Search 
Beckett Women
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
"Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble lives up to its name with a program of short works by Samuel Beckett, late-career works that make his heralded “Waiting for Godot” seem like a simple, straightforward yarn. “Not I” is a monologue for a mouth illuminated amid darkness, recounting a life of abandonment and trauma. “Footfalls,” which PETE calls “a dialogue for feet,” centers on a woman pacing outside her mother’s bedroom. “Come and Go” features three characters, about 10-dozen words of small talk and precisely detailed patterns of movement — an approach taken to a further extreme in “Quad,” a wordless, four-person “geometrical mime." – Oregon Arts Watch
Four women reveal themselves, their histories written on the body. Compulsion and Embarrassment wander the garden in their socks. They rage at the humdrum, giggle about dying, fall down and up. Truth seeps between words and we stumble upon Beckett secrets that have been hiding in the open all along.
This collection of Beckett shorts unfolds as an expansion of bodies and a contraction of text. Not I is a monologue for a mouth. Footfalls is a dialogue for feet. Come and Go is a tria-logue of hands. And Quad is a silent stalking of four bodies through the void. Beckett Women weaves these four rarely produced pieces together into one world, drawing out resonances and disrupting audience expectations to meet Beckett anew.