Vanessa Finney: We're here to talk about the Beckett festival you're producing in Ashland. But before we get into those specifics, why don't you start with Samuel Beckett's basic origins and his involvement with James Joyce?
Octavio Solis: Well, Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland. He was raised there, and as a young man, he excelled, and he was actually a fantastic, I believe, rugby player, but he was definitely made for the life of the intellect. So he read James Joyce's Ulysses, and was really, really interested in working with James Joyce. So he went to continue his studies in Paris, connected with him, hounded him, until James Joyce said, 鈥淥kay, you can work with me. Help me organize my papers, do some translating work.鈥� And he worked with him for a while and translated his works, and he got to know his family quite well. They became close. And when Beckett was stabbed one time by a pimp who thought that he was intruding on his lady of the evening, as he recovered in the hospital, James Joyce came and found him a private room, took good care of him, restored him to his health. And so Beckett grew up with a great deal of admiration for James Joyce. Loved his writing, loved everything about it. There was an encyclopedic sense that fed all his novels, and now he was working on Finnegans Wake, which was even vaster in terms of including everything into his stream of consciousness - so much Greek mythology, so much of current politics, so much of his personal life. Beckett started to emulate that, and it wasn't his real voice. So he determined that he needed to move away from that. And where Beckett felt like, when you read [Joyce's] books, it's a feast - it's a feast of the world of the universe.
With Beckett, he decided to strip all that away to its bare bones. A literature of starvation, where you get only the barest essence of someone's condition in the world in terms of what they've been through, what they're going through and dealing with - specifically with the now, which is at the root of all existentialism, which is dealing with life as it's happening there. Then even memory becomes an object in the now, and you have to cope with it that way. So that helped him through his short prose. And then he wrote Waiting for Godot. And when Waiting for Godot came out, it just launched him. It just really helped crystallize his thinking. And so that also helped him with his novels. He wrote a trilogy of novels, Malloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. And I had these on my shelf for a long time, Vanessa, but I wondered when I was ever going to get to them. And then I found out.
"In that stillness that the pandemic brought - that lull - I found time to read suddenly. Waiting for Godot made a new kind of sense to me. Happy Days made sense to me in a way that it hadn't before, and I resolved to find some way to bring those works, or these other works, out into Ashland."
VF: Well, during the pandemic, you came across them again after already being familiar with them. So how did it impact you when you came across his work during that time?
OS: Well, I was stricken with writer's block during the pandemic. When 2020 happened, all theater shut down around the world. The world shut down. But theaters were especially hit hard because many of them were closed for up to two years on, some three years at a time, and audiences weren't coming. They were afraid to come. And so I really thought that that art form was done, at least my end of it. My career was going to be done. I thought I might as well retire and find something else to do - write prose, print, print media. But theater is my craft. That's what I do. But in that stillness that the pandemic brought - that lull - I found time to read suddenly. Waiting for Godot made a new kind of sense to me. Happy Days made sense to me in a way that it hadn't before, and I resolved to find some way to bring those works, or these other works, out into Ashland.
VF: I'm imagining what a lightning bolt that must have been for you to feel, when here we are all isolated, extremely alienated and confused, and you read something that鈥檚 staged so sparely - written so sparely -, like Godot: two men alone on a stage, and we're so confused about their setting, right?
OS: Right, and that's how we were. Yeah, we were just like that. We were living in isolation. We were living with a great deal of anxiety and fear and depression. And we tried to continue our lives, but there were so many silly things that we had to do, like disinfect our groceries, like stand six feet away from people, wear masks over our faces.
VF: 鈥nd choose your tribe.
OS: Exactly. Have parties online via Zoom, have a little cocktail party with friends. But that was the extent of it. And I found these novels somehow a comfort, because I think at the end, as we came out of the pandemic, there was a lot of unresolved despair that I felt for friends that I'd lost, for time that I'd lost, for the way in which we all suffered together as a civilization, as a people on the planet. And when the world opened up, we just came right back out. But I don't think we really resolved a lot of that anxiety or confronted it in any serious way. The same thing with my loneliness and anxiety. So I said, 鈥淚 have to find some way to resolve this.鈥� And these novels really kind of put their finger right on the feelings that I was undergoing, and I felt like, you know,
"Part of what makes Beckett so attractive is that he's one ready to stare down hope until it vanishes, and then stare into the void and still have the courage to say, 鈥業'll go on.鈥�"
VF: Yes, there is hope at the bottom of it. You know, much is made of how bleak and despairing his tone and language is, but at the bottom, there's hope. And that sort of answers the question of why - maybe someone's not even into experimental theater, but what meaning they might take from this, from reading Beckett or attending your show. So which short works can we expect to see during the festival?
OS: Oh, we have quite a diverse collection of works. The two that I am directing are Not I, with Amanda Moody, who's a performance artist from the Bay Area that I'm bringing up here, and she's completely in black. Everything in black, even her face is covered, is blacked out, and only her lips are showing. And she has something like a 20-minute monologue as she recites with only her teeth and her lips showing. And I've devised a unique way of staging it. It's going to happen in the marquee window of the Thomas Theater on the side of the building.
VF: Oh, brilliant.
OS: She'll be in there. So it'll be really fascinating.
VF: So striking.
OS: Yes, the other one I'm directing is Rockaby. And I have a legacy actress from the OSF, Dee Masky, performing that at 92 years of age. I'm bringing her out of retirement and having her perform this piece, which she had always expressed the desire to perform, and she is sharp as ever - has the stamina of any actor around. She's a real pro, and I let her bring a lot of her interpretations of this really poetic kind of a tone poem piece to bear in our direction. Todd Barton, who's our sound man for the entire festival, co-directed this with me, because a lot of her text is recorded on and played over speakers. It's her, it's her subconscious mind speaking to her, right?
VF: Yes, you have the woman speaking and then sort of the voiceover. Well, you helped her strike that off her bucket list!
OS: Oh, definitely. The other one we're doing is Krapp's Last Tape. UNIVERSES is performing that with Stephen Sapp and Mildred Ruiz Sapp working on it. Steven will be performing, and Mildred will be directing that piece that'll be at carpenter Hall. What Where is a piece that we're also doing with Puppeteers for Fears. I've been following them and their Cthulhu performances around town. They've been on tour all over the east coast with that piece, and now they're here working on What Where, which is a piece that I've always imagined as something to be performed by puppets.
Then Jackie Apodaca, who is the head of the Theater department here at SOU, is directing Act Without Words, with two of her favorite people and my favorite people, James Donlon, who's one of the premier movement and mime artists in the world, and Alina Cenal, his partner, who is also terrific actor and a Flamenco dancer and a movement artist, as well. And then finally, we're doing Imagination Dead Imagine, which is one of Beckett's prose pieces by Michael Roth. He's the composer who composed this.
VF: So Octavio, tell us how the plays will be staged. Where will it be?
OS: Well, they're going to be everywhere, but basically on the campus of OSF. People will meet on the bricks, where they will have a table set up. And if they bought tickets, they just need to give us their name and we give them a colored wristband and then guide them all in to see the first play, which is Krapp鈥檚 Last Tape at Carpenter Hall. All 120 people, if we sell out, will be there. And then at the end of Krapp鈥檚 Last Tape, we have four porters who will break them up into four groups, and they will take them out to four separate areas around the campus. And by the way, all the smaller groups are going to go in a circle and see all the pieces, all four of those pieces, which means those four pieces are going to be performed four times for the audiences, and then we will all, once everyone has seen all four, will reconvene at New Space, which is also kind of behind the Thomas by behind the Black Swan by the Thomas Theater, to see Imagination Dead Imagine, and that's our finale. We do also have a pre-show, a kind of wine and cheese for donors who made donations to our festival, a chat and lecture session with a Beckett scholar. Catherine Weiss is coming up from Los Angeles to just engage us in talking about Beckett and these pieces, prepping them for this. She will also hold after, after every evening, a post-show discussion.
VF: Oh, fabulous. Well, this is a chance for anybody who hasn't seen these short pieces in particular, because they're more rarely staged than his longer work. So this is a wonderful opportunity to see some of Samuel Beckett's shorter works, as well as possibly seeing some new venues that you haven't seen in Oregon. Octavio Solis, thank you so much for stopping by the studio today, and I look forward to seeing you at the Ashland Beckett Shorts Festival, which runs October 24 through the 27th in downtown Ashland, largely on the OSF campus. You can find tickets and more information at AshlandBeckettShorts.com.
OS: Thank you very much. Vanessa. Also, I have to say I could not have done this without the assistance of my co producer Kimberly Colburn and the support of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
The Ashland Beckett Shorts Festival is scheduled for October 24-27 as a promenade performance through downtown Ashland. Directing duties are shared among several local luminaries, including the Chair of Southern Oregon University鈥檚 Theatre Department, Jackie Apodaca, Alyssa Marie Matthews of Puppeteers for Fears, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, co-founder of UNIVERSES, and Octavio Solis.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
