Bleak House

The producers and cast of “The Beckett Project” suggest that audiences bring open minds, a sense of childlike innocence and good walking shoes to the Grove Theater Center’s staging of four short, strange, rarely seen plays by the austere Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett.

The open minds are necessary because these pieces, three of them written during the 1970s and 1980s, after Beckett turned 65, defy all conventional notions of what makes a play.

“People, including myself, speak of these being difficult for an audience,” said Charles L. Johanson, the GTC executive director. “The difficult part is letting go of expectations of a beginning, middle and end.”

In “Ohio Impromptu” two old men sit at a table, one reading from a book, the other silent except for an occasional knock on the table top. “Not I” is a torrential stream of racing, compulsive consciousness emanating from a disembodied mouth suspended above the stage. In “Rockaby,” an old woman listens almost wordlessly to a tape recording of her own loneliest longings while rocking, rocking, rocking her way to death. For bitterly comic relief there is “Act Without Words,” a 1957-vintage slapstick-like mime piece whose protagonist’s every desire and action is balked by unseen forces.

This is sparse, bleak stuff, even by the standards of “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” Beckett’s stark full-length masterpieces of stasis and futility from the ‘50s. Compared with “Not I” and “Rockaby,” those plays seem like action-adventure pieces.

The three cast members, Patricia Boyette, Peader Kirk and actor-director Phillip Zarrilli, sat for an interview on a couch upstairs from the Gem Theater stage where they will undergo strange contortions to serve Beckett’s work.

They’ll be coached by Billie Whitelaw, the English actress who worked with Beckett from the mid-1960s on, rehearsing and absorbing the precise language, timing, gestures and expressions he believed the plays required.

With Johanson and Kevin Cochran, GTC’s artistic director, joining in, the actors discussed the unique demands the plays place on them and their audience, and the approaches by which players and playgoers can make these rarities into a rare experience of a rare form of beauty.

Kirk suggests that those not already indoctrinated into Beckett’s work “come to it with innocence” and simply let the experience take place. It worked for him. At the age of 8, unschooled in theater, he saw Whitelaw’s television performance of “Not I.”

“I was not confused, but accepting,” the tall, slim, British actor recalled. “‘There’s a mouth talking. OK, I’ll listen and watch.’ It’s not as difficult as it’s made out to be.”

Boyette’s pointer to the audience is some advice Whitelaw gave her: “The first thing is finding the musicality.” With no plot to follow, no conversations between characters, and action that is virtually nil, Boyette says that actors and beholders need to grab onto the beats and sounds of the words, much as a concert audience attunes itself to the flow of music.

“The Beckett Project” began taking shape in the mid-1990s when Whitelaw visited the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to give a three-week workshop on the art of acting in Beckett. Boyette and Zarrilli were faculty members; both were aware of Beckett’s work, and Zarrilli had directed some of it. But interacting with Whitelaw was a transforming experience.

Over the next few years, Boyette and Zarrilli collaborated on performances and instructional workshops on Beckett’s short plays in the United States, Great Britain and Austria. Kirk signed on while working with Zarrilli at the Center for Performance Research in Wales. They have remained in touch with Whitelaw, getting advice as needed.

Boyette, who first appeared at GTC in 1995, returned earlier this season as an upper-crust English ghost in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”--suggested an evening of Beckett plays to the management. Johanson and Cochran penciled in a two-night stand but expanded it to four based on the number of calls the theater was getting about the Beckett plays.

After each play--none more than 20 minutes long--there will be a 10-minute intermission in which the audience will be asked to leave the theater while the next piece is set up. The purpose, Johanson said, is to give playgoers a chance to absorb, reflect and converse about what they’ve just seen, to let the spell linger.

For the cast members, a pitfall to avoid is the impulse to pin a precise meaning on the plays, to concoct a story around them.

It’s a fallacy, Kirk said, “that there’s something to ‘get,’ some secret they have to solve. When I go to the theater I’m not looking for the crossword puzzle experience, but some kind of encounter--a feeling. And hopefully, the audience will have one.”

“We don’t want to do the audiences’ work for them,” agreed Zarrilli. His specialty is teaching deep-awareness techniques from yoga and Asian martial arts as acting tools.

With Beckett’s short works, the question arises whether there’s much room for thinking and creativity on the actors’ part. The playwright’s stage instructions regarding settings and gestures are very specific. And in Whitelaw, “The Beckett Project” threesome has a mentor who was committed to doing the playwright’s will.

In a 1995 interview with the Daily Telegraph of London, Whitelaw spoke of how Beckett, who died in 1989, often urged her to put “less color, less color” into her performances, by which she took him to mean, “Please don’t act.”

“He knew that I would turn myself inside out to give him what he wanted,” the much-honored actress said.

“The Beckett Project” crew says there is freedom, not base subjugation, in submitting to this playwright.

“Most of the time when I direct, I really like messing with things” to give an interpretive spin to the text, Zarrilli said. “Doing Beckett takes performers to the limit of their resources and abilities. I don’t feel I need to get in the way directorially.”

“Because [Beckett] is a genius, because he knows what he’s doing, all the parameters he puts on the work give you more freedom,” Boyette said. “It takes me places I’ve never been before. There’s nothing uncreative about that.”

The places Boyette must go in “Not I” and “Rockaby” are extreme. To achieve the disembodied mouth effect in “Not I,” she will be seated on a gallows-like scaffold, her head secured with a brace to keep it from moving. She will grip a metal handrail to steady her unseen body for the stream of words in precise, rushing tempos that must issue forth from it, almost without pause.

Among her concerns: “Where do you put the spit?” Whitelaw, who put a limit on how often she would perform “Not I” because of its demands, likened it to having to stay in control of a whooshing jet plane, Boyette said. The spit will have to go somewhere; she’ll be busy getting the words right and embodying moment to moment their subtle shifts in anguished consciousness. “If [her saliva] dribbles, it dribbles.”

The most basic actor’s task--memorizing lines--becomes daunting in this monologue, where words and phrases repeat in fast-shifting orders, much like a composer putting the notes of a theme through variations.

How hard is it to get the words right?

Boyette’s answer was a loud, frustrated groan--”Aarrggh!”--and a full-body collapse in which she fell halfway off the couch.

She must have it easy, though, in “Rockaby,” in which her only verbal task is to say “more” every now and then.

“For the next four minutes, don’t blink,” Johanson said--that’s part of Boyette’s challenge in playing the rocking woman.

“It’s excruciating,” Boyette said. “When Billie Whitelaw was doing this, she had eye problems. [Her eye doctor said], ‘What have you been doing? You have no tears.’ ‘Been doing Beckett.’ ”

On the page, the plays in “The Beckett Project” have a hypnotic loveliness. But the words are not only particles of beauty. They are capsules of entropy, winding and dripping and funneling down to the absurdity and emptiness Beckett finds at the core of things where many others would prefer to encounter revelations, affirmations and ultimate meanings.

“Reading Beckett is very bleak,” Cochran acknowledges. But for him, on stage, the plays become hourglasses, not funnels. They narrow to the point of nothing, then open again into--something.

“With good plays you can say what it is about,” the GTC artistic director said. “With great plays, even as a director, I can’t say what it’s about. Just that this is what I experienced, this is how it affected me.”

Discussing Beckett seems to bring out the metaphorist in his interpreters. For Kirk, the impact of “The Beckett Project” should be akin to a special kiss.

“If you have a great kiss, I think it would be immensely inappropriate to say, ‘What was that all about?’ If we get it right, the audience will hopefully have a nice kiss.”

BE THERE

“The Beckett Project,” consisting of “Ohio Impromptu,” “Not I,” “Act Without Words” and “Rockaby,” by Samuel Beckett, at the Grove Theater Center’s Gem Theater, 12582 Main St., Garden Grove. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m. $18.50 to $22.50. Ends April 15. (714) 741-9555.