Bill Irwin, the Clown Who Conquered Broadway—and Samuel Beckett

The clown still lives within Bill Irwin. You can see this at New York City’s Irish Repertory Theater where Irwin, a movie, TV, and Tony-winning theater actor and pre-eminent interpreter of Samuel Beckett’s work, is playing Clov in Beckett’s Endgame (to March 12), the jittery servant of the blind, domineering Hamm (John Douglas Thompson). Clov’s body looks painfully elastic and broken, his limbs just about carrying him across the stage and up and down ladders at physically jarring angles.

What ecological catastrophe has occurred outside? What of Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell (Joe Grifasi and Patrice Johnson Chevannes), dwelling like pop-up figures in garbage bins to the left of Hamm’s wheelchair? Is there any way out for any of them? Do they even want to leave? As ever with Beckett, the interpretation game is all yours.

Irwin’s life and career have been as fascinating as the dense thicket of Beckett’s words. He won a Tony Award playing opposite Kathleen Turner in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway; his solo stage show On Beckett is an illuminating master-study of Beckett’s work and themes.

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