In The Silence You Don't Know: Short Plays by Samuel Beckett is Finale of DePauw Theatre Season

March 27, 2006

March 27, 2006, Greencastle, Ind. - The final production of the 2005-06 DePauw Theatre season, In The Silence You Don’t Know: Short Plays by Samuel Beckett, will be staged April 13, 14 and 15. Performances of the collection of five darkly humorous and enduringly hopeful plays by Noble Prize-winning author and playwright Samuel Beckett will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Moore Theatre of DePauw University’s Performing Art Center.

The plays included in the production are Act Without Words II, Play, Breath, Quad and Catastrophe, and are representative of Beckett’s theatrical writings from 1956 to 1982. Suggesting a theme common to all the plays, the production’s title, In The Silence You Don’t Know, is borrowed from a line in Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable, “where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The particular excitement of these astoundingly unique short plays is the contrasting of the miracle of human persistence with the oftimes futility of existence. Act Without Words II, written not long after the premiere of Beckett’s most well known work, Waiting for Godot, is a mime show that explores -- in stifling detail -- daily routines. The silliness, suffering and self-awareness of a love-triangle is the topic of Play. Breath, the shortest piece in the production, is performed with no actors. Originally written for German television, Quad employs a purposeful repetition to expose the barely perceptible suggestions of human identity. Catastrophe, one of Beckett’s last plays, was written for playwright and former president of the Czech Republic Vaclev Havel, and can be seen as an allegory on oppression.

Not coincidentally, the production will open on the 100th anniversary of the playwright’s birth, April 13, 1906. Samuel Beckett was born an Irishman but by the time he was 20 years old had adopted Paris as his home and French as the language of his novels and plays. By 1930, following a brief career aimed at becoming an academic, Beckett had chosen to devote his life solely to writing. Despite several critically acclaimed novels, Beckett did not achieve notoriety until Waiting for Godot, his 1953 play which stages two tramps in conversation about an awaited Godot who never arrives.

In the prolific years that followed, Beckett wrote for radio, television, film and theatre. He received the Noble Prize for Literature in 1969. Interviewed at age 76, he mused on his continued writing: “With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child needs to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility.” Samuel Beckett died in 1989.

In The Silence You Don’t Know is directed by Tim Good, assistant professor of communication and theatre, and senior Megan Alexander. Professor Good describes Beckett’s writings as regarding “the heroism of the human spirit. The bleakness of the reality of our existence never succeeds in killing the hope that the next moment will bring a moment of real connection. In The Silence You Don’t Knowis about our urgent need for spiritual connection. It is about our desperate search for the meaning of life through other people.”

Tickets for the production are $3 for students and $6 for adults, and are available for purchase at the DePauw University Performing Arts Center box office. Information and reservations are available by calling (765) 658-4827 or sending an e-mail here.

Still available for purchase are DePauw Theatre patron passes. Purchasers are entitled to five tickets for the price of four. The passes are available at both student and adult price levels. To purchase or obtain additional information, contact the Performing Arts Center box office using the phone number and/or e-mail information listed above.

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