” (Beckett, The Unnamables)

"Be Friends!" Or, love and collaboration

Beckett's radio play Words and Music concerns the collaboration between the titular characters, who work together to satisfy the musical desires of their lord. Commissioned by the BBC in 1962, it was a collaboration between Beckett and his cousin, the composer John Beckett. The project was apparently somewhat fraught, and after the original recording, John withdrew his score.

My girlfriend, who also happens to be one of my closest artistic collaborators, spent eight hours today remixing excerpts from Holst's "The Planets" into 33 distinct sound cues for our version of Words and Music. Sometimes I count the number of hours she spends designing and wonder why the director gets top billing. At 10pm, we tech'd through the cues. Despite the late hour and our limited vocabulary discussing symphonic music, we fell into a productive and pleasurable rhythm: "I think it should cut off after the 'dum dum dum!'" "The first 'dum dum dum' or the second one?" "Well, definitely before that xylophone comes in," "Yeah, there's no xylophone in Beckett."

For me, love and collaboration go hand in hand. Finding someone I click with creatively is like finding a new lover. When I feel that spark lit, I start fantasizing about when we can next work together and on what source text. Like with a romantic relationship, you can't fake a good collaboration. Trust and communication can be built over time, but it all starts with a recognition and a pull, the thrill of similarity glimpsed across difference.

Words says to Music at the top of the play: "How much longer cooped up here in the dark? With you!" But by the middle of the piece they are singing together, breathing meaning into sound, improvising a new path through the dark space between them.

Beckett & Nietzsche

As a director, the moment a play is hovering in my consciousness, it becomes the filter for the whole world. All the input flowing towards me is somehow in dialogue with the text (or textlessness) of the project I'm working on. Slightly paranoia-inducing at times, it can feel like everything in the world is speaking directly to me.

I suppose since I'm working on Beckett, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Nietzsche seems to be telling me how to direct the play. Nietzsche did, after all, announce the death of God and Beckett put his characters in endless limbo waiting for his return. They are both poets of the void. Bards of the ceaseless cycle. Cynics whose philosophies of emptiness seem at odds with their heartsick love for humanity.

Beckett's short play "Words and Music," which I'm directing next week, concerns the two titular characters (otherwise known as Joe and Bob) who struggle with each other as they strive to create music and words that will please their lord and master, Croak. Reading Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, I stumble across his notions of the "Apollonian" and the "Dionysian." Suddenly the duality embodied in the figures of Beckett's play seem to dance together on Nietzsche's page.

The Apollonian creative drive is the quest for image, form, and the meaning that coalesces around clear lines and boundaries. It concerns the individual and his or her comprehensible vision of self. It's aligned with the arts of sculpture and epic poetry and the aesthetics of distance and clarity.

The Dionysian drive is the aesthetic urge towards excess, creative destruction, and the loss of ego that comes with drinking, fucking, and joining voices together in song. It is the formlessness to Apollo's form, always threatening to unravel.

While he's clearly a Dionysian spirit, Nietzsche does not privilege one drive over the other, but rather describes the task of the artist as the attempt to get the two into a productive relationship with each other.

This is the story of Beckett's play as well. Words/Bob speaks to Croak, and fails, Music/Joe plays for Croak, and it fails. "Together!" he intones. "Together!" They begin to link their forms, putting words and music together in unison and in canon. They lead each other and follow, weaving the twin beauties of words and music together until their creation is actually too successful, and Croak shuffles off, unable to bear it.

Nietzsche described the successful intertwining of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as “the supreme goal of tragedy, and indeed all art.” Tragedy is both hard to do and hard to bear. Beckett doesn't always provide the cathartic emotional release that makes the pain feel, for a moment, worthwhile. Sometimes after the music ends, all that's left is the sound of feet shuffling off into the darkness.

First Impressions

As mature, compassionate, considerate adults, we're encouraged not to put too much faith in our first impressions. Judging a book by its cover is bad form.

But I find in directing theatre that paying attention to my first impressions is essential. Most actors know that their audition begins the second they walk in the door. Playwrights know that the professionalism of their title page --even their font!-- will reflect on their script.

In my directing seminar at Stanford I was recently asked to read a book of short plays by Beckett and pick one to direct. As any fan of Beckett knows, his plays are dense and can take a long time to fully digest. The book arrived late in the mail and class was rapidly approaching. I found myself speeding through these impossibly complex plays, searching for a foothold on what they meant, wondering how in God's name I'd choose without really understanding.

Then I flipped by one in particular. Words and phrases started jumping out at me: "love," "age," "a gleam of tooth biting on the under," "all dark no begging /no giving no words." I had no idea what it meant. And as a PhD student, I really like to know what things mean.

But class was looming and it was time to commit. I grabbed this first impression with all my strength and proclaimed my intention to direct Beckett's radio play Words and Music for my first assignment.

Sometimes it seems like the rational mind can justify anything: "No, it's good that the scenic carpenters messed up on the construction of the banister, the wobbliness symbolizes the fragility of the entire society!" First impressions, like the reflexes that help us pull our hand away from a hot stove, don't allow the time for justification. The reflex arc moves energy and information from your body straight to your spine and back (bypassing the brain entirely) in order to take quick action.

In terms of aesthetics, who can say what instant personal psychic calculus results in that reflexive flash of interest? Why did this play feel hot in my hands when the ones before and after it just confused me? All I know is that when I went home that evening and read the play thoroughly, I fell in love. It's deeper and stranger and funnier and harder than I'd have guessed upon first impression. But the challenge feels like the right challenge.

I've found that trusting this flash of interest, of desire, of excitement --however subtle-- often puts me on a path that my rational mind only partially understands. Careful consideration is important and the ability to question one's initial assumptions is certainly key to being a good human being, but I consider it part of my artistic practice to attend to that flashing fish of desire as it breaks the surface of the lake.