How it’s New York: The play literally takes the audience on a walk through Washington Square Park. It was produced in collaboration with NYU Skirball Center.
How it’s Irish: This is a staged version of a play by Nobel Prize winner, Irish writer Samuel Beckett, brought to us courtesy of Ireland’s young experimental company Pan Pan Theatre.
There’s something about simultaneously moving and listening to something that is bigger than the sum of those two elements. It takes your mind to unexpected places when you’re listening and watching and moving somehow. I’m pretty sure there’s neurological evidence to back this up. You know what I mean: what are those pictures and memories that fly into your head when you listen to a favorite playlist on the train, or on the radio? It’s just– different, somehow.
With their production of Samuel Beckett’s radio play Cascando, here brought to three-dimensions– and as the audience you’re quite literally on your feet– Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre has brought us something wonderful. They use that strange combination of words, music and motion to tremendous theatrical effect.
One of Ireland’s most interesting companies brought this little show over in June for just a few performances or should we say, encounters? There are no actors that you will watch. Instead, you are both the performed and performing site. You are put into a black hooded Druid-like robe, which members of the company hopefully see you in two and make sure it’s not too long, and given a headset. The headset starts automaticallym and you will begin hearing the voices of Irish actors Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon enacting Beckett’s 1963 radio play.
You follow one of the company and march around Washington Square Park, single file, while listening. It’s a New York thing, I believe, that only a few people actually came up to us and asked us what we were doing. I felt almost disloyal when I said “it’s a play.” (I could be wrong about this of course: the production, which debuted in Dublin in 2015, has performed all over Europe, including at The Barbican London, FFT Dusseldorf; Beckett Festival Enniskillen; Galway International Arts Festival, and the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin.)
The day I went with a glorious warm sunny day. We all were wearing shorts or summer dresses under our robes. This was not so much environmental theater, or even peripatetic theater, but some marvelous new combination, several new flavors combined into a taste sensation. (You may crave exotic food afterwards. My nephew and I went for Sushi. This is not white bread theater.)
Now to the play itself. Beckett’s one-act is mysterious and it takes a while to follow.
Cascando is a musical term that means diminishing in tone, and Beckett conceived of the piece as a dialogue between words and music: You’d hear a certain amount of text, then the same length of music. Originally, music was composed by Marcel Mihalovici. For this production, music and sound design was by Jimmy Eadie.
And just what is the story that goes on as we tramp around NYU, the park, for about an hour?
At first it seems be an author trying to find himself in the story, trying to finish the story pf his character Woburn, so he can sleep. There’s a character named Woburn. But as we walked along, I thought perhaps it was one character endlessly chasing another through time and space, like the characters Lokai and Bele in “Let This Be Your Last Battelfield” on Original Flavor Star Trek (Season 3, Episode 15, story by Oliver Crawford, based on a story by Gene L. Coon, if you must.) That’s the one where characters who are half black, half white are locked in endless battle and eventually are beamed down to a planet, arms in a struggle, hating one another forever.
Because Woburn seems to be running. He has been running a long time. There are references to the sea. Voice (we never get a name) is chasing him, but should that be taken literally?
Either way, we feel the existential despair, the seeking for meaning, the beautiful poetic repetition of the language. It washes over you as you walk along. What it all means is less important than that it’s there at all. I think Beckett would agree with that.
Director Gavin Quinn, one of the company’s co-artistic direcvtors and founders, along with Aedín Cosgrove, put together something unforgettable. It’s odd, it’s haunting, it’s utterly Beckdett.
Cascando played from June 21 -July 3.
