MABOU MINES’S STAGING OF REVISITED: Ruth Maleczech, Samuel Beckett, and Holographic Visualization

Abstract

Although the American avant-garde company Mabou Mines's with Samuel Beckett's early plays and David Warrilow and Fred Neumann's presentations of Beckett's prose for the stage are better known, in the early 1980s, founding co-artistic director Ruth Maleczech (1939-2013) sought and received permission from Beckett to stage his short prose fiction Imagination Dead Imagine. The production premiered in 1984 at the Performing Garage in New York City's Soho, home to the avant-garde company The Wooster Group. In combining Mabou Mines's tradition of performing a playwright's text with their innovative use of technology, Maleczech's production transformed the relationship between actor, audience, and performance and provided the company with a new take on staging Beckett.Maleczech had her first taste of Beckett at the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, the first theatre in the United States to produce his plays, where she worked for several years in the 1960s. In her chapter on the company's history with Beckett, Ruby Cohn notes that the San Francisco Mime Troupe (then the R. G. Davis Mime Troupe), with whom Maleczech collaborated during her years in California, also worked with Beckett's texts during Maleczech's time there. Describing the various European theatrical influences on the members of Mabou Mines, Cohn suggests that evolved an approach to acting that [Lee] Breuer called Mr. [sic] Outside (Brecht) combined with Mr. Inside (Grotowski). Less schematically than this contrast would suggest a Beckett play became the linchpin of their exercises - Play, the very play that occasioned Beckett's own step into a new dramatic phase (219; 'sic' in the text). Cohn also refers briefly and approvingly to Maleczech's production of Imagination Dead Imagine (231-32).Prior to Warrilow's highly praised interpretation of Beckett, the actor collaborated with Maleczech, Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Philip Glass on the production of Play during their Paris days. Work on Play began as an experiment in acting, one that would help them to work their way through and beyond realism (Cohn, 219). Although Cohn credits Breuer with this initiative, according to Maleczech on Play began shortly after she and Akalaitis returned from the south of France and taught what they had learned there to Breuer and Warrilow (2011-12). This recollection suggests that the search for a non-realistic approach was a group endeavor, in which each individual collaborator was already engaged. In Maleczech's case, the journey had begun when she sought out visual artists such as Judy North (then Davis) and musicians such as Pauline Oliveros in San Francisco in the 1950s.Before beginning her directing career, Maleczech performed in a number of Beckett's works produced by Mabou Mines in the early seventies, including Come and Go and Play (both in 1971). Vanishing Pictures was Maleczech's debut as a director, premiering in 1980. As later with her staging of Beckett's short fiction, Maleczech participated significantly in her first production's design, for which she and Julie Archer won an Obie Award.1 Maleczech's second directing project, an adaptation of Jim Strah's detective novel Wrong Guys for the stage, premiered in 1981. Having established an important precedent for translating prose for the stage with this adaptation, Maleczech quickly followed it up with Imagination Dead Imagine, her third directing project.2 The Strah project also highlights the kind of multi-media performance that Maleczech would exploit in Imagination Dead Imagine.Wrong Guys was not recorded on video, but the photographs show a highly visual interpretation experimenting with Archer's designs of light and shadow, a technique Maleczech utilizes in Imagination Dead Imagine. This production also featured the kind of careful and subtle use of props that would reappear in Maleczech's treatment of the bier in Imagination Dead Imagine, in this case with naked light bulbs, beer cans, a bathtub, and a typewriter in a set design by Michael Kuhling. …