Diary: Octavio Solis, Sam Beckett and I

Isolated by the pandemic, a playwright finds renewal in an unexpected place

Kristin Scott Thomas, Alan Rickman, and Juliet Stevenson in a film production of Beckett’s Play, directed by Anthony Minghella (2001)

“I am still alive then. That may come in useful.” —Samuel Beckett, Molloy

An insuperable trial, this pandemic. It descended on us with sudden force and turned 2020 into a year of death and desperation. All of us were thrust into paranoia, anxiety, and isolation. I fell terribly ill with the virus late that year as fires scathed our forests and towns. That amplified the misery of the year, but for me the chief misery was the collapse of my playwriting career, because all our theatres were indefinitely shuttered and I was seized with writer’s block. Really, how to be creative at a time like this?

I realized, however, that I had a lot of time on my hands to read, and there was a book on my shelf that called to me. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. I was familiar with Beckett as a world dramatist of the first order; his famous works, Endgame, Happy Days, and Waiting for Godot were part of my theatre education and I’d seen them in some acclaimed productions. They represented the finest examples of the Absurdist movement in theatre, which included the plays of Eugene Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Genet. But Sam’s prose was alien to me. I resolved to read this triad of novels in succession, aloud to myself.

I didn’t expect to find any solace in them, but I did. Each novel comes in a single massive block of internal narrative and reading these pages aloud led me to understand them as theatrical monologues, painting the raw tensions between the individual and their world. I realized how Sam had taken a different tack from James Joyce’s all-encompassing stream-of-consciousness approach by striving instead for scarcity,  playing upon the barest bones of human experience. I came upon self-obsessed ramblings from people lost in their wilderness, struggling with their outer defects and inner turmoil to make some part of their lives bearable. Even in their malignancy, with the end approaching, they claw, cry out, lie to themselves, and teeter on the edge of epiphany, in the name of something close to but not quite hope. And yet it is still hope. Arriving at this knowledge showed me that we will always strive to live; that hope, even when it’s futile, is necessary.

These works aroused my curiosity about Beckett’s short plays, which I’d never read. They now blossomed for me with new revelations. I consumed them all, Krapp’s Last Tape, All That Fall, Act Without Words I andII, Not I, Cascando, Quad, Rockaby, Embers, and so many more. I discovered their solemn beauty, the spareness of their presentation, running from overwhelming spoken text to complete silence. I saw a personal dynamic within these circular stories. In the immersive language that one finds in Not I, a woman is reduced to a simple clamoring Mouth, suggestions of some transgressive sexual assault emerge, and inevitably a child is born into the same “godforsaken hole”; in Rockaby, a woman sits in her rocker in the basement, consumed by a lifelong loneliness, retracing the steps that her own mother took to leave this world; in Play, a man and two women trapped in their own urns battle each other’s narratives around the open betrayal of the man, dramatizing Beckett’s own adultery; in Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp replays a recording of himself as a younger man, turning it into his personal Schrodinger’s cat. These works rely on the spoken text, even recorded and replayed; they harken back to Molloy, where the narrator declares that to occupy silence, one must listen, and that only then can one “detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.” These short works are all clamour, all text and whistling in the dark, a way to keep one’s terror at bay, as all around them silence reigns.

But there are also plays that draw upon that silence, like Act Without Words I and II, Quad, and Nacht und Träume. These works depict people on the brink, where words fail, and only the mindless routine of workaday life offers direction. In Act Without Words II, two figures in burlap sacking are prodded to life by a mechanical “goad,” a long pole with an arrow tip that stirs them into numbing and meaningless routine, presaging Nagg and Nell, Hamm’s legless parents in Endgame. Quad is strikingly mathematical, devising a pattern that four cloaked figures must traverse across a large square of light, avoiding contact with each other in an algorithm of solitude. In the barest of circumstances, a square of light, a rocking chair, a burlap sack, a body stripped of everything but her mouth, the characters totter between hope and hopelessness, between the raucous detention of ordinary life and the inevitability of silence.

Last year, I determined that my next step, as a person of the theatre, was to restore the short plays to the communal setting for which they were imagined. With the help of my co-producer Kimberly Colburn, we brought together a group of performers and supporters and arranged to mount five of them, Act Without Words II, Rockaby, Not I, What Where, and Krapp’s Last Tape, as well as “Imagination Dead Imagine,” his stunning prose text of 1965, in a festival of short plays in non-traditional indoor  and outdoor spaces around downtown Ashland, Oregon, where I live, and where they have never before been seen, over the course of a weekend, October 24 to 27.  I am directing two of them, Rockaby and Not I, and the experience of crafting the words of Beckett with two fine actors has touched upon so much that is intimately familiar—loneliness, aging, the loss of so many beloveds, and finally the little triumphs of daily survival. We’ve discovered that the experimental nature of these plays is actually the rendering of such personal experiences in their purest form.

I have my writing voice restored, as well as my health and my hope, the latter of which I owe to Samuel Beckett. He’s offered me a new direction as a theatre artist, and I’ve no doubt he’ll be a sharp influence on my writing. But it’s as a person, a husband, a father, a friend, a colleague, and a survivor of a dark period in our history that I have most keenly felt his impact. By stepping into his own shadow, he’s taught me to step into mine, fearlessly.

To order tickets or support the Ashland Beckett Shorts Festival visit www.ashlandbeckettshorts.com

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Octavio Solis’s plays have been performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the California Shakespeare Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Hartford Stage, the Alley Theatre, the Dallas Theater Center, the Center Theatre Group, Yale Repertory Theatre, and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, among other venues. His 2018 memoir of growing up on the Texas-Mexico border, Retablos, was featured in Book Post.

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