Bill Irwin’s Beckett Effect
Bill Irwin reflects on Samuel Beckett’s writing and how it shaped his legendary stage career in his one-man show "On Beckett."
“The interesting thing about back in those days, there was no contract for it,” says Bill Irwin, recalling the time, decades ago, when “music videos were cutting edge” and also “shown a thousand times a day” on MTV. The legendary multi-genre performance artist first dipped his toes into the proverbial video waters as a performer in 1988. “I got flown to San Francisco where they shot it, but I don’t know that I got paid,” he says. He also didn’t get any residuals, despite heavy rotation on the network.
The video in question? A lighthearted romp featuring Irwin and Robin Williams supporting singer-songwriter Bobby McFerrin in his unique and ubiquitous Grammy-winning, chart-topping a cappella pop hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
Irwin happily bounced from that project to the next with Williams later the same year: a limited Off-Broadway production of Waiting for Godot directed by Mike Nichols and starring Williams and Steve Martin. Irwin was featured as Lucky, a mostly mute, minor role seemingly custom-made for a physically expressive actor who also dabbles as a professional clown.
That production of Samuel Beckett’s existential tragicomedy and modern stage classic served as Irwin’s professional debut as a performer of works by the acclaimed Irish writer and playwright — just the first of many to come. Ultimately, though, Irwin attributes getting “bitten by the [Beckett] bug” to his award-winning foray a few years later performing from Beckett’s collection of experimental short stories wryly titled Texts for Nothing. “It’s a little corny, but it’s true: My life has never been quite the same since,” he says. “The language, the Irishness of it, the way of looking at the human mind.”
Irwin has long been fascinated by what he’s dubbed the “pronoun energy” that fuels Beckett’s writing. “Beckett’s language is full of pronouns, differently than, say, Shakespeare’s.” Consider, for example, the Bard’s famous soliloquy from Hamlet that begins, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” “He goes on and on, and he’s talking, incredibly, about suicide,” Irwin notes, “but he doesn’t use a personal pronoun for a long time in that speech.”
Beckett, on the other hand, is “often right off the bat talking about ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘they.'” Irwin reasons that such frequent, often interchangeable use of personal pronouns is a way of exploring “the different parts of each human mind. All those pronouns rattle around in an effort by Beckett to reflect and hold the mirror up to nature. We’re full of pronouns. We talk within ourselves, we talk to ourselves, we lecture ourselves.” And increasingly, we’re also “reexamining human [gender] identity with pronouns — the pronouns we each use about ourselves.
“I’m doing my best just to share my delight and excitement about that,” adds Irwin, who touches on Beckett’s pronoun energy and its increasing cultural resonance given today’s preferred pronoun bent as part of his one-man show On Beckett, currently at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Irwin conceived of the show as “a personal evening about my relationship” with Beckett, structuring it around performance excerpts from signature Beckett works that hold special significance to Irwin. In between, Irwin intersperses insightful commentary and poignant reflections. He further enhances the proceedings by incorporating a few amusing, comedic vignettes highlighting his mastery of physical theater, including a few signature clown routines and some light slapstick.
“That’s my mission: to look at Beckett’s language in relation to the language of the body. And it seems to me it’s a rich connection and interplay,” he says. The two-time Tony Award-winning actor makes it all work. Calling On Beckett “an intimate, illuminating, and unexpectedly moving evening,” Metro Weekly critic Kate Wingfield, in a five-star review, touted “Irwin’s facility with Beckett’s free-associating, fragmentary, hidden-treasure language [as] nothing short of Shakespearean.”
For his part, Irwin makes the case for greater appreciation of Beckett’s work, perhaps one day going all the way to canonization akin to the Bard. “Interestingly, I think every generation sort of thinks, ‘Wow, this is weird stuff. This’ll go away soon.’ And yet it outlives generations. I think people will be reading Beckett’s work centuries from now the way they are Shakespeare.”
On Beckett runs through March 15 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre, 450 7th St. NW. Tickets start at $39. Call 202-547-1122 or visit ShakespeareTheatre.org.
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