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- Irwin
Incomparable In
"Texts"
-
ACT Production
Both Funny,
Grim
-
 By
Steven Winn
San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco, Calif.The earth moved at the Geary Theater
on Wednesday night. It began as a
trickle of loose dirt down a mountainside at the start of "Texts
for Nothing"
and ended, 70 splendid minutes later, with the inexorable pull
of gravity on
a man sunk to his neck in thought.
With this heroic appropriation of four Samuel Beckett prose works
written
in 1950, the master solo performer Bill Irwin approaches the
peak that great
theater aspires to reach. He melds the word to a body moving
exquisitely in
space, mind and spirit to a precisely imagined physical world,
sublime comedy to the primal ache of existence.
Irwin does it by roaming the crevasses and stony outcroppings of
designer
Douglas Stein's inspired set like some explorer watchful and
astonished at every step he takes. The language, an unmapped
journey through the shimmering muddle of consciousness
itself -- "answers to questions not
understood," as Beckett writes -- gets a concordant blast
of alpine freshness.
From bold rhythms and semaphoric gestures to microscopic facial tics
and tiny sighs, Irwin tracks every declaration and
contradiction on
the page. He's infant and ancient at once, his bare head
and forelock
tuft popping out from beneath a jaunty bowler hat. His pleading
eyes, panicky scrambling and
flowing pratfalls all have a rich syntax of their
own. Irwin can compass all
the ages of man in a phrase or single staggering lurch.
"I'm holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness," the
actor
muses in one of the evening's many breathtaking vistas of
self-awareness,
"but faithfully, faithfully."
This American Conservatory Theater presentation of a show Irwin
first performed and directed in New York last fall is rare and
glorious
stuff. It's mysterious, funny, grim, tender and undoubtedly
not for all tastes.
Those who insist on being told stories, with clear
beginnings, middles
and ends, need to reconfigure for the geography of these
"Texts." The show invites a deep
submission, not to something dense and unsolvable but rather to
that inner
hum of memory, mortal grief and joy daily existence drowns
out.
"Texts," as advertised, is about nothing -- that plush Beckettian
void of terror and self-consciousness and confounding
language. It's also
about everything -- the balm of being read to as a child, the
delight and folly of
sex, nightfall, wind, home, words, death, the feel of spongy
earth and smooth stone, the shock of an unseen puddle on an
unsuspecting foot.
SURPRISING ENTRANCE
Irwin, the multifaceted artist familiar to ACT audiences for his
silent clowning in "Fool Moon," begins here with an entrance
that ought to
arrive as a surprise for all viewers. It's as natural and
startling as
childbirth.
For several silent and captivating minutes, Irwin is like some
full-grown newborn on this bleak and tricky terrain. He
clambers up a
cliff and lopes across the plain. He disguises his tumbles
as lolling
rest stops, then hops up to peer out anxiously toward some
horizon a universe away. He's the
comic quester and eternal skeptic. There's a whole tangled
history of man
according to Beckett compressed into this brilliant,
wordless overture.
Then language comes, in streams and waves and swirling eddies.
"Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't anymore, I couldn't go
on." So it begins, in a sentence foaming with assertion and
cosmic hesitation.
Irwin's in the current right away, riding each shift and
pause and elliptical
rush.
Written in French and translated by the Irish-born author into
English, the four "Texts" (there are 13 in all) go where they
go. The first
is suffused with the childhood recollection of a boy clinging
absently to his
father, "the hands forgotten in each other." The second
conflates life's beginning
and end ("I'm dead and getting born").
The third reduces Irwin to a vibrantly physical torso and the last to
a jabbering mouth. The scenes are set off by deliberate shifts
of light
(by designer Nancy Schertler) that could signal the passage
of a day or
perhaps a century. One's attention rests and idles at
times. Then something
snags, and the sleeper awakens to his own dream.
A lesser actor might be guilty of trying to illustrate Beckett's
gnomic language. Irwin makes finger quotations in the air,
wags his arm at the future and points to symbolic perils on
the ground. But this
performer, one of the great physical actors of his age, can turn
something
as simple as sitting on a stone or wiping his shoe into a
poetic comedy on
the dilemma of living in time and space.
ECHOES OF 'GODOT'
Irwin's regal tramp costume and demeanor evoke the existential farce
of "Waiting for Godot." So does Stein's set, with its stunted,
leafless
shrubs.
The final scene recalls the earthbound characters in "Happy
Days."
But even as it connects to Beckett's theatrical masterworks, "Texts
for
Nothing" has the heaven-sent astonishment of something
new. Irwin and Beckett are
artistic soul mates, in a collaboration that is only
beginning for this
performer as he reaches his full maturity.
ACT artistic director Carey Perloff deserves high marks for bringing
the incomparable Irwin back to town. It's another rich
homecoming for
the long-ago Pickle Family Circus clown. And it comes with
a bonus: A
return engagement of "Fool Moon" follows these amazing
"Texts" at the Geary from July 22 to
Aug. 12.
Steven
is the arts and culture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, a
position
he assumed this spring after 22 years as a theater critic at the
paper.
His work has appeared in American Theatre, Art News, the
New York
Times, Sports Illustrated, the Utne Reader and various other
publications.
He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.)
and the
University of Washington (M.A.) and has held a Wallace Stegner
Fellowship
at Stanford University.
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