A Bit About This Theater
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- Published on Sunday, 05 February 2012 07:26
This is New City Theater’s fourth and final home theater since its founding in 1982 by artistic director John Kazanjian and actress Mary Ewald. The New City was founded and developed as an alternative to the corporate structured theater that fails to provide a home for playwrights and performers. So, from the get-go, the New City has been artist-run and ensemble centered seeking to develop long-term, on-going artistic collaborations with a select group of high quality national artists and Seattle artists.
Susan Sontag on Samuel Beckett
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- Published on Sunday, 05 February 2012 07:00
Beckett is dealing with emotions, however abstractly, and there is a progress from one emotion to the next that feels inevitable. Not only are his plays narrative but, as Joe Chaikin once observed, Beckett has actually discovered a new dramatic subject. Normally people on stage reflect on the macrostructure of action. What am I going to do this year? Tomorrow? Tonight? They ask: Am I going mad? Will I ever get to Moscow? Should I leave my husband? Do I have to murder my Uncle? My Mother? These are the sorts of large projects that have traditionally concerned a play’s leading characters. Beckett is the first writer to dramatize the microstructure of action. What am I going to do one minute from now? In the next second? Weep? Take out my comb? Stand-up? Sigh? Sit? Be silent? Tell a joke? Understand something? His plays are built on reflections leading to decisions, which imparts to his dramas a real narrative push.
"I sometimes think of what future historians
will say of us. A single sentence will suffice
for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."
Albert Camus
"My work is a matter of fundamental sounds made
as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else.
If people want to have headaches among the overtones,
let them."
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett's HAPPY DAYS, now playing through May 5, 2012