In the Mind's I

By T.E. Kalem

ACT WITHOUT WORDS KRAPP'S LAST TAPE HAPPY DAYS NOT! by SAMUEL BECKETT

The characters in Samuel Beckett's plays are continually drawing their next-to-last breath of life. Thus it is fitting that three old playlets of his--Act Without Words (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961)--and one new one, Not I, are currently on view at the Forum, little sister to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Thanks to a fiscally inept board of directors, the Forum is drawing its last foreseeable breath with the Beckett quartet.

Beckett's terrain is the skull; drama's terrain is society. Aristotle defined tragedy as the imitation of an action; Beckett's quasi-tragedies are imitations of nonaction. Drama thrives on characters; Beckett's work contains no characters, only the solitary vagrant thoughts of an agonized brain. Why, then, should such an antitheatrical playwright be touted as a master? One may only speculate that a despairing age simply mistakes his statements of paralysis, alienation and isolation for some sort of apocalyptic wisdom.

All of the people in these playlets wish that they could drop dead. Some of them talk us to death first, as the monologue happens to be Beckett's favorite mode of speech. To Beckett, the other person exists only in the mind's I, and not as a separate entity. For Winnie (Jessica Tandy), who is buried up to the waist in Act I of Happy Days and up to the neck in Act II, life is a slow, garrulous leak into the sands of death. The trivia of her handbag and stray threads of memory sustain her, together with a fossil of a husband who is scarcely seen and seldom heard. In Krapp's Last Tape, the dialogue is incestuous. A 69-year-old man (Hume Cronyn) communes with his recorded self of earlier birthdays and indulges a ravenous appetite for bananas. Krapp is another of Beckett's incorrigible gas bags, an amusing aspect of a playwright who has been so widely heralded for the austerity of his prose.

Speech is dispensed with in Act Without Words, in which Cronyn mimes the frustrations of a man lost in the desert who is variously tempted by water bottles that elude his grasp and ropes that foil his attempts to hang himself. The character is a kind of vaudeville Sisyphus, and one can thank Beckett for the small favor that the playlet lasts only ten minutes. Not I lasts 15. It is the seemingly final verbal spasm of a woman of 70 (Tandy) who recounts fragments of her life and concludes that even her suffering does not add up to much of anything. Only the woman's spotlighted mouth can be seen, along with a huge, silent druidic figure who flaps his arms from time to time in what may be compassionate annoyance.

Despite a querulous vocal pitch, Jessica Tandy endows these tiny marine skeletons of drama with shimmering glints of life, and Hume Cronyn brings a gusto to his roles that adds flesh to their bones. But their admirable efforts are largely wasted. Life is a rum show, Beckett keeps on telling us. So, alas, are his plays.

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