The death recently took place of noted scholar and past president of the Samuel Beckett Society Robert Scanlan. The board of the Society express their deepest sympathies to his wife Joanne Baldine and his family.
We publish here his full obituary which appeared in the Boston Globe:
SCANLAN, Robert N. Theatre director, writer and professor, died of cancer on May 30, at age 77.
Bob was born in Troy, New York, but much of his career was influenced by the experience of growing up in post-war France, where his family moved in the early 1950s. From a young age, he was immersed in the lingering cultural and historical reverberations of World War II: an experience that deeply informed his artistic vision.
He received bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and humanities from MIT in 1971 and a PhD in comparative literature from Rutgers University in 1975.
He joined the MIT faculty of humanities in 1977, where he furthered the development of the university’s Drama Program. A specialist on the work of Samuel Beckett, whom he met several times beginning in 1981, Scanlan published several noteworthy papers on Beckett and directed nearly all of his plays. In 1987, he was elected President of the Samuel Beckett Society. His 1995 production “An Evening of Beckett” at the American Repertory Theatre earned him Boston’s Elliot Norton Award for Best Director.
In 1989, Scanlan joined the American Repertory Theatre as Literary Director and Dramaturg. He was also a Professor of the Practice of Theatre at Harvard University, where he taught courses on American Theatre, Beckett and his celebrated drama history course “The Greeks to Ibsen.” His abiding interest in dramatic structure led to the development of his signature “plot bead diagrams,” featured in his book “Principles of Dramaturgy” (2020), which he used to guide students at both MIT and Harvard in the art of understanding and crafting plays. In 1991, he co-directed with Derek Walcott the ART’s production of Steel at the Hasty Pudding.
As Artistic Director of the Boston Poets’ Theatre from 2014, Scanlan had a rare gift for bringing published poets together to present their work in a staged setting. His 2015 Poets’ Theatre revival at Sanders Theatre featured a reading of Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood” and that same year, he directed Ceremonies of Departure, a staging of Beckett’s “Not I,” “Footfalls,” “Rockaby” and “Come and Go.” Earlier projects included his adaptations of Robert Pinsky’s “Dante’s Inferno” (1998) and poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Gilgamesh” (2008) at New York’s 92nd Street Y. He also presented staged readings and adaptations of poetry by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, David Ferry, Derek Walcott and many other leading voices.
Bob’s impact on his students was profound and lasting. Many credit him with helping them discover and refine their artistic vocations. His keen intellect, generous spirit, and personal warmth embodied his belief that dramatic art, at its best, can make every human person more ethically centered.
Bob was a dynamic, witty and deeply humane person. Always the adventurer, he regaled friends and family with stories of his life before the theatre, from a college summer scuba diving in Nova Scotia to an engineering job scaling the Golden Gate Bridge to install ambient vibration equipment. He seized every chance to embrace the linguistic and cultural challenges of directing across the globe, from Wuhan, China to Belfast, Ireland and Poland’s Stary Theatre. At home, he brought his sensitivity to the human species to bear on another of his passions: gardening. Under his tender care, bountiful tomatoes, plumeria and night-blooming cereus plants flourished, year after year.
The Samuel Beckett Society 