Why Beckett?
“This is the source of inner cleansing, the life force nevertheless, in Beckett's pessimism. It houses a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs further into the depths of abhorrence, a despair that has to reach the utmost bounds of suffering to discover that compassion has no bounds.”
-Karl Ragnar Glerow, of the Swedish Academy, presenting Beckett the Nobel Prize for Literature
“A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.”
-T.S. Eliot
David Sinaiko as Hamm and Avery Monsen as Clov in The Cutting Ball Theater’s production of Endgame February 22 – March 16
Talking about Beckett’s work is difficult. Beckett himself found it difficult. But why? It is because Beckett took great pains to make his plays first and foremost an experience. It is something that can be looked at from many angles and each audience member is invited to have his or her own personal reaction to it. There is no message. There is nothing to “get.” His work is mysterious and paradoxical by design. This is why Beckett was evasive with critics who wanted to have his plays explained to them. He didn’t want them reduced to one thing, but rather to be many things, as varied as life itself. Beckett said it best when defending Finnegans Wake, the masterwork of his mentor James Joyce, “His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.”
It is in this spirit that I invite you to see The Cutting Ball Theater’s production of the play Beckett valued most in his oeuvre, Endgame. As you embark on this adventure, you may want to go solo or you may prefer to have a guide.
If you would like to go solo and read our program notes later, click here to buy tickets now.
If you would like a guide to our production, click here for our program notes.
I hope to see you at the theater!
- Cutting Ball Artistic Director Rob Melrose
Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.
The Cutting Ball’s production of Endgame is made possible in part by grants from Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Mental Insight Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.