Bill Irwin insists he’s not a social media maven, or even hip to what’s trending on the interwebs. But in “On Beckett,” he’s doing a quintessential social media play — sharing his most private predilections with anyone who cares to listen.
And the 90-minute one-act play, now up through March 24 at the Guthrie Theater, offers evidence of a kind of Jedi mind meld between the notable actor and his haunting muse — celebrated playwright Samuel Beckett.
Part lecture, part interpretive clown dance, “On Beckett” is surprisingly entertaining. And it brings new perspective to the brooding works of a doyen of darkness.
Winner of a Tony for his performance in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Irwin is best known for TV roles, including playing the clown Mr. Noodle for a quarter-century on “Sesame Street.”
In his stage show, he explains that for decades he’s had voices knocking about his head. They all ring out from Beckett’s oeuvre — prose pieces, monologues and dialogues from such plays as “Endgame” and “Waiting for Godot,” which he has acted in half a dozen times.
These voices course even now through the actor’s body and compel it to do unexpected things onstage. At the Guthrie, he puts his feet on the lectern. Sometimes he slowly slinks and rises behind a podium, as if going down and up an elevator. Other times, he lets his knees go all wobbly, intimating a Chaplin-esque duckwalk. Then he swings a cane like a golf club.
A septuagenarian, Irwin is as limber as performers decades younger. And he’s putting on a tour de force turn in “On Beckett” as he tries to expiate a lifelong obsession with the bleak author.
Our understanding of Beckett is all wrong, Irwin insists. The severe Irishman who wrote in French and then translated his work back into English is not, as we understand him, the doyen of existential despair.
