
DATE: Wednesday, April 30, 1997             TAG: 9704300036

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  141 lines

SHEDDING LIGHT ON BECKETT GROUP BRINGS PLAYWRIGHT'S SHORT WORKS TO STAGE

REHEARSING LAST WEEK on a Norfolk stage, actor Rob Cui wore a blind man's shades and held a violin. Moving the bow across the strings, he produced a pathetic, sustained squeak.

Then he stopped and called out, ``A penny - for a poor old man? A penny - for a poor old man!''

A wheelchair-bound man rolled in, stage right. ``Music,'' actor Terry Jernigan blurted, excitedly. ``So it is not a dream.''

It is, in fact, a dream world of Samuel Beckett's making. Among the greatest 20th-century playwrights, Beckett (1906-1989) created dark realms where individuals are left with so little and are in deep need, but still cannot connect.

While he's best known for ``Waiting for Godot'' and ``Endgame,'' he also wrote more than a dozen one-acts.

A new group, Theatre of the Millennium, will present six of Beckett's rarely staged short plays Thursday through Tuesday at The Chrysler Museum Theater in Norfolk. Besides ``Theater I,'' featuring a blind and a crippled man, the group will mount:

``Play,'' a bizarre comic piece with three actors talking very fast from inside giant funeral urns.

``Not I,'' a mesmerizing work in which a tight spotlight is trained on an actor's talking mouth, hovering 8 feet above the stage floor.

``Krapp's Last Tape,'' about an old man, frustrated and heartbroken as he listens to an audio tape diary from his early years.

The remaining short plays - which Beckett dubbed dramaticules, as in miniscule drama - are ``Act Without Words 2'' and ``Come and Go.''

The 2-hour and 20-minute production is part of the Virginia Waterfront International Arts Festival, and is the regional premiere of the private, nonprofit, Hampton-based troupe, The Theatre of the Millennium.

The Equity company is the brainchild of founder Michael Curry, executive director since 1988 of the Hampton Arts Commission. The first presentation was in August at Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where their performances drew positive reviews in British publications.

Theatre of the Millennium has no office, no staff, no fixed company of actors. Instead, Curry will produce theater on a project-to-project basis, hiring actors and directors to suit the occasion.

The group is beginning with a modest annual budget of about $70,000, but boasts an advisory board peppered with international celebrities - all of whom have been presented through the Hampton Arts Commission's Great Performers Series - including vocalist Frederica von Stade, actors Claire Bloom and Michael York, jazz duo Cleo Laine and John Dankworth, violinist Ida Kavafian and choreographer David Parsons. Curry also has attracted top corporate sponsors, such as Philip Morris and US Airways.

The performers lent their names to the endeavor, Curry said, ``because this is not just a regular old project. This is an evolving, creative process. And I think that's what they're in tune with.''

In December, Curry invited Christopher Hanna, who heads Old Dominion University's theater department, to choose a play to direct for the group's festival entry.

``Why Beckett?'' Hanna asked. ``He's the greatest.

``And in terms of my life, he's the playwright I've had the most direct contact with, having worked on so many original or pivotal Beckett productions with Alan Schneider.''

From 1979 to 1982, Hanna worked on 12 shows with the brilliant Schneider, who directed the premiere productions of most of Beckett's plays. At the time, Hanna was enrolled in the Schneider-led directing program at the University of California at San Diego. He followed his mentor all over the world, working beside him on high-profile, cutting-edge productions.

A highlight for Hanna was being assistant director on the 1981 world premiere of Beckett's ``Rockaby.''

Hanna was just 23, and spoke often with Beckett himself, who phoned daily from his Paris apartment. ``He would be this lilting voice on the other end, wanting to know of the day's progress.''

Beckett's direction came in the form of specific timing he required for pauses and to utter his usually spare dialogue. He might ask that a pause be precisely 3 3/4 seconds. ``I had to have a stop watch for rehearsals.

``The big things that happen to you never seem like it at the time,'' Hanna said, reflecting on the experience.

After a 16-year hiatus, Hanna returns to the work of the great Irish playwright - this time, as a mature artist at the helm.

``The reason I haven't done Beckett is I've never had a company equipped for it before. Most contemporary actors are so grounded in the mechanics of psychological reality that if you threw them in an urn for 20 minutes, the first thing they would want to know is, `Where did the character eat lunch?'''

The six-member cast consists of his former ODU drama students. When Hanna first came to this area in the mid-1980s, as associate artistic director of the Virginia Stage Company, he taught theater part time at ODU.

He left for New York in 1991, returning two years later to teach full time at ODU. As he mounted his fall 1993 student production - Thornton Wilder's ``Our Town'' with Rob Cui as the narrator - Hanna told The Pilot of his ambitions: ``I would like the program to rise to a level where we can be doing justice to the work of the most difficult classical writers, and new playwrights.''

That time has come, and actors Cui and Jernigan are evidence.

``This is definitely the most challenging work I`ve undertaken,'' Cui said. ``There are so many things you have to take into account as an actor. And Beckett is so specific about the world he creates.''

With Beckett, ``you reveal who you are. You're not putting on a character, as in a Shakespearean play. You can't rely on your usual bag of tricks.''

``It's such a long, hard journey,'' Jernigan said. ``You delve so deeply into it. There's no mask you can put on; they don't work.''

Cui sees the essential alienation in Beckett's plays as ``modern man's condition. He knew this back in the '60s. I think he was really affected by what happened in World War II, with the dropping of the bomb.

``That post-apocalyptic feeling: What happens if there are only two people left on Earth, and they meet. That's why these plays have such a ghostly feeling.''

But there's light in Beckett's eyes, too. Hanna sees it clearly, being of Irish descent.

``His voice is very easy for me to connect to, because my father is Irish, and all of my family. I think that his voice is uniquely Irish, in that it is bleak.''

As Hanna sees it, a compassionate wisdom dwells in that darkness.

``His voice really is so warm, it embraces you. If you've ever listened to an Irish tenor, it's the same quality. So many of their songs are so despairing. But the beauty and warmth of the voice compels you to pour another drink, and listen.''

It's like sitting by the fire in an Irish pub, and outside it's raining cats and collies.

``But within that room,'' he said, ``there is a safety in humanity. And that's where he's writing from - a voice of comfort, comfort from the cold.'' ILLUSTRATION: BETH BERGMAN color photos/The Virginian-Pilot

THE DIRECTOR

RIGHT: Christopher Hanna watches the Theatre of the Millennium

rehearse. Hannas has worked with famed Samuel Beckett director Alan

Schneider.

THE ACTORS

BELOW: From left, actors Susan Hightower, Terry Jernigan and Amy

Ingram rehearse a scene from ``Play,'' a Samuel Beckett short, at

the Stables Theater at Old Dominion University.

Graphic

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[For complete graphic, please see microfilm] KEYWORDS: THE VIRGINIA WATERFRONT INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

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