Not quite a meeting of the minds.

Like a lot of people, I'd always thought of Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett as kindred spirits. Both always seemed committed to a monkish spareness, and a determination to burn away distractions, to burrow down to the essentials of things.   Brook spurned more and more of the trappings of theatre as he aged, and Beckett's plays dwindled into "dramaticules" so concentrated that sometimes he seemed to be poised at the very edge of being, scraping at the basis of consciousness. But surprisingly enough, Fragments, Brook's whimsical treatment of various Beckett "shorts" and "roughs" at ArtsEmerson through April 3, somehow leaves you pondering the differences between these two giants rather than their similarities. For note that adjective "whimsical" - yes, I meant it, and it's not a word that's usually attached to Beckett. Not that the great Irish playwright isn't funny - in fact, he's hilarious. But is he whimsical?

Well, sometimes Brook, and co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne, almost convince you he is; and the lightness the director brings to opaque scraps of script like Neither isn't entirely unwelcome.  There's nothing worse than Beckett when it congeals into doom-ridden pretentiousness, that's for sure.  And Brook's spritzes of zen bemusement keep the production far from the dark, very still waters where so many productions drown.

Still, as you watch Fragments, you keep feeling that Brook doesn't really "get" Beckett, or rather that he keeps trying to tease the great playwright into his own modes of Grotowski-in-Asia stylization.  But Beckett's simply got more grit in his soul than Brook seems to realize; and what's more, Beckett is deeply religious, even though apparently an atheist - as one wag put it, Beckett's universe may be a godless one, but the god it's missing is Christian.  Meanwhile Brook kind of floats in the penumbrae cast by Buddhism and Hinduism (or something like that; did I mention Sufism? Zoroastrianism?).

So the tone is a bit odd, and then there's the problem of the changes Brook makes in Beckett's stage directions, even the very explicit, don't-change-this-under-any-circumstances stage directions.  Now I'm not one to cling to Beckett's prescriptions as holy writ - still, whenever a director asks me about this question, I always reply with the following: "Now remember Beckett was a genius - so ask yourself, am I a genius?"  I say this because time after time, when I see a Beckett production that hews closely to his instructions, I find it superior to one that was "experimental."  Now sure, maybe Brook is a genius, too - maybe - but still, Samuel Beckett had a phenomenally acute understanding of how his work would best be realized onstage.  You tinker with his instructions at your peril.

In Fragments, the greatest damage is done to Rockaby, the haunting late-career solo piece in which a lonely woman retreats completely from a seemingly-empty world into the rocking arms of death itself (in French, the original language of most of Beckett's work, the title of the play is Berceuse).  In their production, Brook and Estienne abandon almost all of Beckett's suggestions about props and costume; the weirdly glamorous funeral gown, the pre-recorded vocals (the actress onstage should only chime in occasionally), the chair that rocks itself - all this is gone, as are even the subtle divisions of the woman's descent from consciousness into, well, "apparent" death, as the playwright puts it.  (Does anyone ever really and truly die in Beckett?)

The results were, inevitably, thinner than they should have been - indeed, whole swaths of theme were just missing, and while actress Hayley Carmichael did her best with the text, she simply couldn't conjure its full, echoing dimensions.  Which is too bad, because as Rockaby is the greatest of the scripts on offer in Fragments, its failure counted for a lot. And there were other odd deviations from Beckett's directions that undermined the other, slighter pieces: in Act Without Words II, for instance, I believe Beckett even spells out that the seemingly divine prod that pokes his Didi- and Gogo-like protagonists must come from the wings (on ever more sets of wheels), rather than down from the flies - yet Brook brings it down from the flies anyway, which partly spoils the piece's central joke (that God is just as rickety, and just as determined, as we are).

Still, there were many moments in which Beckett's voice came through, in "fragments," as it were - and it's a voice that's always worth hearing (I personally place Beckett right after Chekhov in the pantheon). Actors Bruce Myers and Yoshi Oïda brought a withered comedy and calm pathos to Rough for Theatre I, which is a kind of variant on the themes (and characters) of Godot and Endgame (although neither actor had quite the level of desperate decline needed to conjure Didi on his way to Hamm, or Gogo on his way to Clov). Brook's methods seemed best suited to the wry vaudeville Act Without Words II, which played (as it should) as a Beckett's idea of a silent Buster Keaton movie. Best of all was Come and Go, which Brook staged explicitly as a light drag burlesque. I have to say that even here, the more exquisite qualities of Beckett's conception (its geometric perfection and eerie sense of timelessness) went missing; but at least the piece worked as comedy, and as a charming introduction to the playwright, as intended. I just thought that Peter Brook would intend more.

Endgame replay

Remo Airaldi, Karen MacDonald, and Will Lebow in Endgame.

Was it really a generation ago that the A.R.T. and JoAnne Akalaitis screwed Samuel Beckett and Endgame? How time flies when civilization is winding down; that disastrous production feels like only yesterday. Alas, the Nobel-prize-winner didn't manage to prevent it - all he got was a disclaimer in the program - but clearly it made him decide for damn sure that nothing like it was ever going to happen again. So when the A.R.T. decided to return to the scene of its crime, Beckett's estate got everything in writing: this time, not a single beat or stage direction in the script was to be changed: a body-blow to the A.R.T.'s whole raison d'être. (Indeed, despite his failure to stop the Akalaitis Endgame, Beckett did manage to score one for intellect over attitude back in 1984: Brustein had made a career out of proscribing how - and even why - theatre should be done, and then arguably the greatest playwright of the twentieth century brutally smacked him down. That musta hurt.)

But how, exactly, was the A.R.T. to deal with a legal writ forcing it to produce a play exactly the same way everybody else does? Well, thinking fast - not for nothing are they at Harvard - the theatre turned this contractual obligation into its marketing concept: they would bravely soldier on in chains, honor the intentions of the author and still pull off his play! Oh my God, what a like totally awesome challenge! Nobody has ever tried that before!

Of course you knew they were only kidding. There's no way the A.R.T. was going to color within the lines.

And indeed, they've doodled a bit on Beckett's masterpiece; they really can't help themselves. No major sacrileges have been done, mind you - just petty gambits that read as tiny, secret tantrums. The idea this time around seems to have been to conjure a vaudeville playing out in an ambiguous time and space, which is fairly close to the right idea, and certainly an improvement over JoAnne's literalist post-Armaggedon setting. In this version, Hamm and Clov's cell floats in a metaphoric darkness, and it's decrepit, but somehow slightly urban, and hardly suggests the end of the world; instead, it's almost ostentatiously neutral, in a we'll-show-you-Mr.-Beckett-we're-not-going-to-do-anything kind of way (although it's actually ecru, not gray). Still, most of the deviations from the author's wishes come courtesy of the designers: neither Hamm nor Clov has "a very red face" as stipulated, the "high, small windows" are now full-size but boarded up, and the ash cans from which Nagg and Nell emerge are sunk into the floor, rendering their leglessness theatrically moot; the picture "with its face to the wall" is revealed to be of Beckett himself (genius!), and at the final moment, the set begins to slowly drift apart, which at least has some thematic resonance (although it was amusing to read Carolyn Clay wrongly identify this as "the production's only liberty;" read the play more carefully, Carolyn).

To be fair, I'm speaking from a specialist's perspective (I've directed Endgame), and almost all these deviations are well within the accepted limits of theatrical production. Still, it's amusing to see demonstrated yet again how unconsciously both the A.R.T. and its enabling critics depend on the ignorance of their "educated" audience (even when they're shouting about how they're following every detail of a script, they know they can actually fudge it). And there are similar small oddities and mannerisms in the performances as well - some of them serious - although to give the actors their due, this is a generally accurate, though superficial, rendition of the play.

And the critics were surprised to discover how funny a "straight" production of Endgame can be (although every production I've seen has been pretty funny). This is largely due to the fact that in the central roles, Will Lebow and Thomas Derrah (at left) drop hint after hint that they're engaged in some kind of meta-theatrical game (the hints are indeed there in the text), and effortlessly pull off the call-and-response timing of a seasoned comic team. The trouble, of course, is that Endgame should do more than just chase the February blues away, as Louise Kennedy would have it. There's a startling lyricism to its language, as well as great symbolic depth (there are Joycean echoes of the Greeks, and Shakespeare, and the Old and New Testaments throughout). And somehow little of this thematic density comes over at the A.R.T.; the actors conjure a sense of meta-theatricality and nail all their laughs, but Marcus Stern has directed them too superficially to suggest the Biblical power struggles and wounded psyches moving beneath the surface of the text. In the end, Endgame is primal, and there's always something terrible at stake - in a word, the end of the last human connection in the world. Yes, this is just a room, and "where" and "when" it exists is a mystery; and yet somehow, Beckett hints that Western civilization is playing itself out within its walls.

But you'd never mistake Will Lebow's arch, plummily-toned Hamm for the last, sterile gasp of the tragic hero, and you'd never imagine that Thomas Derrah's highly mannered Clov was actually a brutalized, broken-hearted slave. You'd likewise be hard pressed to guess from this production that "real" surprises keep breaking up their routine - and lead, step by step, inevitably down into the dust. But that's rather the trick, isn't it - to keep the audience wondering whether something is, indeed, "taking its course" (it is). Even the twists of the final "scenes" - the last dose of Hamm's pain-killer, and the possible appearance of a future Clov on the horizon - registered here as little more than blips in the ongoing schtick (when they're actually turning points). And at the curtain, it seemed obvious we were still stuck in a cycle of re-enactment. But are we? Or is Clov at last really leaving his master for good? Both interpretations should seem eminently possible, but this time only one - the rather more comforting one - seemed credible. Thus the moving walls didn't seem like much of a liberty - they were actually supplying what the actors weren't.

There was, to be fair, more truly Beckettian feeling in the performances of Remo Airaldi and Karen MacDonald, who perhaps looked too hale and hearty for Nagg and Nell, but clearly were in the right grimly gay frame of mind. Both referenced the music hall too - again, appropriately enough - but this time with more genuine feeling in their desperate, dying interactions. Somehow I think the talented Derrah and Lebow have more of this depth in them, too. Let's hope they find it before this Endgame meets its end.

Does Bob Brustein think Samuel Beckett was a racist?

Sigh. The A.R.T. is doing Endgame again, which means we have to revisit one of the most ridiculous episodes in its history, its botch of the play back in 1984. For those of you too young - or too wisely concerned with other things - to recall, Beckett (at left) tried to put the kibosh on a misconceived version of his script by JoAnne Akalaitis, avant artiste and former paramour of Philip Glass. Akalaitis pasted her usual dim downtown appliqué onto Endgame - she dopily literalized its sense of apocalypse by setting it in a bombed-out subway station (she even wanted an "overture" by her ex), and she cast African-American actors in two of its four roles.

Once Beckett got word of this, he objected, and almost shut the show down (it's too bad he failed; it proved to be bombastic and, well, stupid). But his reasoning allowed an opening for the A.R.T. to cast a kind of shadow on his reputation.

First, some background. Beckett always disapproved of productions of his plays that "mixed" the races (or the genders in ways not specifically described), because he felt that power relations between the races and genders were not a part of the artistic material he was trying to present, and so he wanted to leave them out entirely, as he felt they would inevitably draw attention in performance from his central concerns. He was happy, however, to see all-black productions of his plays - or all-female productions of single-sex scripts like Waiting for Godot. I suppose it's easy for Cambridge types to pooh-pooh Beckett's worries on this score - like Stephen Colbert, they probably "can't tell" when someone's black. But since Beckett's death, mixed-race productions of his plays have appeared elsewhere - and unsurprisingly have been largely interpreted as meditations on race and colonialism. So it's hard not to feel that Beckett's critics weren't - and aren't - being a little naïve. True, Endgame doesn't lend itself to blunt parallels with the civil rights struggle. But then again, isn't the very air of downtown hipness that Akalaitis was reaching for in her production itself a distraction from Beckett's vision?

Of course all this was lost on the Boston Globe back then, and it hasn't learned much in the meantime, to judge from a recent article by one Megan Tench bemoaning the fact that this time around, the Beckett estate has wrangled a promise from the A.R.T. not to change a single word or stage direction in their new production of Endgame. (Egad - a production of the play as the author intended! Could this be a first at the A.R.T.?) In the article, Tench dwells on the earlier controversy at length, but without any real insight. And she quotes Robert Brustein, then Artistic Director of the A.R.T., in the following manner:

"I was really astonished," says former ART artistic director Robert Brustein in a recent phone interview. "Beckett was a playwright who we revered. We were shocked. We had black actors in the cast playing the parts of Ham and Nagg, and we were most upset about his objection to that."

Now perhaps Brustein then continued: "Of course we knew that he was not a racist, and that his concern was essentially born of his passion for the formal means of his work, which he had devoted his life to paring to their essence." Perhaps he said that, and Megan Tench left it out.

Or perhaps he never said it.

But he should have said it. Because not saying it leaves hanging the sense that Beckett was somehow some sort of racist, consciously or unconsciously - a slur that the Globe article hardly avoids by one weak mention of "the issue of miscegenation."

And on top of all the things I've always found wrong with the A.R.T., I'd really rather not add the calumny, "And they dissed the greatest playwright of the twentieth century."