Inside A.C.T.

By Simon Hodgson With On Beckett opening at The Strand Theater tonight, we caught up with master clown and A.C.T. favorite Bill Irwin to talk about his five decades immersed in the words of Samuel Beckett. Back in December 2015, Irwin performed On Beckett in a brief engagement of three shows—all of which sold out. Now he’s back at The Strand for a longer run. “The Strand is a good box for this package,” he says. “It’s a space with a good sweet spot in relation to the audiences’s seats. It feels right in size, physical contours, and checkered history. It’s the right spot for the sharing I have in mind.” Bill Irwin. Photo courtesy of Concept Artists. How does your clowning experience inform your performance of Beckett’s work? It’s as much instinct as anything else. These two threads of work—baggy-pants comedy and Samuel Beckett’s writing—they just seem to connect. Beckett and his family went to the variety theater often; a point which his biographers make. His descriptions of...

By Simon Hodgson Bill Irwin. Photo courtesy of Bill Irwin. Bill Irwin may be best known to Bay Area audiences as a master clown, but he has also spent five decades immersed in the words of Samuel Beckett. It was in the late ’60s, as a student at UCLA, that he was introduced to Beckett’s language. In 1987, after exchanging brief letters with the playwright, Irwin met Beckett in Paris. The following year, Irwin joined Steve Martin and Robin Williams in Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center Theater. Over the last two decades, Irwin and A.C.T. have developed a partnership for his Beckett explorations. In 2001, he performed Texts for Nothing at The Geary Theater, and in 2012, he followed up with Endgame , directed by Carey Perloff. On Beckett represents his third and most personal Beckett collaboration with A.C.T. The idea began to take shape three years ago. After a handful of performances around Seattle in 2014, Irwin presented the embryonic production the following year in th...