Spook Sonatas

By RICHARD CORLISS

ROCKABY by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is the victim of a bum rap. Everything that lends him academic eminence--the 1969 Nobel Prize, the scholarly exegeses of his plays and novels, even the famous dust-jacket photograph from which he stares like an eagle just slightly startled to find himself prematurely taxidermized--has also conspired to suggest that his plays have a savor too rarefied for the palates of most theatergoing mortals. It is true that in writing, staging and performance, his plays are ethereal, austere, elegiac, pioneering a dramatic form that whittles existence into essence. But this is to say only that Beckett is a master of theatrical effect and a poet of the darkest human emotions. Though his characters are haunted specters speaking in liturgical monotone, there is music in the monotones; there is passion in the music. His late plays are telepathic conversations of the nearly departed. In the mind of the adventurous auditor, they resound like campfire tales exchanged by the last creatures on earth.

Just now the center of the Beckett universe is a pair of off-Broadway houses on Manhattan's 42nd Street. In the Harold Clurman Theater, a trio of Beckett skits has been playing since June. And last week, at the newly named Samuel Beckett Theater next door, English Actress Billie Whitelaw opened in two short plays and a reading of the Beckett short story Enough.

Whitelaw strides to center stage, waves the bright aquamarine binder that holds the text of Enough and warns, "Look closely. It's about the jolliest piece of color you're likely to find in a Beckett evening." It is indeed. In Footfalls, Whitelaw plays a tattered woman patrolling, ever so slowly, a slab of light about the size of a cemetery plot. Into and beyond the grave, she relives her days feeding and changing her aged mother, dominating the mother with her dogged servitude, then slipping into reverie to imagine her self the sad heroine of a gothic novel. Is she mad? Is she dead? Perhaps both, or in transit between the two states, like the old woman Whitelaw plays in Rockaby. A child-dotard in her cradle-rocker, a near relative of Psycho's Mother Bates, she lullabies herself to death with the sound of her own (offstage) voice, interrupting the melancholy monologue only for four plaintive cries of "More!"

It is a cry that echoes through Beckett's work: the human need to keep replaying our own life stories, no matter how hopeless the tales. In Ohio Impromptu (one of the plays at the Clurman), two gray-haired, black-robed figures sit at a table. They are called Reader and Listener, but they could be priest and communicant, doctor and patient, actor and audience. The Reader intones a mysterious narrative that is in fact the history of their relationship. When the text ends, the Listener will be left alone forever. And so, like a child before bedtime, he begs the Reader never to stop. But the story must end; the power play must be acted out to the death.

Each trio of plays was directed by Alan Schneider; each lasts barely an hour, excluding intermissions; each offers an indelible evening of minimalist theater sorcery. The one visible magician is Whitelaw, for whom Beckett wrote the two sepulchral mood pieces Footfalls and Rockaby. Scraping across the stage or hardly moving in her shroud of a rocking chair, she performs daredevil isometric exercises of the soul. -- By Richard Corliss