British director Peter Brook’s C.I.C.T./Theatre des Bouffes du Nord is a Parisian theater center that has created many world-class productions, one of the most acclaimed being “Fragments,” a collection of five works by one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett. This weekend, the Kennedy Center is bringing “Fragments” to Washington. Co-directed by Brook and Marie Helene Estienne, “Fragments” includes four short plays and a poem.
“Americans know Beckett as well as Europeans do,” Estienne said. “All Peter did was put together some pieces that were not so familiar but could give a sense of Beckett’s writing.
| Onstage |
| ‘Fragments’ |
| Where: Kennedy Center |
| When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 1:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday |
| Info: $20 to $49; kennedy-center.org |
“We wanted to show works that are profound and light at the same time. We didn’t want to do ‘Godot,’ which is very well-known now, or even ‘Happy Days.’ We wanted to show a different aspect of Beckett.”
Although for years Beckett was heralded as one of the leaders of the theater of the absurd, Estienne feels that his reputation has now far exceeded any category. “I think that is a very old-fashioned term,” she said. “Nobody now knows what you mean when you talk about theater of the absurd, especially young people.”
“Fragments” includes one of Beckett’s earlier pieces, “Rough for Theatre I.” The characters of the play are identified only as A and B. A is blind and sits on a folding stool, playing a fiddle and begging for pennies. B is paralyzed. Though the original script calls for him to be in a wheelchair, in this production B is envisioned slightly differently.
“We didn’t always follow the original stage directions,” Estienne explained, “but we tried to be faithful to the spirit of what Beckett wrote. So B is on a box pushing himself with a long stick.”
Another play that is being done differently is “Come and Go.” The characters are Flo, Vi and Ru. “The play is usually done with three women,” Estienne said, “but since the cast is made up of one woman and two men, the men are dressed as women. That’s something new for us.”
The remaining selections include a farcical mime for two actors who crawl out of sacks (“Act Without Words II”), the poem “Neither,” and a moving monologue spoken by a woman who is preparing to die (“Rockaby”).
“I think ‘Fragments’ goes deeply into the human mind and being,” Estienne said. “I say ‘being’ rather than ‘thinking’ because there are a lot of emotions hidden in these plays. Beckett opens the soul of men and women. And it is because he opens the human being and soul so deeply that Beckett still touches people so profoundly today.”
