The town of Ashland in Oregon, currently best known for its annual Shakespeare festival, will host a season of Beckett works this month. From October 24-27, each night at 7pm, an exploration of Beckett’s experimental theatre will take over the downtown area. The entire festival takes place in non-traditional theatre spaces, and rain or shine, audiences will travel from place to place to encounter each piece. All pieces will be performed each night. The vision of well-known playwright Octavio Solis, Ashland Beckett Shorts, will include Not I, Rockaby, Krapp’s Last Tape, What Where, Act Without Words II, and Michael Roth‘s musical composition Imagination Dead Imagine which was sanctioned personally by Beckett. The festival will also feature as guest lecturer the renowned Beckett expert and critic, Katherine Weiss, who organised and hosted this year’s Samuel Beckett Society annual conference Beckett and Justice, at Cal State LA in June.
According to Solis, he has ‘long been attracted to the bleak but comic vision of Beckett’s works, as I find comfort and solace in his courage of his unblinkered imagination’. He continues ‘the events of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic laid bare our terrors and isolation in ways we could not have anticipated. Coming across the works of Beckett again in midst of the three years of worldwide death and uncertainty made his works so poignantly relevant. I suddenly found new life, wit and daring in his works. He seemed to be addressing our age so explicitly, particularly in the numerous brief plays that he wrote during his lifetime. I realized that so many of these short plays had still not been presented in Ashland, except perhaps on a university level, because their brevity made them prohibitively difficult for larger theatres to produce. I read and selected a number of short works from his theatre canon to produce’.
Watch the Festival Promotional Short Here
Full details of the festival and booking can be found by clicking here.
The Samuel Beckett Society 