MISERY LOVES COMPANY

For fans of Samuel Beckett, the Lincoln Center Festival is offering more kicks than pricks, importing this trilogy of solo plays conceived by Dublin’s Gate Theater. Ralph Fiennes stars in First Love, based on a 1960s novella, about a destitute man and the strange woman he encounters. Liam Neeson is harangued by an unseen female voice in Eh, Joe, adapted from the teleplay by filmmaker Atom Egoyan. And the Irish actor Barry McGovern, perhaps the finest interpreter of Beckett’s work, offers I’ll Go On, his distillation of the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. In enacting that latter work, he’ll play a figure without nose, eyes, or genitals, yet McGovern insists:, “Some people think of Beckett as a very negative writer. I think he’s a positive writer.” We’re positively thrilled to see the triptych.

July 16-25, 2008