“Static” is one of those words from which most artists recoil. It’s typically used for something felt to be listless, inert, and boring. In fact, physical stasis is an artistic tool, or at least it can be. In the right hands, it can release unexpected and explosive theatrical energies that can’t come from movement. This week, two marvelous examples of this phenomenon—call it reverberant rigidity—coincidentally arrived in New York at the same time: Samuel Beckett’s Not I starr

To those who feel overexposed to Waiting for Godot—which includes many theater snobs—no text-faithful production may ever fully satisfy. A great many worldly people yawn nowadays at the play as written. They’ve seen enough Didis and Gogos who wear the requisite grubby clothes and boots and move among objects that actually resemble a tree and rock. For them the desolate, unaccommodated stage picture Beckett made famous has become a cliché, the existential malaise performed in

Nothing you do this week will likely be more worthwhile than spending 40-odd minutes with Dianne Wiest performing excerpts of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days for passersby in Madison Square Park. Every lunch hour until Friday, beginning at noon, Wiest is performing as Winnie, enclosed not in a mound but in a wacky, understated, rocklike sculptural costume designed by the visual artist Arlene Shechet. This event has arrived totally under everyone’s radar. The Park has dropped the

From Brecht’s plan to project films of Marxist revolutions behind Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot to JoAnne Akalaitis’s explicitly postnuclear Endgame, firebrand directors have never stopped trying to amp up the social and political relevance of Samuel Beckett. George Tabori’s Happy Days in which Winnie was a paraplegic confined to a bed rather than buried in a mound was in my view the nadir of such disastrous experiments, reducing one of drama’s most monumentally reverber