Beckett Appreciation 101

Few writers are able to capture the imagination through irony, metaphor, and despair as startling or as vividly as Samuel Beckett. His prose has proven as deeply layered and richly textured as a perfectly aged bottle of wine. And much like wine, it is definitely an acquired taste.

Photo by Craig Schwartz

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School Girls Will be Mean Girls

By Patrick Hurley

Borrowing tropes and devices from teen clique films such as Mean Girls and Heathers, School Girls or, The African Mean Girls Play, playing now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is a story of assimilation as much as it is a comedy about the universal struggle of fitting in.

Elliot Lingers in the Past

By Patrick Hurley

A metaphor manifest through a time-bending series of monologues, makes Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, playing now at the Kirk Douglas, a lyrical but uneven patchwork.

Chaotic King Is A Crowd-Pleaser

By Patrick Hurley

A woman in search of her father serves as a metaphor for a writer in search of her story. King of the Yees, a new play by Lauren Yee, playing now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre is part true story, part fantasy and part meta-theatrical experience.

Dry Land Proves Unsettling

By Patrick Hurley

Dry Land, playing now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre as part of Center Theatre Groups Block Party, is a theatrical and literary novelty, it’s a coming-of-age story that was written by a playwright who was only twenty-one years old when she wrote it, she had not had time nor space from her own youth before she tackled this very deliberate, awkwardly funny exploration of friendship.  And while some could lay the blame of her inexperience of life on the lackadaisical adherence to traditional plot, it is precisely the lens of inexperience that creates something new and interesting.

Vivid Prose Lights up Burnpile

By Patrick Hurley

Lucy Alibar’s new play Throw me on the Burnpile and Light me up, playing now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is a hybrid theatre/creative non-fiction piece that evokes through cleverly constructed language, simple nostalgic imagery, and a gentle performance by the writer.

A Winning Endgame

By Patrick Hurley

Filling the emptiness that accompanies the mundaneness of everyday life is a recurring theme throughout the work of Samuel Beckett. He creates cold, isolated landscapes and then populates them with characters who are usually incapable of escaping the dreary and awful world around them. Endgame, playing now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is a classic example of Beckett at his very best. 

First Love is a Tender Thing in Wonderful Girlfriend

By Patrick Hurley

The awkwardness of first love is sweetly and nostalgically captured in the Actors Theatre of Louisville Production of Girlfriend, playing now through August 9 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.