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Welcome to Endgame

From Terry Nolen, Producing Artistic Director

One of the things that I love about choosing plays for the Arden is that our mission allows us to produce a great variety of work. Contemporary musicals such as Next to Normal; classic stories such as Cyrano; new plays such as Clybourne Park and the American classic that inspired it, A Raisin in the Sun. In our 24-plus years, we’ve produced an extraordinary group of writers, some to whom we’ve returned more than once: seven plays by Michael Hollinger; three by Michael Ogborn; two each by Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, and August Wilson; nine Shakespeares; ten Sondheims. With this production of Endgame, I am thrilled to bring the work of Samuel Beckett to our stage.

Samuel Beckett was a remarkable figure in world drama: an Irishman who lived in Paris, often writing in French and then translating his plays into English; a friend and confidant of James Joyce who also served as part of the French Resistance during World War II. As a dramatist, Beckett was a visionary and a revolutionary, transforming how stories could be told onstage. He was also famously private, determined to let his work speak for itself. In response to the persistent question, “What does it mean?, Mr. Beckett provided no answers, save, “I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant.” He left us the words, images and rhythms. It is up to us to make sense of them.

Scott Greer and James Ijames. Photo by Jaŭhien Sasnoŭ for Philadelphia Magazine

Beckett was one of the most – if not the most – influential playwrights of the twentieth century (as detailed in Assistant Director Suzana Berger’s article). Beckett’s work also influenced generations of writers of fiction, film and even television (Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen in Deadwood have always struck me as characters inspired by Beckett’s anti-heros); and his plays have attracted some of the great actors of our time. When Associate Artistic Director Ed Sobel, who has a deep and abiding passion for Beckett’s work, suggested Endgame with Scott Greer as Hamm and James Ijames as Clov, I felt the thrill of possibility. Here are two actors who bring tremendous humanity, intelligence and humor to their work. They could have careers anywhere, but they have chosen to make Philadelphia their home. When we started the Arden in 1988, we wanted to help foster a vibrant Philadelphia theater community, one that could attract such extraordinary theatre artists as Scott and James. Who better to lead us into the world of Samuel Beckett?

A version of this letter appears in the stagebill for the Arden’s production of Endgame

Endgame – Director’s Notes

By Edward Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

I first fell in love with the work of Samuel Beckett when I was in college. At eighteen, what I perceived as aridly funny nihilism held irresistible appeal. In the intervening years I’ve strayed promiscuously, but have often returned, and never fully left. Now, as I sit squarely in the advancing shadow of middle age, I know this lover differently.

I chose to direct Endgame this season while I was reading a number of new plays from American writers that seemed to be confronting loss. Not personal psychological grief, although that was present, but loss as it has an impact on a wider community. It seemed to be in our zeitgeist. Perhaps we are now distant enough from one of our latest national tragedies that we are trying to process the impact.

Beckett (at right) in the French Resistance

Beckett’s own world view, as many artists of his time, was informed by experiences during World War II; in Beckett’s case including direct participation in the French Resistance under German occupation. As I write this, one American community and by extension all of us, has suffered a tremendous, heartbreaking loss. Each time such a thing happens, I find myself thinking, well surely this is the last. We can’t be punished anymore. Then I remember World War I, which Beckett also lived through, was called the “War to End All Wars”. Until it didn’t.

It seems I must accept that personal and communal calamity, destruction, cruelty and inhumanity are inevitable. As Beckett has Didi say in Waiting for Godot, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth … Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.”

Beckett also wrote a phrase in his notebook: “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned. ” He said he was not so much interested in the theology of the saying, but in its shape. That in his drama, every darkness contains the “perhaps” of light.

If it is true, if things like slavery, oppression, violence and war will always happen, if the thief is damned, then so do we also always have opportunity to respond. The possibility remains of being wiser, more forgiving, more compassionate, of laughing and loving more than we did the last time. One of the thieves was saved. What we do with our perpetual calamity, as individuals or as a country, is up to us. Such is the nature of hope in this world.

Making plays is an act of optimism. While you may never be sure that what you are saying has any value and that you haven’t just messed up your own life for nothing, you live in the faith that the creative act animates possibility, even if only for an hour and a quarter, in the dark.

Making a play is also a communal act, and I have been given the gift of an exceptional family of actors and designers, all of whom have dedicated their considerable talents to this production with a fervor that has been inspiring. I am grateful to them, and to you our audiences, for being willing to enter Beckett’s unique theater with us.

So here we are. I am stuck with Beckett, and apparently for this production anyway, him with me. And you with us. And all of us with each other. What are we going to do now?

A version of these notes appear in the stagebill for the Arden’s production of Endgame

Directing Endgame – What’s the Story?

By Edward Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

A critic once described Samuel Beckett’s two-act masterpiece Waiting for Godot as “Nothing happens. Twice.”

Understandable, but not correct. A careful reading, and a good production, reveal a lot to actually be happening. And while repetition is important to both the play’s form and its meaning, Act One is not a simple mirror of Act Two.

This is not Endgame.

A similar challenge faces us with Endgame. If one enters the play expecting conventional events and the kind of story one is used to in a play (A ghost appears and urges me to exact revenge on my father’s murder. I hire actors to make a play to catch the conscience of his murderer. I kill everyone in sight, and get killed myself.), then one may be in for a confusing 80 minutes.

Obvious dramatic events don’t seem to have a place in Beckett’s world. Godot never arrives. (Sorry, should that have had a spoiler alert?) and in Endgame, the huge event (the apocalypse) has already happened. Beckett seems interested in what we do in the non-overtly dramatic moments instead. Are we waiting? Are we ending? But we are doing something. What is the drama of our quotidian existence? What is its meaning?

It seems the task of our ensemble, as I prepare to begin rehearsals this week, will be to make sure we know what seemingly small thing is happening, and communicate it with clarity, humor and visceral energy. There is no question the central characters, Hamm and Clov, have a different relationship at the beginning of the play than at the end. They also have individual views of the world that change during the course of the play. I’ve spent the last weeks tracking through the script to uncover the moments those changes happen, and what causes them.

It is also clear that part of the genius of the play is treating language as a kind of music. (Beckett himself, when directing the play, did not always talk to actors in terms of a character’s motivations — sometimes he would resort to musical terminology – “that line needs to be more staccato”.) We don’t listen to music expecting a linear story – music operates on us emotionally, and is ordered through themes, counterpoint, and repeated motifs (there’s that repetition, again.) We will need to honor that music, and play it for all we are worth.

So, what is the story? Something is taking its course. And part of the fun, both in the doing and the watching of the play is figuring out what.

Scott Greer and James Ijames, from the cast of Endgame, at a recent photo shoot.

Directing Endgame – Designing Life after Cataclysm

By Edward Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

In my previous post I mentioned Beckett’s early drafts of Endgame contained specific information about time and place which he subsequently edited out. In the design process, we have tracked along a similar path.

The world of this play is fundamentally different from what many people expect walking into the theater. If you step into our production of Freud’s Last Session, you will see a striking facsimile of Sigmund Freud’s office – there are doors and walls and windows, and a radio and knick-knacks and books and glasses with drinking water and… you get the picture.

Beckett called for a reconfiguration of how we see theatrical space, and the theatrical event. He was not writing “realism”. He wrote, well, something else. Some have called it absurdism, though Beckett never took that title. Others call it minimalism. Whatever the label, the demands of this play are different.

The challenge we have been confronting is how specific we need to be, and what is the right level of abstraction. Given Beckett’s economy, and our attempt to match it visually, every choice we make becomes that much more magnified. The opening stage directions are “Bare Interior. Grey light.” But what is the nature of this bare interior? Is it, as some have suggested, antiseptic, like a hospital or nursing home? Something more domestic? Is it even a self-contained room? Is “bare” meant physically, metaphysically, or both?

The play is an examination of what happens after cataclysm. To Beckett, the cataclysm is being born. While I don’t fully subscribe to that philosophy, we nevertheless have used as a starting point the specifics of American cataclysm, both of its founding and of our own time. We have now begun the process of removing the inessential to arrive at… well, time will tell.

Below are few of the images set designer Kevin Depinet and I have been using as inspiration.

Directing Endgame – Economy

We’ve asked the Arden’s Associate Artistic Director Edward Sobel, who will be directing Endgame this season, to document some of his process. Here is his first entry.

Preparing to direct Endgame is walking a long way to find the shortest possible path.

Having read and loved this play since I was nineteen, I feel I’ve been working toward this production for more than 20 years. Beckett himself directed the play twice. Once in Germany (in his own German translation) in 1967, and again in England (in English) in 1980. He kept notebooks during preparation and rehearsal for both productions, and I’ve spent the last few months studying them, seeking out clues they offer. Why did he change “hash of the crotch” to “botch of the crotch” or “but you can walk” to “but you can move”. Why did he cut one of my favorite lines from the original printed version? (For those keeping score at home, its Clov’s line, having turned a telescope to look out at the audience, “I see a multitude in transports of joy. That’s what I call a magnifier.”)

Two pages of Beckett's notes on Endgame, in his own handwriting

Two important ideas have come clear, which if I’m lucky and good, will inform our production. First, Beckett, while a giant in the library, was also a deeply savvy practitioner in the theater. His refinements of the play over more than 20 years seem most motivated by making the play more playable — a more effective piece of stage-craft, giving vitality and responsiveness to aural and visual rhythms and patterns, promoting the immediacy of the live actor occupying the same time and space as the audience, and providing the actors with a stronger template upon which to base their work. I know our production, to do the play well, will need to be visceral, funny and as far from an arid academic exercise as Beckett might have wished.

Second, in initial drafts of the play Beckett was explicit about the time and place in which it is set. He gradually removed these details, but they are the foundation of the relationships, the setting, and ultimately the work’s meaning. The relative obscurity of the play on its surface is not Beckett being deliberately abstruse (though he may well have taken a rueful pleasure when that was the result) but instead his attempt to be as concise as possible. One of my favorite drawings by Picasso may, literally, illustrate.

Shown above in its entirety, it is entitled “Femme”. With four succinct lines, Picasso captures what he saw as essential, just as Beckett distills both the action of his own play and his vision of our lives with two succinct lines “What is happening?” “Something is taking its course.”

As we move into the design process, I am using these two combined principles as my compass: vital economy.

A new writer for the Arden Family – Stephen Belber

By Ed Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

The Arden is pleased to announce the addition of a new writer to our family of artists. Following on Wendy MacLeod’s introduction through our Writers’ Room program, we have recently commissioned Stephen Belber to craft a new play for the Arden.

Stephen is a New York based playwright, screenwriter and director. He is the author of Tape, which received its premiere at the Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival and was subsequently made into a film starring Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, directed by Richard Linklater. He was one of the writers, with Tectonic Theater Project, of The Laramie Project, and its sequel, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. His play Match ran on Broadway with Frank Langella. He also wrote and directed the film Management with Jennifer Anniston and Steve Zahn.

Stephen’s most recent play, Don’t Go Gentle opens October 15^th at Off-Broadways’ MCC Theater. Click here for a recent interview with him.

I have been a fan and follower of Stephen’s work since I first read a draft of Drifting Elegant back in 1999. His plays, though varied in subject, demonstrate a unique gift for muscular, theatrical dialogue and an affinity for using the stage to explore complex moral issues through visceral events and suspenseful storytelling. We could not be more pleased to have him as a new member of our artistic community.

At the Arden, commissioning is an expression of support and interest in developing an ongoing relationship with a writer. Stephen will spend some time over the coming months getting to know more deeply the Arden, our work, and artists with whom we frequently collaborate. He will then write a play which we hope to program in a future season.

About The Writers’ Room

Ed Sobel, Associate Artistic Director
These Director’s Notes appear in the stagebill for Women in Jep, which runs on the Arden’s Arcadia Stage July 5-15, 2012

The Writers’ Room is a playwright residency program in which a writer is in residence at the Arden for six weeks completing the draft of a new play. A few weeks after completion of the draft, the play is given a workshop and rehearsal process which culminates in public performance.

The program is an attempt to address a number of issues facing our field. As Todd London insightfully documented in his book Outrageous Fortune: The Life And Times of the New American Play, the landscape for the development of new work in the American Theater is vibrant and fertile, but also facing severe challenges. Many playwrights feel alienated from the large institutions presenting their work and the communities to whom it is being presented. They undergo protracted development processes that often do not result in an actual production.

A rehearsal inside The Writers' Room

The Writers’ Room is designed to offer the playwright a relationship with the Arden, and the wider Philadelphia community, that is positive and nurturing. We shorten the time between the actual writing of the play and the performance of it, so that the writer is better able to keep in close contact with the creative impulses that originated the work. This new model is an experiment, and as one of the first audiences to see the results, you are joining us in its exploration.

Audiences are central to the program. A group of interested members of the general public signed on for an “Inside The Writers’ Room” pass. The passholders attended a reading of the first draft of the play, a number of rehearsals, technical rehearsal (the period when the design elements – sets, lights, costumes, sound—are integrated into the production) and are seeing the play in performance. By their report, the passholders have been energized by this added exposure to the development and production process, and we have gained insight from their questions and responses.

What you are seeing today is the result of the four-week workshop and rehearsal process. The first week most closely resembled a “workshop” of the play. The actors, sitting at a table, read the play or sections of it, while Wendy and I listened. Wendy made revisions, sometimes minor, sometimes extensive, both in the rehearsal room and between rehearsals. The second week was a transitional week. Wendy continued to revise, as we started to put the play “on its feet”. The last two weeks have more closely resembled a rehearsal process, with all of us gearing our thinking and choices more toward performance. However, we have incorporated opportunities for Wendy to revise the play, up to and including between our two performance weeks.

This bears some external resemblance to the customary process for producing a new play, but it has been qualitatively different in our emphasis on the development of the script. As a play lives not on the page, or even purely in actors reading it aloud, but as an entity on a stage we have included a design process (rudimentary, but we hope, suggestive enough) and now you, an audience.

I thank Wendy for her eagerness to be the first adventurer to occupy The Writers’ Room. I have long admired her work, her sensibility and her dedication to craft. I could not imagine a better collaborative partner. Thanks are also due the actors who approached our work with a spirit of rigorous but generous inquiry; to the design team who have brought skill, ingenuity and thrift; to our Artistic Circle who have welcomed Wendy into the community of artists in Philadelphia, and to our entire staff at the Arden for supporting this addition to our already ambitious season of work.

And thanks to you, our audience, for supporting new work, and for entering this Writers’ Room with the open-hearted faith that you will be moved and entertained by what you see. We hope we’ve delivered on that promise, and that you will be inspired by knowing that by attending today you are being an active participant in the creation of a new work of art.

Reading “A Raisin in the Sun”

By Ed Sobel, Arden’s Associate Artistic Director and Director of Clybourne Park

When Bruce Norris was a young boy growing up in Texas, he saw a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and it had a deep impact on him. He notes that, as a white child, he was provoked to see himself in the role of “oppressor”. Some 40 years later, in response to those feelings, he wrote Clybourne Park, now running on our Arcadia stage. We thought it might be valuable to return to Norris’ inspiration, and so last night the Arden hosted a free reading of Hansberry’s play, performed by group of Philadelphia and New York actors and led by director Lee Kenneth Richardson.

The reading, which coincided with the 53rd anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun opening on Broadway, was attended by many who have seen Clybourne Park. Even in this simple form, with actors at music stands and minimal rehearsal, the power of Hansberry’s storytelling and her ability to capture the complex relationships between her family of characters resonated with rich vibrancy. Like Norris, Hansberry drew on personal experience when writing the play (her father moved their family into an all-white neighborhood when she was young, and the resulting court case went on to be adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Hearing Raisin juxtaposed with Norris’ rendering of another side of the story literally just upstairs, added an additional charge.

Here are a few photos from the evening:

The Arden will present a full production of A Raisin in the Sun, under the guidance of long-time Arden collaborator Walter Dallas as part of our subscription season next Spring. If last night’s reading is any indication, it promises to be a moving and rewarding experience.

The American Family

By Ed Sobel, Arden Associate Artistic Director and original dramaturg on August: Osage County

“Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” — Robert Frost, The Death of a Hired Man

It’s hard to find a play that isn’t in some way about family. The great tragedies of ancient Greece (think Sophocles’ Oedipus or Antigone) while pursuing ideas of political power, responsibility, and free will have as their principal advocates members of the same family. (Oedipus murders his father and sleeps with his mother. Antigone rebels against Kreon, her uncle, because she wishes to properly bury her brother.) The mighty Shakespeare’s discourses on the ability to take meaningful action (Hamlet) or the vicissitudes of inherited power (Henry IV) look at humanist and existential questions as they play out within family dynamics. (Hamlet seeks to avenge the murder of his father by his uncle. Young Hal navigates his difficult relationship with his own father, and tests a surrogate in Falstaff.)

The American dramatic tradition is equally, if not more tightly bound to the familial – even plays thought to be primarily of social significance and commentary (Death of a Salesman, Raisin in the Sun) revolve around contests between parents and children or husbands and wives. With August: Osage County, Tracy Letts draws upon his own family lore, amplifying these stories with an artist’s delight in extreme behavior and moral ambiguity. But while outrage and outrageousness permeate the play, one should not be so distracted by the emotional fireworks as to lose track of the social critique. It is not just the pathology of the American family about which Tracy is concerned, but the American family.

Photo by Mark Garvin

The play begins with the interrogation of a Native American woman who agrees to take on the job of caring for this family, descendents of those who have invaded her homeland and destroyed her people. What follows is not only an investigation into familial betrayals and rivalries, but the diagnosis of dysfunction for an entire class of people. With its large cast of characters and form (a three-act structure) Tracy is not only referencing theatrical days of yore, but also demanding a canvas large enough for individual relationships to take on metaphorical significance and sweep. In one of our earliest conversations about the script, Tracy told me that the play was partly about what happens when “men abandon the field”. Certainly the male characters in the play abrogate responsibility for themselves and others in ways both hilarious and damning. We leave it to you to determine whether the women follow suit.

Sweltering around the arguments, not to mention outright fisticuffs, of the play is the sticky truth that no matter what the members of this family do, they can not extract themselves from their familial history or the family fabric. Their original sin, as with O’Neill’s great tragic families in Long Days Journey Into Night or Desire Under the Elms, is simply being born. Their continued afflictions – addiction, greed, self-interest, moral confusion– are inherited as surely as the mythic American values – the right to happiness, self-determination, ambition, capitalism – of which they are extensions or complements.

Family. We all have one. Some may even have one that looks like the Westons. We all have a country. Even one that looks like America.

Bill of Sale or Bill of Rights?

By Matt Ocks, Manager of Institutional Giving

June 30^th is the end of the fiscal year here at Arden Theatre Company, and the development department is in the midst of a mini-phone campaign to encourage former supporters to renew their contributions in time for us to make goal for the season. As an added incentive, any increase they make over last year’s gift counts towards the Hamilton Family Foundation Challenge (audiences who have seen Sunday in the Park are already familiar with this challenge, as it’s mentioned nightly in a post-show speech by Jeff Coon). If we raise $50,000 in new or increased gifts by June 30th, the Foundation will match that with an additional $50,000 for Children’s Theatre and our outreach program, Arden for All.

One of the questions I get asked the most by audience members when I talk about donations is why, after they already spent money on tickets, they need to contribute to the theatre as well? And of course, the answer is – they don’t. But if they can, by gum, they should! Right? As a theatre-maker reared mainly on Broadway shows, I struggle with this issue a lot. After all, on Broadway, when a show doesn’t sell, it closes. And if we think of the theatre as a business, than the idea that we should have to buy tickets and be asked to make donations does seem silly.

But perhaps the theatre is something else. True. It has many of the same qualities as a business – it employs a variety of highly trained craftsmen; those craftsmen create a product; that product is sold to the community. And yet, by virtue of the transformative potential of what we produce – transformative for us and our audiences – we theatre-makers are by and large not in it for the profits. But if theatre’s not just a business, what else is it?

When William Penn wrote his plan for the layout of Philadelphia, he insisted upon five public squares that would be open to everyone. As far as he was concerned, we all had a right to spend time in these “havens of respite in a busy world.” And if we’re all allowed to sit on a bench in Rittenhouse Square, throw pennies in the fountain at Logan Circle, or cut through the City Hall courtyard on our way to Market or Broad – shouldn’t we all be able to see Sunday in the Park at the Arden? Is that show not also a haven of respite in our busy world – a world even busier, I might add, than the one Billy Penn was talking about?

Theatre is a commodity, but it is also every citizen’s right. And until more people in our field start to position it that way, the argument that those who can afford to ought to both buy their tickets and contribute will not hold very much water. At least, that’s what I think.

We did boffo business this season at the Arden. We’re humbled by the thought that 100,000 ticket-holders passed through our doors. If one third of those people contributed $10 on top of admission, we would already be above our individual giving goal for the season.

I put this argument forth not to be contrary or to make anyone who might have bought but not contributed feel guilty. I’m merely a professional fundraiser who constantly calls in to question the need for my services. Because, you see, a part of me still thinks theatre is just a business. Even when I know it’s as essential to my life as relaxing in a park on…er…Sunday.

This is a complicated issue. And I’m only talking about individuals. I could write a whole treatise on whether or not the country’s government ought to be supporting the work of its artists. But if summer is a time for reflection, I can’t think of a better topic theatre-wise to reflect upon. So by all means, tell us what you think. I’m sure there is more to be said here.

Welcome to Endgame

Endgame – Director’s Notes

Directing Endgame – What’s the Story?

Directing Endgame – Designing Life after Cataclysm

Directing Endgame – Economy

A new writer for the Arden Family – Stephen Belber

About The Writers’ Room

Reading “A Raisin in the Sun”

The American Family

Bill of Sale or Bill of Rights?

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