Theater Review Playing Beckett for laughs

By Joseph Hurley

THE COMPLETE LOST WORKS OF SAMUEL BECKETT AS FOUND IN AN ENVELOPE (PARTIALLY BURNED) IN A DUSTBIN IN PARIS LABELED ‘NEVER TO BE PERFORMED. NEVER. EVER. EVER! OR I’LL SUE! I’LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE! The Neo-Futurists/Theater Oobleck of Chicago. At the Present Company Theatorium, 196 Stanton St., NYC. Through Feb. 3.

One of the unalloyed joys of last summer’s New York International Fringe Festival, which lured stage troupes and solo performers from all over the world to a few blocks on the Lower East Side for a 12-day romp, was a visit by the Chicago-based Neo-Futurists and Theater Oobleck, a three-man aggregation performing a kind of intellectual vaudeville bearing one of the lengthiest titles in living memory.

Now, "The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (partially burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled ‘Never to be Performed. Never. Ever. Ever! Or I’ll Sue! I’ll Sue from the Grave!’" is back for a brief run ending this Saturday, at the Present Company Theatorium on Stanton Street.

The show, which won the Fringe’s Overall Excellence Award, is a sporadically inspired send-up of the great Dublin master’s methods and materials. At its best, in three or four of the seven sketches that make up the fast-paced 90-minute bill, it’s hard to see how Beckett himself, famously a fan of the silent screen comics, could fail to be amused and even charmed by the efforts of the trio of Neo-Futurists, Ben Schneider, Danny Thompson and Umit Celebi.

Celebi has replaced Greg Allen, the group’s founder and artistic director, who was part of the production when it debuted at the Fringe, where it quickly became one of the festival’s hottest tickets, selling out every performance.

Allen, Schneider and Thompson are credited with having "reconstructed and performed" the antic, tongue-in-cheek material. The show, which might best be described as resembling a particularly audacious edition of "Monty Python’s Flying Circus," had its Fringe audiences screaming with a breathlessness seldom encountered in the theater, particularly in response to a sketch, one of seven "lost works" attributed to Beckett, called "If."

In the vignette, a gray-wigged hag of indeterminate gender sits in a rocker, wordlessly transfixed by a recording of "If a Picture Paints a Thousand Words," by the 1970s bubblegum band Bread. Each time the song nears its final notes, the specter seems about to expire. Each time, however, the seated figure gains enough strength to cry out a single word, "More!" and the recording begins again, to mounting audience frustration and hilarity. It may be impossible in the future to see Beckett’s "Rockabye" without thinking of the sketch and the song.

Schneider, as the hag, is inspired in his daffiness and, after the fourth go-round of the number, the audience is howling to end it all.

Every segment of the show works to one degree or another, but the opener, "Table Talk," in which a battered Everyman, again played flawlessly by Schneider, a genuinely gifted clown with a poignant stripe, engages in a form of master-slave dialogue with a talking brain that, resembling an uncooked cauliflower, bobbles about, glowing green when agitated, preserved in liquid in a transparent cylinder.

Enjoyable, too, is "Happy Happy Bunny Visits Sad Sad Owl," presented as Beckett’s earliest known work, coming across as a post-apocalyptic Punch-and-Judy show, an exercise in pre-kindergarten malaise as produced by Sammy’s Playhouse, the Foxrock-born master’s earliest showcase.

If the Neo-Futurists’ show seemed funnier at the Fringe than it does on its return trip, it may be a trick of memory or possibly an indication that the absent Greg Allen is missed, and that the event fares better when performed by the three performers who created it.

Whatever the case, "The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett" has its undeniable bright spots, particularly for audience members who know and love the sometimes enigmatic author.