RADIO REVIEW : ‘Beckett Festival’ Begins Today on KCRW

Most fans of Samuel Beckett know him through his stage plays--”Waiting for Godot,” “Endgame,” “Krapp’s Last Tape.” Few are aware that Beckett wrote radio plays--and for good reason. Only one, “All That Fall,” was aired in this country, in 1986 on the occasion of the author’s 80th birthday. The rest have largely languished on the page.

This changes today, however, when KCRW-FM (89.9) launches the “Beckett Festival of Radio Plays,” an extraordinary collection of five works for radio written between 1956 and 1976 and punctuated by accompanying discussions among director, actors, critics and Beckett scholars (including the late Richard Ellman, biographer of Yeats and Beckett’s friend James Joyce).

The festival begins with “All That Fall,” followed by “Cascando” (with a score by William Kraft), “Embers,” “Words and Music” (music by the late Morton Feldman) and “Rough for Radio II.” Director Everett C. Frost has assembled a superb company that includes such distinguished Beckett actors as Billie Whitelaw, Alvin Epstein, Barry McGovern and David Warrilow.

“All That Fall,” Beckett’s first radio play, is perhaps the most accessible. Written between “Godot” and “Endgame,” it matches both in resonance and stature.

Beginning as the bucolically simple story of the travails of 70-year-old Maddy Rooney, (Whitelaw) who decides to go meet her blind husband Dan at the Boghill railroad station, it becomes an epic adventure worthy of Odysseus. This “200 pounds of unhealthy fat” makes her lumbering way on foot, in a comical welter of unexpected encounters, mishaps and other trauma whose serious subtext is rarely hard to read. It is, of all the pieces, the most amazingly visual.

The other four plays are more exacting and recondite, none more so than “Embers,” a howl of anguish from a tormented man on a beach--the edge of the world?--who rails at his dead father (who doesn’t reply) and speaks to his wife Ada (who does, but in a voice so thin and distant that it might well be coming from the depths of Dante’s hell). “Embers” is the darkest of the pieces, all unrelieved shriek and moan and sob and silence, not easy to sit through.

Sounds play specific roles in it, with the clatter of hooves re-evoking a painful childhood and the lapping of waves (actually recorded at Killiney Beach, near the Foxrock house where Beckett spent his youth) a symbol of the despair and emptiness of this Everyman’s shipwrecked life.

This inclusion of sound as an influential component (barnyard animals in “All That Fall,” gulls and hooves and the sea in “Embers”) is a hallmark of these plays. With “Cascando” and “Words and Music,” sound makes the leap to full embodiment, becoming flesh, so to speak, as an actual character.

In “Cascando,” A Voice (Alvin Epstein) hurries to finish a story in a race with Music (Kraft’s composition), as each completes its tale.

In “Words and Music,” Beckett creates two characters, one impersonating words (named Bob and played here by Warrilow) and one music (Joe, represented by a seven-piece orchestra playing Feldman’s score). They are ordered into performing by a third character, Croak (Epstein again), in what becomes a dense parable for the difficulties of the creative process.

The same preoccupation is at the heart of “Rough for Radio II,” which elaborates on that theme in a sexual burlesque played out among An Animator (W. Dennis Hunt), his Stenographer (Amanda Plummer) and a whip-wielding mute character named Dick (Charles Potter) who all try to get Fox (Barry McGovern) to complete “some unexplained testimony of unknown significance.”

Again, the sounds (smacking whip and smacking kisses) constitute a major part of the play’s fabric, though its political overtones remain stubbornly obscure.

This is not easy theater. The listener has to work for every moment of it. Much of the success of the achievement rests with the exceptional actors and Frost’s meticulousness in giving full dimension to the aural landscape. “All That Fall” is visual, “precisely because we don’t see anything except in our mind’s eye,” comments Warrilow. “(Beckett) said that radio plays were written to come out of the dark.”

Exactly. His language is paradoxically spare and rich, his settings post-nuclearly bleak and haunting. They invite populating through the imagination. “Beckett gives us the cues and we create the world ourselves,” says Whitelaw.

What better way to do it?

KCRW-FM (89.9) will air the series as follows: “All That Fall” today, 1-3 p.m.; “Cascando,” Thursday, 2-2:30 p.m.; “Embers” and “Words and Music” next Friday, 1-2 p.m.; “Rough for Radio II” April 27, 2-2:30 p.m. The festival is being distributed nationwide this month by National Public Radio and presented by Voices International. Cassette copies of the plays and documentary discussions are available from NPR: (800) 253-0808.