Bill Irwin Photo by Carol Rosegg

The actor-writer-director-clown, when not engaged in conventional drama (Albee, O'Neill, etc.) or one of his several delightful vaudevilles, has performed a bucket of Beckett over the decades. And as he makes plain at the outset, looking fit in Martha Hally's ivory shirt and black suit, he's obsessed with Beckett's output: "It haunts me. It will not leave me alone." So we're in for 90 minutes, with one delicious interruption, of Beckett texts alternating with Irwin's well-reasoned ruminations on their meaning, and how acting Beckett is different from acting other playwrights.

Riveting stuff? Depends on how you feel about the source material. Irwin launches right into Text #1 from Beckett's prose pieces Texts for Nothing. It traffics, like much Beckett, in existential questions–who am I, why am I here. And, to the untrained ear, it can come across as verbal wallpaper. "All mingles, times and tenses, at first I only had been here, now I'm here still, soon I won't be here yet, I don't try to understand, I'll never try to understand anymore, that's what you think, for the moment I'm here, always have been, always shall be." Irwin declaims with as much clarity as the prose permits and a voice almost as versatile as his clown's body, but the meaning, for some of us, will remain elusive. He praises the Irishness of the rhythms and speculates on whether the text is a monologue or two voices melded into one, but it's not like he exactly explains what Texts for Nothing is about. He does, though, take an interesting detour into the history of the "Comic Irishman" in American literature and theatre, and muses on how Beckett's birth year of 1906 exposed him to early cinema and vintage vaudeville, bolstering the argument that Beckett inserted a fair amount of vaudeville and Chaplinesque foolery into his works.

Neither is apparent, though, in the next passage, from Beckett's novel "The Unnamable." It's an "I"-heavy monologue about–well, you've got me there, but Irwin ponders how it's full of what he calls "character energy," without portraying an actual particular character, and "life force and useful desire." The Beckett-philes were loving it, but I wasn't. Nor was I much taken with a reading from Beckett's early novel "Watt," largely a partially-rhymed list of regrets and relatives ("and my mother's father's mother's and my father's mother's mother's fathers...") and violence, though Irwin gives this somewhat Joycean moment an American-everyman-accent lilt that falls nicely on the ear–it reminded me of Jack Lemmon, of all people. And his after-talk, positing how Beckett's violent language here masks a plea for tolerance and an end to cruelty, does give one something to think about.

More Texts for Nothing, and then something wonderful happens: Out come the baggy pants, followed by baggier pants over the baggy pants, and we're temporarily out of Beckett Land and back to the Bill Irwin who dazzled us with The Regard of Flight and quickly became a MacArthur Fellow. Balletic slapstick, hilarious pantomime, that invisible-elevator gag, a little soft shoe. It's a prelude to a brief treatise on Endgame and a longer discussion of Waiting for Godot (what, no mention of Happy Days?), and grist for Irwin's assertion that clowns and clowning do figure heavily into Beckett, even when existential agony and much man's-inhumanity-to-man dwell beside them.

Irwin has some lively observations here, including a protracted side trip on how to pronounce "Godot," and some fun memories of trying to suss out Beckett's meanings with Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Nathan Lane. It's a "great Rorschach of a play," he says, and he makes a convincing case for how political it is–it's about haves and have-nots, domination and subjection, possibly acceptance of death. But on that last one, we'll never, never know.

You won't come out of On Beckett a newly formed expert on the man, but you will hear some telling revelations on the actor's art, and if you do love Beckett's work, there's probably no one you'd rather have perform it than Bill Irwin. His devotion is so absolute that it even infected me on occasion. Beyond adoring the artist, Irwin also seems to genuinely like him as a person: Beckett was, according to a colleague of Irwin's who knew him in the 1970s, witty and warm and friendly. And Irwin is in awe of the Hibernian lilt of Beckett's prose and dialogue, though he marvels that most of it was, in fact, first written in French. But there are those of us for whom Beckett will, unfortunately, always be a foreign language.