EXPLORE Endgame: Life During Wartime
Posted by John Zinn on 5/20/2010
(John is the Marketing Director at Steppenwolf)
“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no fooling around
This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB
I ain’t got time for that now”
Anyone remember THAT song? “Life During Wartime” - Talking Heads. It burst onto the scene in 1979, then reappeared in their live film Stop Making Sense. I used to put on one of my dad’s way-too-big-for-me suits and jerk-dance around to it like David Byrne. As I understand it, it’s about some kind of urban guerrilla movement gaining momentum in NYC - and the protagonist is getting caught up in it - it feels like something that is going to change (or end?) society, and he is reflecting back to when he used to hang at the (now defunct) NYC punk clubs Mudd Club and CBGB. I do miss my punk youth… anyway, I was thinking about it as I was putting together the EXPLORE event for Endgame, which happens this Friday. How do you put together a rockin’ party for Samuel Beckett’s Endgame? Well, it turns out that you think about “Life During Wartime.”
I wanted to make sure I respected Endgame’s message - and got myself stuck into planning a lecture. Once I left that behind and shook off any notion of the “right” way to approach it, it made much more sense - and was way more fun. And I think that maybe there is something in that in how you approach this play: don’t go in thinking there is some message you “have” to get; there is some way it “must” be received. Once you let that go, it is a play that can be received on any number of personal or philosophical levels, and our audiences are finding how VERY pertinent it is to their lives - each of them in very different ways. Which makes for great conversation over drinks after the show.
Just like in “Life During Wartime,” the characters in Endgame think back over the beauty of the past, while slowly turning to face or embrace or brace for… the present, where nothing much is left.
“Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?” – “Life During Wartime”
“There are no more bicycle wheels” - Endgame
It occurs to me that people want to do two things in tough times (not only wartime, but recession, upheaval, times of intense change, etc.): 1) be together and 2) understand what is happening.
On some small scale, I hope EXPLORE is doing this: provide a place & time to hang out with friends and explore together the amazing ideas in these plays, especially in the case of an author like Samuel Beckett. We have some truly fantastic artists coming to help guide us: some guys from Theater Oobleck and The Neo-Futurists who are reviving a piece of their very funny, inventive, wildly acclaimed show about Beckett with the 35-word title; a fun, cool dance piece from local favorites Lucky Plush; and some really beautiful Beckett inspired music from the hip Chicago folk/rock band Square the Circle. Plus food, drinks, atmosphere and a little Beckett crash course. Join us. This ain’t no disco. This is EXPLORE.