Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Letters from Alvina Krause: Summer 1977

Context
Besides directing Arms and the Man in Ft. Lauderdale, I played Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. This post is an excerpt from a longer letter dealing with her Bloomsburg students.

Letter
[....]

If an audience does not look with you into the far distance and see nothing you fail. I suggest you play in black darkness and try to see light. If your audience sees a nuclear cloud rising -- good.
The comedy springs from the incongruity of two tramps, two naive humans concerned with a banana and the need for a toilet are faced with profundities -- Charlie Chaplin and a nuclear bomb -- You -- David -- washed up on a desert isle -- you need food -- why? -- shelter -- why? But you can't remember the end of "King Lear": Waiting for -- what? Godot. Never forget that empty waiting. So you eat a banana, take off a shoe, rub a corn, talk, take off a coat, put it on again -- endlessly waiting -- for what? And in come Pozzo -- money -- money -- and a slave remembering all the things he has forgotten -- with no association with realities. -- Some rehearsal play it as a nightmare more real than reality --
The summer was a curious one, but wound up with three final hours of work that make hope flame again.
[... Further discussion of her students -- DD....]

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