Beckett.Women. at HERE Arts, July 2023


An evening of three short plays by Samuel Beckett:

  • Footfalls with Ylfa Edelstein

  • Not I with Lesya Verba

  • Rockaby with Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

“With excellent performances as its vertices, Beckett. Women. triangulates a fresh, female-forward presentation of a canonical playwright.”

- Thinking Theatre NYC, 2023

Beckett’s powerful one-acts for women are a meditation on the will to life - and the inexorability of death. The minds of Beckett’s female characters reverberate with the past and the future, with the voices of the living and the dead. The complex bond between mothers and daughters courses through these texts: mothers who are themselves daughters of the dead, and daughters who, in their mothers’ dying, confront their own mortality.

BUT: these are also plays rooted in our shared drive to live – theatrical poetry rich with the life of the mind crying out in indignant fury against its own transience.

“Not I” performed in Ukrainian as avant-garde opera - “Footfalls” set upon a reflective path - “Rockaby” refracted across a dozen mirrors: director Diana Zhdanova is at play with Beckett’s conceptual intent, interweaving experimental elements into the playwright’s canonical staging. In Zhdanova’s hands, all three plays are shot through with the visual poetics so essential to Beckett’s work – performances conceived as three dimensional artworks unfolding in time and space –

“Syssoyeva’s naked feet, curved back, frantically contorting hands – and even the white powder, like dust, swirling above her head through the violent back and forth movements – will stay in the memory of the audience like a painting, perhaps a lost triptych by Francis Bacon.”

- James Martell, The Beckett Circle, 2022

Lesya Verba, Not I

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, Rockaby

Ylfa Edelstein, Footfalls

CREATIVE/PRODUCTION TEAM

Directed and Designed by Diana Zhdanova

Performers:

Ylfa Edelstein, Lesya Verba, Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

Stage Manager:

Erika Bracy

Ukrainian Translation of "Not I" by Lesya Verba

Ms. Edelstein’s Costume Design by Lesya Verba

Lighting Design by Milner Sommers

Technical Director, Stage Manager, and Board Op - Erika Bracy

Production Assistance - Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, Jeremy Goren

Marketing, PR - Diana Zhdanova, Marketing Assistance - Weronika Wozniak

Produced by AnomalousCo

Development Associate:

Toni Mello

Photo: Jarrett Robertson

Rockaby with Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva was featured virtually at the Between.Pomiędzy Theatre Festival, and live on stage at the national Beckett Conference Not I: 50th Anniversary at Assumption University, Massachusetts, November 2022.

NOT I (BECKETT) is presented by special arrangement with Broadway Licensing, LLC, servicing the Dramatists Play Service collection. (dramatists.com)

“Footfalls” is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. concordtheatricals.com

“Rockaby” is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc.

concordtheatricals.com

Photo: Jarrett Robertson