“Beckett briefs”, with F. Murray Abraham, runs over time.

In the “Beckett Briefs” program, a bill for three short games by Samuel Beckett At Irish Repertory Theater in New York, three questions are asked: “Why these pieces?” “Why now?” And “Why Beckett?”

The concise responses presented by the production director, Ciarán O'Reilly, and Irish artistic director Charlotte Moore are not mine, but I agree with them when they write that “there has never been a more consecutive moment to deepen and ask the fundamental questions: the why”.

During a recent short trip, while deciding what to see, I felt forced to make room for Beckett in what was an impossible calendar. Yes, I was curious to see the winner of Oscar, F. Murray Abraham, in the room, I consider the masterpiece of Beckett, “Krapp's Last Tape”. And yes, I find that I am unable to let the opportunity to see “play”, in which three characters – a man, his wife and his mistress – are in a pot in funeral polls in the beyond, each telling their side of a romantic triangle which hardly seems valid eternal discord.

As for “Not I”, the shortest of the three pieces, I was waiting for another chance to live the valve of a woman speaking a mile per minute of fragments that I have not yet been able to reconstruct. Sarah Street, who heroically did the work at a break -in pace, confirmed to me that the coherent narrative meaning was not what Beckett was aiming.

After organizing tickets, it was announced that the League of Live Stream Theater will be Streaming “Beckett briefs” From March 16 to March 30. I had thought that this bill would be an ideal streaming offer and I would have liked me to know in advance, but I am happy to have been able to live in person for reasons that have to do with the “Why Beckett?” question.

Beckett is eternally appropriate because his works are concerned with these eternal questions that the political emergencies of the time cannot prevail. Even if we will face the impossible moments, we remain planted in this greater impossibility – human existence.

Kate Forbes in “Play”, part of the “Beckett Briefs” of the Irish representative.

(Carol Rosegg)

But I wanted to “Beckett Briefs” for other reasons. I want to be more attentive to the place where I pay my attention. Our minds are diverted by major technologies, and one of the irony of our time is that, even if our access to information, entertainment and consumer goods has developed in an exponential way, our ability to concentrate and prolonged us cognitively has become seriously altered.

As an act of personal resistance, I attach myself again to “Ulysse” by James Joyce. I admit that it is a struggle. I read a chapter, browse the online support documents, then listen to the chapter in an audio recording on YouTube. The technology is not so bad. Internet resources were not available for me when I read for the first time “Ulysses” as a student. But at the time, I did not feel the need to read Joyce as a sociological corrective. And I was a little more comfortable with the idea of ​​difficulty in art. I was not conditioned to expect everything that was worth predigated and easily exploitable.

Joyce was, of course, Beckett's mentor, and although he went to the opposite direction of Joyce's maximalism, he shares the same determination to start from scratch with an artistic form. In whatever the discipline Beckett He turned out to work, he re -examined not only vocabulary but the grammar of this medium.

His pieces demonstrate a fierce effort to put himself in brass. What is the least necessary to reveal the most? The public has no choice but to exist in the theatrical moment, without resorting to linear logic, sensitive language or psychological epiphanies.

“Krapp's Last hits” creates a dialogue between an old man and his young me, through audio newspaper bands that reveal what the character was like 30 years earlier – to his eternal disgust. Krapp listens to his young literary aspirations and his decision to put an end to the relationship that turned out to be his last chance of love.

The play can be the most personal of Beckett, the one that brings you closer to man. In less than an hour, he realized what took Marcel Proust, another key literary influence, thousands of pages in “lost time” to transmit – that we die not once but a myriad of times, being a succession of me, recognizable but discreet.

Abraham, adopting a worthy clown behavior, has an embodied theatricality which is well suited to the style of Beckett. Its exuberant actor benefits from the severity of Beckett's conciseness. I recently showed my students the film John Hurt's Performance in “Krapp's Last Tape”, which I was lucky to see in person at the Kirk Douglas Theater. There remains for me the brand of high water from Beckett. But I was grateful to live the text through a different voice and face.

Sarah Street, on the left, Roger Dominic Casey and Kate Forbes in “Play”, part of “Beckett Briefs” of the Irish representative.

(Carol Rosegg)

It tells you something about Beckett That an actor of the Stature of Abraham wants to make this Off-Brroadway game to this career. The cast of “play” – Kate Forbes, Street (doing a double duty after “Not I”) and Roger Dominic Casey – give the playful a new tone in a lucid, deliberate, perhaps a little excessive production. The public of the Irish rep on the Sunday Matinee that I have assisted perhaps beckett veterans, but it is essential that a new generation of artists remains in contact with the vision of this rare playwright.

Which brings me to the other reason that I had for having seen “Beckett Briefs” – my total fatigue with realism. Or should I say my exhaustion with a kind of televised realism which seems to believe that the goal of art is to offer a slice not so much life but of idiosyncratic behavior. It is not just that the canvas has shrunk. Beckett worked on a rigorously compact scale. It is that realism was confused with reality, and I fear that actors and writers lose sight of the experience of life by zooming in on psychological mins.

Beckett reminds us of the metaphysical immensity that the scene may contain. Fortunately, his style, still so in front of us, is ready for a thorough examination of streaming. If he would have designed a digital performance that would have made us rethink the possibilities of the form. But it is comforting that more people can live through the “Memoirs of Beckett” the aesthetic renewal of his example.

For streaming tickets for “Beckett briefs”, click here.