| Abstract |
Few works have divided audience and critical opinion the way Samuel Beckett's play Waiting For Godot did in 1953. Almost immediately, Godot began to turn up in prisons under startling circumstances. The Impossible Itself documents the earliest of these prison performances of Godot--in which German prisoners (some had been Nazis during WWII) took Godot to a Jewish cultural building in 1956. But it is the legendary November 19th, 1957 performance at the San Quentin Prison by the San Francisco Actor's Workshop that is the centerpiece here. Made famous by Martin Esslin's seminal book The Theatre of the Absurd--finally the perspective of those "worried actors" are revealed. Concluding with a surprising epilogue at Beckett's Paris apartment The Impossible Itself documents this essential aspect of author Samuel Beckett's life and work and is "a highly memorable film which adds new material to what is known about Samuel Beckett's best known work." -Professor James Knowlson, author of Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett. |
