Beckett in Exile, and the genesis of "Godot"

Those who know me well know that "Waiting for Godot" is one of my favorite plays, and one which was seminal to my becoming a writer. Those who know me well also know how much I love the south of France and, in particular, the region of Languedoc-Roussillion.

Beckett joined the Resistance movement in Paris in September of 1941 and helped pass secret information to England about German military movements. When an infiltrator began uncovering the names of Resistance members in Beckett’s group, Beckett and his companion (later his wife) Suzanne had to flee Paris and travel into the South, where they eventually found refuge in the small village of Roussillon, near Avignon.

In the French version of "Waiting for Godot" (En Attendant Godot), this village is named as the place where Vladimir and Estragon picked grapes, an activity that Beckett and Suzanne actually engaged in. This has led some scholars to suggest that Vladimir and Estragon, at least in part, represent Beckett and Suzanne in flight from Paris to Roussillon.

"A country road. A tree. Evening." 

Other scholars have suggested that the situation which Didi and Gogo find themselves in has its genesis in Beckett and Suzanne's waiting in an extremely dangerous form of exile for the war to end.

In Roussillon, Beckett earned food and shelter by doing strenuous manual labor for local farmers, eventually working for a small local Resistance group, and trying to keep his identity hidden from the Germans occupying outlying areas. After the war, Beckett was awarded two French medals, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance, for his contributions to the war effort.

On Nick Hynter's 1994 Revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Carousel"

I'm not one for musicals, in general, but when they do work (and they still do, even some of those written today) there is no finer melding of drama, music and dance this side of opera. Fat ladies optional. Sixteen years ago, when I was at a theater conservatory in NYC, we - the first class of playwrights at the conservatory - were privileged to attend a dress rehearsal for Nick Hytner's revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel.

Carousel is one of the first American musicals to incorporate all three elements (drama, music and dance) in a story in which each song was not a departure from the development of the story but, rather, an integral part of the telling of it. One day, in the Fall of 1993, when all things still shone bright for us at Juilliard, we sat in on a technical dress for Carousel at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater. It was, in retrospect, one of the best lessons in making theater that I received as a student there. We were met, that afternoon, in the lobby of the theater by Bernie Gersten, head honcho at LCT, and Robert Crowley, a stage designer whom Hytner had brought over from London to help reconceive the musical for its New York run.

Bernie explained to us something of the history of the Beaumont and the modifications they had made to accommodate the musical. The Beaumont was designed with a square thrust stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience. They reconstructed the square portion of the stage that projected into the house, reshaped it into a half-circle. They also set up a large turntable beneath the stage, so that a circular portion of it (including half of the circle which projected out into the audience) could rotate. This circle was used, to great effect, as the base for the eponymous carousel, as well as a means for rotating sets on and off the stage.

Bob Crowley then told us how the imagery of the circle had guided all of the decisions that he and Nick Hytner had made in re-staging the musical. He told us that they had rented a car and driven up the coast of New England, looking for images relevant to this story of a tightly knit community of New Englanders whose economic livelihood was changing from fishing to factory work. They chose to emulate painters (Wyeth, especially, but Hopper, as well) whose work whose work was tied to the region.

After this talk, we entered the theater itself, and saw a run through of the play from overture to epilogue. We were the only ones in the entire house and, speaking for myself, I felt quite privileged to be there.

The lights went to black and then, projected on the curtains, appeared a fiery red circle. Meanwhile, R&H's Carousel Waltz Overture started... one of those grand old full- orchestra overtures that composers used to write to help move the audience out of their workaday world, and into the world of the Theatre; one of those grand scores that musically foreshadow the events to come.

Everything on stage, from that moment on, happened in circles, presaging and marking the passage of time:

"It is late on a summer afternoon in a textile factory. A large clock descends from the fly and hovers over the work-floor. Julie Jordan, the heroine of the play, is at work at a loom along with a dozen other women like her. The minute hand on the clock crawls; the looms and the workers alike move in tempo to the music, in slow motion. The plant owner walks by outside, takes out his pocket watch and checks it. The music of the waltz swells up and crescendos. Finally, the clock strikes five and the whistle blows, signaling the end of the workday. The women rush from their worktables to their lockers to change back into their home clothes, and they disperse in a circular pattern like the wisps of a cloud.

The turntable beneath the stage turns, and the factory set splits open and rotates off-stage. Then, while the waltz is still playing, the lights shift and a country entertainment, a traveling carnival, appears. Carousel horses on poles fly in from the wings, each maneuvered by a roustabout, and are locked into place in hidden holes around the periphery of the turntable. The full Carousel Waltz plays as the carousel comes into being. Julie and the rest of the working girls rush in and the carnival’s barker, Billy Bigelow, helps her aboard one of the mounted wooden horses. All of this action is without words, mind you.

The music shifts, the table turns, and it is now evening of that day or the day after. There appears a gentle green hill, no more than a rise, near where the land meets the sea. It is evening with a deep blue sky, and upstage, far up the hill, a lamp burns in the window of a cottage. Julie and her friend Carrie are taking their ease at the end of a workweek, lying on the hill and looking up at the evening sky. They sing the duet You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan.

A fellow happens by. He is Billy Bigelow, a barker from Coney Island whose carnival has just pulled into Julie’s town, the fellow who helped Julie onto the carousel in the scene before. In the course of this scene the two of them go from being complete strangers to contemplating becoming a couple. The entirety of this character development is accomplished through two amazing songs: If I Loved You and What’s the Use of Wond’rin?

Billy
Well, anyway, you mean you don't love me.
That's what you said, ain't it?

Julie
Yes!
I can smell 'em, can you, ah?
The blossoms. The wind brings 'em down!

Billy
There ain't much wind tonight... Hardly any.
[Sung]
You can't hear a sound, not the turn of a leaf
Nor the fall of a wave hittin' the sand.
The tide's creepin' up on the beach like a thief,
Afraid to be caught stealin' the land!
On a night like this I start to wonder
What life is all about.

Julie
And I always say two heads are better than one to
figure it out.

Billy
[spoken]
I don't need you, I don't need anybody helpin' me.
Well, I got it figured out for myself.
We're not important. What are we?
A couple o' specks with nothin'
Look up there...

[sung]
There's a hell of a lotta stars in the sky,
And the sky's so big the sea looks small,
And two little people, you and I
We don't count at all.

[spoken]
You're a funny kid, you know?
I don't remember meetin' a girl like you.
Hey, [are] you tryin' to get me to marry you?

Julie
No!

Billy
Then what's puttin' that into my head, babe?
You're diff'rent, alright! I know what it is...
You've doped me with that little kid's face, right?
You've adjusted me!
I wonder what it'd be like...

Julie
What?

Billy
Nothin'.
No, I know what it'd be like.
It'd be awful! I can just see myself-

[Sung]
Kinda scrawny, and pale
Picking at my food,
And love-sick like any other guy.
I'd throw away my sweater, and dress up like a dude
In a dicky and a collar and a tie.
If I loved you.

Julie
[spoken]
But you don't!

Billy
[spoken]
No, I don't!

Billy
[sung]
But somehow I can see
Just exactly how I'd be
If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I'd want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn't come in an easy way
Round in circles I'd go!
Longin' to tell you,
But afraid and shy
I'd let my golden chances pass me by!
Soon you'd leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know
How I loved you
If I loved you.

[spoken]
Aha...I'm not the kinda fella to marry anybody!
No, even if a girl was foolish enough to want me to, I wouldn't!

Julie
Don't worry about it, Billy!

Billy
Who's worried?

Julie
You were right about there bein' no wind.
The blossoms are comin' down by their selves.
Just their time to, I reckon.

Shortly thereafter, in a subsequent scene, Rodgers and Hammerstein do something which is quite amazing, something which I’ve never seen done before or since in a musical. Billy and Julie do fall in love, of course. Billy is revealed to be a tough kid from Brooklyn with a history of being on the wrong side of the law.

Julie, who matches Billy for toughness, muses - in a song which is really an internal monologue (she’s thinking the words to herself, as much as saying them to any particular person whom she shares the stage with) - about Billy’s character, and about her fate, which she knows will be entwined with his…

Julie:
[sung]
What's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad,
Or if you like the way he wears his hat?
Oh, what's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad?
He's your feller and you love him,
That's all there is to that.

And then Oscar Hammerstein does this really deft thing. The next lyric, on the surface another musing by the heroine, is also a warning directed at the audience in the theater, a premonition of what is to come…

Julie:
[sung]
Common sense may tell you
That the ending will be sad,
And now's the time to break and run away…

The warning is saying to you: GET OUT, NOW. THERE IS MUCH SADNESS AND HEARTBREAK (AND TRUTH AND LOVE AND BEAUTY) AHEAD, IF YOU STAY. The wonder of Hammerstein’s lyrics and Rodgers’ music is such that no one ever breaks and runs away. We, the audience, are rooted to our seats. We are there for the complete ride.

Snow Was General All O'er Ireland...

On the eve of our first real snowfall of the season, from possibly the single best piece of short fiction ever written in the English language:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

-- from "The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners

On "Avatar," "Lord of the Rings" and "Gangs of New York" and Why Motion Capture and Green Screen Will Never Replace Live Action Acting and Filming on Back Lot Sets and Locations

Jim Cameron's Avatar is set for a holiday-weekend opening, and already his detractors are sharpening their knives. Costing $380 million to make and market (on a production budget of $230 million), Avatar, which is Cameron's first feature since Titanic, is among the most expensive films ever made. Employing an innovative camera system allowing the director to "fly" a virtual camera through a computer-generated world, much of the action is depicted using CGI and the motion-capture technology which allowed Peter Jackson to render Gollum based upon Andy Serkis' performance on a green-screen stage in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is estimated that the film will have to do $217 million domestically to recoup its costs (by comparison, Titanic did $600 million domestically, and $1.84 billion worldwide). Shot in 3-D, part of what is riding on its success or failure is the extent to which audiences will pay a premium price to sit through a 3D feature.

Whether Avatar ultimately proves to be DeMille's Birth of a Nation, on the one hand, or Cimino's Heavens Gate, on the other, I doubt that the CGI motion-capture technology will make a heavy inroad as against live-action sequences for all but unique character parts.

C O N T I N U E D...

Cassandra's monologue from "Going Home"

When I first moved to New York, in the early eighties, I lived for a while in a renovated Old Law (dumbbell) tenement in Chelsea. My next-door neighbor was a late middle-aged woman who had been living, for years, in the un-renovated tub-in-kitchen version of my apartment. She was usually very nice, but was sometimes given to loud one-sided aggressive declaratory conversations with Jesus in the wee hours of the morning. I later learned that she suffered from schizophrenia, and was always one disability check away from being out on the street. At the time, rapacious New York landlords were emptying SRO buildings through any means that they could find, fair and foul, and were often "warehousing" the empty buildings until the market turned in their favor.

One day, I read in the News the sad story of a little girl on the Lower East Side who had been playing beneath the stoop of her building and was killed when the stoop collapsed on top of her. She was a very well-loved child and the neighborhood was very tight. It was one of those moments in a neighborhood, a much smaller version of the General Slocum disaster from eighty years before, when you could practically hear a collective keening arise from scores of kitchens where mothers were cooking dinner, empty lots where kids were playing stoop-ball and in Tompkins Square Park where she was memorialized by sad-eyed men.

This was the first thing that I ever wrote for an actor, and it was given wonderful voice by the late Rosanna Carter of the Negro Ensemble Company.

Scene: The doorway of a former SRO tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York. CASSANDRA, a black homeless woman of indeterminate age, stands at the foot of the stoop with two large paper bags at her side packed with all of her earthly possessions blocking the steps. She addresses PAUL [an actor who has taken a job as the super of an empty tenement building in the process of being renovated].

CASSANDRA

You think I don’t know you? You live here now, in this building, don’t you? You like it? You think it’s built solid, do you? I’m here to tell you. You best be saying your prayers ‘fore you go to sleep at night, ‘cause this building’s liable to fall down any moment.

[beat] You moving away. You think I’m out my mind, don’t you? You sure as hell don’t know me. But I know you.

You read in the paper, sometimes, see on the TV, about some old building fallin' down somewheres. Always seems to be in East New York, South Bronx, Lower East Side... one of them poorer neighborhoods, don't it? Why you spose that be?

What?

Just cause they old? No, chile. I'll tell you why. Old buildings be a lot like old people. They be storing up memories and souls since the day they be built. Souls of everyone who ever lived there. Every gal who give birth over some tub inna kitchen 'cause she be too poor to afford a doctor. Every old man who pass on in his sleep with a bottle in his hands 'cause he don't got no good reason to get up no more. And every little thing that happen in between.

After a while, see, the weight of all them souls starts to press down on the walls, press down on the floors, until something just give way.

No suh. Old buildings don't fall down for no reason at all. Not in these neighborhoods. They collapse from the weight of all the souls they got in 'em, all the life they've seen.

Oh, I know you well enough. You the one they hire to watch this old building they "warehousing" like you say. You the one holdin' the keys. It be getting cold for November. Now, will you let me in my home?

- from Going Home ©1989 Peter Basta Brightbill

Runyon, Riskin and the Pleasures of Adaptation

Part One.  Of Children & Idiots.

Damon Runyon wrote his short story "Madame La Gimp" at the inception of his career as a writer. It was published in October of 1929, in Hearst's Cosmopolitan, two weeks after the market crashed. The story is short, running just more than 6,000 words, but it's seminal - it has inspired two film adaptations ("Lady for a Day," in 1933 and "Pocketful of Miracles," in 1960; both directed by Capra) and at least one radio play of the same name as the short story, performed in 1948 as part of "The Damon Runyon Theater" with great radio voice actors like John Brown (Burns & Allen, "The Life of Riley"); William Conrad (who went on to narrate "The Fugitive" on television), Anne Whitfield and Frank Lovejoy.

Each of the three adaptations suffers from several problems, chief among them being the tendency of the actors to overplay the lines. Runyon writes in such a distinctive voice - always the present tense, never the conditional (i.e., the narrator in MLG, in reaction to a particularly far-fetched story, says "It is commencing to sound to me like a movie such as a guy is apt to see at a midnight show," not "It sounds like a movie that one might see at a midnight show"); and the narrator constantly straining at precision, using diction far more formal than the milieu warrants - that any attempt by an actor to embellish this by overplaying the language ends up rendering Runyon's characters as children or idiots, neither of which they were. In fact, while his work is full of humor, the world that Runyon's characters inhabit is actually quite dark, full of low-level hustlers who barely make their rent by selling bruised apples, flowers from an undertaker or yesterday's news (Apple Annie, in, various incarnations); or by hustling hicks from the sticks out of a fiver at a pool hall (Judge Henry G. Blake) or by suckering rubes out of their traveling money in games of faro on the Deuce (the Pale Face Kid).  Just off of the page, alluded to but never dwelt on, the sons of old money are jumping to their deaths out of windows up and down Wall Street, while men and women of more modest expectations queue up on breadlines and sleep in the Hoovervilles that have sprouted, like mushrooms after a rain, in the Central Park and at the ends of various alleyways and corners of the metropolis.

With this adaptation, I intend to bring Runyon back to his roots. This will be a darker Runyon than audiences are familiar with from the Capra films, one in which - if I am successful and my actors are well-cast and well-directed - Runyon's characters (including the ubiquitous narrator) will be firmly rooted in the denizens of 1920's Broadway who were Runyon's actual pals (e.g., Otto "Abbadabba" Berman, Frank Costello) or people whom he rubbed shoulders with covering the "Main Stem" for the Journal-American (e.g. Heywood Broun and other members of the Algonquin Round Table, and a very young Archie Leach, before he metamorphosed into Cary Grant, stilt-walking adverts for a local haberdashery just off Times Square in between gigs with Prenders Acrobats). At the same time, however, Runyon's characters, like the creations of all great artists, are as much a product of that artist's particular sensibility (in this case, the yearnings of a young boy from Manhattan, Kansas for a life of adventure in the Big City) as they are of the personages he or she observed and, as such, transcend mere reportage. Therefore, I hope that this will also be a Runyon adaptation which will evoke that dream cityscape which is particular, interior and individual to everyone who has ever fallen under the spell of New York City, one which is visible just out the corner of one's vision, and one in which the worst fate that could befall oneself was to be banished forever from the Great White Way.

Ghost in the House: on Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali and the Why the Craft of Writing Resembles Nothing So Much as Boxing

In her 1987 essay, On Boxing, the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who grew up watching boxing at her father's knee, writes of the similarities between writing and boxing, how the heart of both lies more in the rituals leading up to the execution (i.e., the training period for a fighter preparing for a bout, the drafts of a writer) and about the relation of both with Time:

In the boxing ring, the ceremonial ringing of the bell... sets into motion the authority of Time...

When a boxer is "knocked out" it does not mean, as is commonly thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapacitated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time.  (The referee's dramatic count of ten constitutes a metaphysical parenthesis of a kind through which the fallen boxer must penetrate if he hopes to continue in Time.)... Counted out, he is "dead," in symbolic mimicry of the sport's ancient tradition in which he would very likely be dead.

I have never thought of boxing as a sport.  There is nothing fundamentally playful about it; nothing that seems to belong to daylight, to pleasure.  At its moments of greatest intensity it seems to contain so complete and powerful an image of life - life's beauty, vulnerability, despair, incalculable and often self-destructive courage - that boxing is life, and hardly a mere game...  One plays football, one doesn't play boxing.

In writing my play Stand-Up Guys, I knew that I was drawing on Budd Schulberg's incomparable script for On the Waterfront, just as I was drawing on the story of Pietro Panto and the very real history of the mob on the Red Hook piers.  I knew, of course, that Brando's Terry Malloy was an amateur boxer who had "thrown" some fights at the urging of his brother and knew, further, that there was a lot of brawling, both inside the ring and out, that went on "down the Hook" in 1930's through 1970's.  Finally, being a student of boxing, I knew that fighters like Ali, Patterson and Tyson had trained at Gleason's Gym, back in the day when it was in Manhattan's Tenderloin, and so - after it had moved to DUMBO in 1985 - I went down there and started training there myself.

In 1968 Muhammad Ali came to see Howard Sackler's play The Great White Hope on Broadway, starring a young James Earl Jones. At the time, Ali's boxing license had been suspended and his passport seized at the behest of the federal government over his refusal on religious grounds to fight in Vietnam, and he was reviled by a large segment of white society. After the show, Ali met Jones. The house was empty and the stage was bare, save for the ghost light, when Ali met Jones and told him that the play had affected him deeply "That's my story," Ali said. "You take out the issue of white women and replace it with the issue of religion. That's my story!"

Ali's cornerman, Drew "Bundini" Brown, used the boxer's affinity for Johnson to encourage him in the ring. During several of Ali's major fights, Bundini was heard to call from the corner, "Ghost in the house! Ghost in the house! Jack Johnson's here! Ghost in the house!"