Theatre Tuesday : Breakfast, Beckett, Dinner

By J. Kelly

Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht: Two playwrights with such different styles, but such similarish-sounding last names. These two theatrical trendsetters opened in preview together at The Theatre Centre last night, thanks to a double-bill imaginatively titled Beckett and Brecht.
The Brecht portion of the evening is actually diluted Bertie. BéBé: The Women Behind Brecht is a show about B.B.’s collaborations with women playwrights, conceived, directed and co-written by Jennifer Capraru and presented by Theatre Asylum.
The Beckett portion of the evening is called That Time: Five Short Plays by Beckett. Which five plays, alas, they do not say. The title allows Torontoist to make an educated guess that That Time will be part of the evening, and the NOW article notes that the stream-of-consciousness monologue Not I will be staged as well. But Torontoist — a big Beckett junkie — is desparately searching his Collected Shorter Plays trying to figure out which of Beckett’s short plays features a woman with her pants falling down.
Torontoist is a mite concerned by the note on this production’s website that the shorts presented contain “the seeds of [Beckett’s] most radical ideas,” since Beckers wrote most of his short plays — including Not I and That Time — well after the radical theatre-changing ones that everyone knows, ie. Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days. But we’re going anyway in the hopes that Beckett’s best and completely wordless work Nacht und Traume (Night and Dreams) is on the bill. Torontoist saw a student production of it four years ago and still cries when s/he recalls it.