The End.Qxp GP 10/21/15 12:10 PM Page 1

11-02 The End.qxp_GP 10/21/15 12:10 PM Page 1 Monday and Tuesday Evenings, November 2–3, 2015, at 7:30 Post-performance discussion with Conor Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett on November 2 Pre-performance discussion by Keri Walsh on November 3 at 6:30 Beckett Shorts The End By Samuel Beckett Conor Lovett , Actor Judy Hegarty Lovett , Director Mike Gunning , Lighting Design Maura O’Keeffe , Associate Producer “The End” is approximately 80 minutes long and will be performed without intermission. These performances are made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater Please make certain all your electronic devices at the West Side YMCA are switched off. WhiteLightFestival.org 11-02 The End.qxp_GP 10/21/15 12:10 PM Page 2 MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center. Upcoming White Light Festival Events: Thursday–Saturday Evenings, November 5–7, “The End” by Samuel Beckett is presented through at 7:30 special arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. Here All Night (U.S. premiere) on behalf of The Estate of Samuel Beckett. All Featuring selected music and texts from across rights reserved. Samuel Beckett’s prose and plays Gare St. Lazare Ireland Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett Monday and Tuesday Evenings, November 9–10, at 7:30 No’s Knife (world premiere) Excerpts from Texts for Nothing by Samuel Beckett Lisa Dwan , Performer and Director Nicholas Johnson , Director Saturday Afternoon, November 7, at 4:00 in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse White Light Conversation: Language and Human Consciousness John Schaefer , Moderator With Joan La Barbara , Colum McCann , Steven Pinker , and Gary Tomlinson Performance extract of Gare St. Lazare Ireland’s work in progress of How It Is by Samuel Beckett, performed by Conor Lovett, with director Judy Hegarty Lovett Friday Evening, November 13, at 7:30 in the Bruno Walter Auditorium White Light on Film Waiting for Beckett—A Portrait of Samuel Beckett Directed and produced for Global Village by John L. Reilly, produced by Melissa Shaw-Smith. 1994. 86 minutes. For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit WhiteLightFestival.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) 875-5766 to learn about program cancellations or to request a White Light Festival brochure. Visit WhiteLightFestival.org for full festival listings. Join the conversation: #LCWhiteLight We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. 11-02 The End.qxp_GP 10/21/15 12:10 PM Page 3 Note from the Director to return to the city to present two Beckett By Judy Hegarty Lovett works at the White Light Festival. There are many New York connections with I consider “The End” to be one of Samuel Beckett’s work: the great produc - Beckett’s most complete and haunting tions of Mabou Mines, the wonderful Bill works. It can be seen as a precursor or Irwin, and the late, great Joseph Chaikin; sketch for the characters who inhabit so Irish Beckett actors Jack MacGowran, Barry many of Beckett’s subsequent works, McGovern, and Conor Lovett have all per - whose view of the world is at odds with formed here; Beckett’s U.S. publishers the world’s view of them. For me, though, Barney Rossett and Richard and Jeannette it is an homage to life and the living. A man Seaver are New Yorkers all; playwrights in his later years has fully come to terms Sam Shephard, Edward Albee, and Will with the fact that when all is said and done, Eno all cite Beckett’s influence; and of we have ourselves alone to deal with, to course our hosts here at Lincoln Center have a great history of presenting answer to, to answer for. We are all of us Beckett’s work. Beckett himself shot his kings of our own plot; every life can be cel - only film, called film , here, with his director ebrated and every death commemorated in of choice, the esteemed Alan Schneider, a full breath; we are in, and then out, of it all. and Buster Keaton in the lead role. I would like to dedicate these perfor - Gare St. Lazare Ireland first presented mances of “The End” to the memory of Beckett’s prose works in New York in 1998, Micheline and Albert Sakharoff, two cher - when Molloy played at the Irish Arts Center. ished champions of our company. Since then, we have performed here sev - eral times, and it is an absolute honor for us —Copyright © 2015 by Judy Hegarty Lovett WhiteLightFestival.org 11-02 The End.qxp_GP 10/21/15 12:10 PM Page 4 Samuel Beckett a feeling of joy. The friend said it was the kind of day that made one glad to be alive. By Mel Gussow Beckett responded, ‘‘I wouldn’t go that far.’’ Samuel Beckett (1906 –1989) was a tower - Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in ing figure in drama and fiction who altered Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin, on Good the course of contemporary theater. His Friday, April 13, 1906 (that date is some - plays became the cornerstone of 20th- times disputed; it is said that on his birth century theater beginning with Waiting for certificate the date is May 13). He majored Godot , which was first produced in 1953. in French and Italian at Trinity College, As the play’s two tramps wait for a Dublin. At school he excelled both in his salvation that never comes, they exchange studies and in sports, playing cricket and vaudeville routines and metaphysical rugby. He received his Bachelor of Arts musings—and comedy rises to tragedy. degree in 1927 and his Master of Arts degree in 1931. At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, In 1938, while walking with friends on a exploring man’s relationship with his God. Paris street, he was stabbed with a knife With Beckett, one searched for hope amid by a panhandler. A young piano student despair and continued living with a kind of named Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil stoicism, as illustrated by the final words of came to his rescue and telephoned for an his novel, The Unnamable : “You must go ambulance. One of his lungs was perfo - on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Or as he wrote rated and the knife narrowly missed his in Worstward Ho , one of his later works of heart. Beckett fully recovered from the fiction: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” wound but it left psychological scars. When he asked his assailant the reason for Beckett wrote six novels, four long plays the assault, the man replied, “Je ne sais and dozens of shorter ones, volumes of pas, Monsieur.” More than ever, Beckett stories and narrative fragments, some of became aware of the randomness of life. which were short novels. He wrote poetry The episode had one other long-ranging and essays on the arts, including an essay effect: He began a lifelong relationship about Marcel Proust (one of his particular with Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom he favorites), radio and television plays, and married in Folkestone, England, in 1961. prose pieces he called residua and disjecta. With her, he chose to remain in France dur - In 1969 the Irish author, who wrote first in ing World War II rather than return to the English and later in French, received the safety of Ireland. Nobel Prize in Literature. In the last year of his life, Beckett lived in a For more than 50 years Beckett lived in his small, barely furnished room of a nursing adopted city of Paris. Though he wrote home. He had a television set on which he most of his work in French, he remained watched major tennis and soccer events, definably Irish in his voice, manner, and and several books, including his boyhood humor. Even in his final years, when he copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian. lived in a nursing home in Paris, he joined He died on December 22, 1989. friends in a sip of Irish whisky, which seemed to warm his bones and open him to —Excerpted from The New York Times , Decem - greater conviviality. In no way could Beckett ber 27, 1989 © 1989 The New York Times. All ever be considered an optimist though. In rights reserved. Used by permission and pro - an often repeated story, on a glorious tected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or sunny day he walked jauntily through a retransmission of this Content without express London park with an old friend and exuded written permission is prohibited. 11-02 The End.qxp_GP 10/21/15 12:10 PM Page 5 Note on Beckett’s Prose determining to quit the stage in favor of the page. He wrote to his French publisher By Dan Gunn Jérôme Lindon, in November 1969, after protesting that he should not be counted I am in acute crisis about my work (on on for any new dramas: “There is also and the lines familiar to you by now) and have decided that I not merely can’t but above all the fact that I must work, and had won’t go on as I have been going more promised myself, to that end, to stay away or less ever since the Textes pour Rien from the theater for at least 2 years.” [Texts for Nothing ] and must either get back to nothing again and the bottom of It is in prose written to be read, rather than all the hills again like before Molloy or plays to be performed, that Beckett felt he else call it a day.

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