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Show "An Evening with Samuel Beckett" at SUSC "An Evening With Samuel Beckett," a compilation of the contemporary playwright's works by Southern Utah State Collgee theater instructor Joseph Gilg, will begin this weekend at SUSC. Performances will be held Friday and Saturday, and again February 1-3, beginning each evening at 8:15 p.m. in the SUSC auditorium. "Samuel Beckett is considered by many to be one of the most influential playwright's of the 20th century, but theater audiences don't see much of his work because his pieces are generally very short," Gilg said. Under Gilg's direction, a cast of nine SUSC students will present excerpts from Beckett's novels, short plays, short stories, full- length plays and radio plays. Tickets for the winter quarter production are on sale at the SUSC box office, 586-4411, extension 234, each weekday from 1-5 p.m. and on the days of performance from l p.m. until curtain-time curtain-time that evening. "We're doing the show to expose Beckett's work to the audience, but also, in a larger sense, for the department to explore and experiment with new acting techniques and actor-audience actor-audience relationships," the director said. "The production is being constructed as a type of aud ience-pa rticipa tion situation," he said, "not in the sense that the audience must actually perform, but in the sense that it works emotionally and intellectually in-tellectually with actors." "This audience participation par-ticipation results from the close proximity of the actors to the audience. When the actors speak, they speak directly to the audience," he explained. "An Evening With Samuel Beckett" contains no logical sequence of pieces as in a regular scripted play, but a series of short dramatizations drama-tizations which will form a cohesive theatrical experience, ex-perience, the director said. "One of the most exciting things about the play is to manipulate the emotional and psychological impact of each particular piece," Gilg said. Each actor must play many different roles and often must develop a totally differnet character in a matter of minutes. "Jacques Brell is Alive and Living in Paris" and "Spoonriver Anthrology" are two other plays recently presented at SUSC in which actors played multiple characters. "It is really difficult to let me audience Know what to PRODUCTION READY. Robin Steep. Pavsnn. as Hamm in an excerpt from Samuel Beckett's "Eng Game" which will be presented January 26 - 27, and February 1 - 3 at SUSC. "An Evening With Samuel Beckett" will include pieces from many of the contemporary playwright's works. expectln this performance," Gilg said. "The most exciting ex-citing thing is to have audience come into the theater with no preconceptions, precon-ceptions, the idea that anything can, and maybe will happen." "The show is training for both students and the audience, a chance to experience ex-perience the different theories and practices of theater in the 1970's," he said. "Beckett isn't interested in making an earth shaking point. He offers no solutions to problems. You don't leave the theater thinking that you'll be a better person because you saw his work," Gilg explained. "It is an experience of two hours time and the things that happen within that two-hour framework. |