Beckett, Joyce, Synge

Source: NY Times 7/12 The Arts p.B1 "Why Not Take All of Synge?" by Charles Isherwood

FM-FM Comment:
We all wake up each morning - or not. The body knows something and immediatly starts blabbering about itself while the mind asks how much more can we bear of this nonsense. Pulling reluctantly on the oars to get the carcass moving and then resting a bit, the glassy surface water throws back our reflection. We row on. Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and John Millington Synge know the elements of comedy and tragedy out of the Irish experience. The Irish experience is Shakespearian without the fine threads and colors of Shakespeare's language. Ireland seems to breed writers who sit on the edge of their beds and look out into the day and see the human comedy, or absorbed by their own demons, make Ireland and Irishness a metaphor for their war with their culture. Thank goodness they did. The everyday is a blockhead and needs a kick in the pants. Joyce, Beckett, and Synge filled their lungs with Irish air and exhaled at home and abroad in language that resonates with the desperation that lurks in human consciousness. Turning characters towards myth, existentialism, and nature, we can puzzle ourselves into thier stories and plays the way no other nation's writers can. Synge's naturalism, like Hardy's, is celebrated for two weeks in New York City's Gerald W. Lynch Theatre, with perfomances of Synge's "Riders to the Sea," "The Tinker's Wedding," "The Well of Saints," "The Shadow of the Glen," The Playboy of the Western World," "Diedre of the Sorrow's. An eight hour event without applause until the end is an immersion in Synge's work that is as likely to be as profound as Shakespeare or the great plays of Greece. Indeed, it might even have a Beckettian effect. I directed "Riders To the Sea" some years ago. It's poetry and stark pathos lingers with me still. The Irish experience is really universal, at least in the English language. The tragedy and comedy of men and women is placed before us like a deck of cards to be dealt out and digested slowly with recognition of our own frailty. Charles Isherwood's review of this event is grand...the only word for it.