Samuel Barclay Beckett
April 13, 1906 - December 22, 1989
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
The Seventh Handwritten Theatre is being released the day before Samuel Beckett's centenary, because releasing it on his birthday would just be asking for trouble. When I wrote this one I didn't know it would go up so close to Beckett's birthday, but it now seems the best note I could leave on the headstone of the man who wrote some of the purest and most rhapsodic language ever spoken on a stage.
Listen to this one with your eyes closed. Imagine a stage covered with muslin shaped into mounds and hills. Two women and one man onstage. The first woman to speak is in a yellowing gown with cascading bugle beads that falls to the floor. She addresses a man sitting on a stool with his back to the house center stage. The man wears a black suit and a fedora. The woman who speaks second wears a gown identical to that of the first, but hers is new and resplendent as she stands at the edge of the apron looking out over the house. It begins and ends with the same sound.
Handwritten Theatre Seven: "What I'd like you to do is behave more like a husband."
Performed by Moira Quirk and Moira Quirk
Running Time: 11:00
All Audiences (But it is about grown-up behavior)
