The Pan Pan Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Embers,” currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its annual Next Wave Festival, veers toward the boundaries of theatrical production. Really, it’s hardly a theatrical production at all.
Which makes sense, since “Embers,” written by Beckett in 1957 (roughly a decade after he wrote “Waiting for Godot”), was created as a radio play, first broadcast on the BBC in June of 1959 and appearing in the pages of the Evergreen Review later that same year. Much of the work he was creating around this time — including “All That Fall” and “Krapp’s Last Tape,” among others — for the radio and the stage involved a process of stripping away theatrical conventions. The result was a refined version of his already minimalist style, where stage directions were spoken as dialogue, sound was pushed toward the foreground and became part of the rhythmic fabric of the piece, and repetition was embraced, sometimes abrasively and other times comically.
The other way the Pan Pan Theatre’s production of “Embers” tests the audience’s preconceptions of theatrical spectacle is in the complete removal of actors from the stage. Our only glimpse of actors is in the play’s first minute, which begins before the house lights even go down and features a group of seemingly random men and women wandering on the stage before one of them removes a sheet covering a large object, revealing a giant skull.
This skull, which sits in the middle of the stage and does not move, is where the action takes place. Around it hang wires that resemble icicles dangling from a ledge, and the only thing that signals the shifting of time is the light, which subtly slides through different configurations. The first voice we hear, and the voice that dominates the next 60 minutes of the production, is that of Henry, speaking into the void. We see nothing, only hear his anguished conversations with himself and others (his wife, mainly, although he rambles on about his deceased father and his annoying daughter), although it’s never clear if what we’re hearing is happening in some present day narrative or strung together through a variety of memories, reconstructed for our benefit.
And somehow, despite the absence of bodies and a discernable narrative, the entire production is never tiresome (although undoubtedly more than an hour of this would begin to wear an audience down). You’re never less than engaged, partly due to the unreliability and strangeness of what’s happening, and the Pan Pan Theatre group is wise enough to not only stick closely to what Beckett has on the page, but to push it further. In a world of theater that is dominated by revivals and formulaic new productions, it’s exciting to see something that truly moves from one moment to the next without any idea of which direction its heading. We just have to go back almost 60 years to find it.
