photo credit Josh Friewald

Under St. Marks – a dusty, claustrophobic basement space just east of First Ave – offers an almost ideal setting for Beckett Below, a staging of four short works by the late Irish playwright.

Running a taut 75 minutes, these seldom-produced works – Samuel Beckett’s estate demands that not a word be changed – present isolated characters trying desperately to connect to love, dreams, idyllic childhoods, an always precarious ‘reality’ and, in their alternately timid or scathing ways, each other.

Beckett used words sparingly, giving equal or greater weight to pauses, silence and pantomime. It’s no coincidence that his work found brilliant ways to channel the mugging of Bert Lahr (Waiting for Godot ) and the tragic eyes of Buster Keaton (1965’s short movie Film ). To take on the challenges presented by these works, ghostcrab producers Tim Lee and Eve Hartmann have wisely selected a creative team with backgrounds in dance, choreography, mime and opera, as well as the expected Shakespeare and more Beckett.

…creepy and spooky

In Play , the highlight of the evening, three talking, seemingly disembodied heads – eerily lit by a flashlight – sit atop bulbous wooden urns speaking directly to the audience, recounting their sides of a messy marital triangle in rat-a-tat staccato style, interrupted by sudden pauses and even a few hiccups. The effect is by turns cryptic, dryly humorous, and saturated with venom and despair.

The staging of this fascinating piece recalls “The Addams Family,” with the shaved head of David A. Gordon (who has performed with New York City Opera), resembling a philandering Uncle Fester, while the ghoulish makeup of Amanda Boekelheide and Morganne Davies conjure up Macbeth’s witches— faces as unappetizing as the affair they evoke.

Don’t Speak

The dance/choreography background of director Ariane Anthony makes her an excellent choice to stage Act Without Words II , a silent duet in which one man emerges from a cloth sack, performs a morning ritual, attempts to wake another “sleeping sack man,” gives up and returns to the comfort of his bag. Much of the action is repeated when the second actor emerges from an identical sack, performing a more energetic pantomime of the first man’s actions. Both of the excellent performers in this piece, Cedric Neugebauer and Jeff Seal, have dance backgrounds, with Seal having attended Clown College and studied mime in Paris. It’s all put to use.

Somewhat more obscure, or perhaps “challenging” is a better word, Footfalls is held together by Eve Hartmann’s taut direction and the writhing, woeful face of Molly Powell (The Laramie Project ), as May, a lonely, possibly deranged spinster. When not addressing the offstage voice of her unseen elderly mother (Ellen Maddow), May paces the floor, Powell’s maddening energy filling the small room, her burlap sack of a dress brushing back and forth. Whatever the meaning of this piece, the intensity of this actress is mesmerizing.

The evening closes with That Time , in which a bearded, chalk white man resembling a statue of Zeus dressed for battle (Milt Angelopoulos) stands in the light, listening to recorded voices of (presumably) himself, trying to recall the details of scenes from his past, elusive moments of happiness that only return in snatches. Angelopoulous also provides the voices.

A well-conceived, tightly directed evening of intelligent theatre, it’s unfortunate that Beckett Below (which opened November 9) is scheduled for such a short run, leaving little time for lovers of the playwright’s work, much less new audiences, to discover it.

Though he is considered by many the greatest playwright of the 20^th Century, the plays of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) can be infuriating. They leave many audiences cold, confused (often justifiably) and even angry, but they have a strange power. Their very elusiveness makes them troubling and hard to forget, and ghostcrab’s inventive staging, firm grasp of the material, and obvious affection for these short works make Beckett Below well worth a visit.

Beckett Below runs through Saturday, Nov. 18 at Under St. Marks.

94 St. Marks Place (Between 1^st Ave. & Ave.A).

For tickets, call 212-868-4444 or visit