Unfolding across Thomas Dunn’s lush, stage-spanning, and pole-wrapping (!!) village diorama, Mabou Mines’ production of Beckett’s radio play All That Fall ran as part of Under the Radar Festival. Ethan Karas spoke with director JoAnne Akalaitis to talk Beckett, Cape Breton Island’s Salmon Museum, and Do-It-Yourself theater.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ethan Karas: This is now the 10th Beckett production that Mabou has done. What keeps drawing you back to Beckett?
JoAnne Akalaitis: It’s like a no-brainer. They think it’s all about existential angst. It’s not. First of all, it’s great writing. It’s very funny. It’s always new. It always kind of wakes you up. It’s endlessly rich. He’s endlessly rich. What really matters is that he gets it and his morbid humor, combined with this great writing, complicated structure, and deep compassion…irresistible.
Ethan: What were the things about All That Fall that drew you to putting this piece up specifically?
JoAnne: It’s just a terrific play. It’s a whodunnit, it’s his first woman protagonist. And the fact that it was a radio play, and that we had to do something that none of us knew how to do. None of us knew how to do this. I’m exhausted, and I would say rather, I don’t wanna use the word “disillusioned” because it’s so negative, but I am wary of New York audiences because they kind of come knowing it all, especially what the New York Times tells them. And I wanted to do a piece that invited the audience to work hard. And what I find is that they don’t have to work so hard because Beckett is so generous, and also the designers are so brilliant.
Ethan: Were there things as a director that felt like pushing you out of your comfort zone?
JoAnne: Well, as a director, I’m never in my comfort zone. I always feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I decided to work with the actors, not as if we’re making a recording. We rehearsed this as a play. Not blocking, but moving around. The recording came at the very last minute. I think they were wonderful. Their work was inspiring and heroic to me. I think most of them had never been in a Beckett play, and that made it even more fun.
Ethan: Do you feel like, for Beckett with actors, that there’s a certain expectation or a certain weight that they feel that these actors were free from having not performed Beckett before?
JoAnne: Look, performing Beckett is really hard because it’s like doing a very complicated string quartet. It’s music. One could say that it’s quite technical. So all of those silences and pauses, they are part of the language of the piece- they speak. So what is the difference between a silence and a pause? That takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of courage to find what happens in the silence, because the silence isn’t being silent. Something is happening. It’s not that everything goes away; something different happens, and that’s unusual in writing.
Ethan: When you’re rehearsing it in a room with actors, that process of finding the pulse or the rhythm, what does that look like for you in the room for this play?
JoAnne: Well, the only thing that we didn’t do was block it, but we rehearsed it, we went over the beats, we went over…you know, the usual stuff, only this may be harder because this particular play has all these pauses and silences, and then there are no pauses and silences. It’s really two plays: a play of the life of the village, and then a play of a terrifying relationship, which is also hilariously funny, between a doomed couple.
Ethan: Were there any things invented in the room that surprised or challenged some of your preconceptions about Beckett or the play itself?
JoAnne: I mean, that happens all the time. I don’t have any preconceptions about any play, really. What actors do always astonishes and surprises me. I don’t have much to say to them, it’s just the way it is. Actors are not there to interpret the play. They’re there to react to the play and to invite the audience to join in what I call a kind of Jungian subconscious playground in which the audience and the performers meet in a very special place, in a magical place that only happens in theater.
Ethan: All That Fall is written as a radio play, but the presentation of that radio play is something that’s up to interpretation. How did you arrive at this expansive diorama of this town?
JoAnne: We went through a lot of ideas, you know, some very abstract and minimalist…you know, objects talkings. I was inspired by going to the Salmon Museum at Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, which is perhaps my favorite museum in the world. There’s a diorama of the Margaree River. Dioramas are interesting because they ask you to use your imagination, and that was the inspiration.
What was interesting was to not make it all to scale. Then it becomes sort of adorable, a little Celtic fairytale as opposed to a real railroad track, a real broken bike, a real old tire. That opened the door to tremendous creativity.
For me, there’s something kind of endearingly old-fashioned about theater. I really wanted a noisy carousel projector, like a dopey projector. And for the pre-show, this guy I know up in Nova Scotia gave us like a hundred old negatives. From you know, regular people. And I thought that they were so wonderful because this is not the fancy production. And the noise when he takes the projector off, the noise that the cart makes, I thought, we have to cut that. Then a couple of people said that was brilliant, that it was so noisy. They were all working on making it quiet, I said, keep it noisy, because it has that kind of…Do-It-Yourself theater!
JoAnne Akalaitis is a theater director, writer and founding member of Mabou Mines, whose first Beckett Production, Cascando (1976) was sited as “proof that the Mabou Mines is one of the most original experimental companies in the United States” by Mel Gussow of the New York Times. Outside of Mabou Mines she went on to direct Beckett’s Endgame and Beckett Shorts that included Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Eh Joe, and Rough For Theatre I. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Edwin Booth Award, and a Rosamund Gilder Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre. Akalaitis is the former Artistic Director of The Public Theater and has staged works by María Irene Fornés, Kroetz, Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Janacek, Philip Glass, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter in addition to her own work. She has received six OBIE Awards for direction (and Sustained Achievement), a Drama Desk Award and in 2023 was inducted into the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association Theater Hall of Fame.
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