Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)  was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, to a middle-class Protestant family of comfortable means. He attended the prestigious Portora Royal School and Trinity College, where he excelled in French and Italian, then taught briefly at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he moved in the circle of artists and writers around James Joyce and began writing prose and poetry. He traveled widely in Europe in the 1930s—including Germany under the Nazis—and ultimately settled in Paris for the rest of his life. In 1946, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work with the French Resistance.

Feeling that WWII had wasted his precious time and energies, Beckett withdrew into creative seclusion afterwards, producing a torrent of astonishingly powerful and original prose, including the introspective, formally challenging, darkly hilarious novel trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. These books—written in French, in which Beckett said it was easier to write “without style”—were ignored or dismissed when they appeared, then later hailed as paradigm-changing masterpieces and literary landmarks.

Beckett first turned to drama as a break from the novel-writing he considered his real work, but it soon became much more than a sideline. The international success of Waiting for Godot—his play about two tramp-like characters filling time while waiting for someone who never comes, premiered in 1953—made him a public figure and ensured his continued involvement in theater despite his shyness and distaste for publicity. He went on to refine his dramatic vision in Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape and many other plays that featured similarly castoff, ambiguously fictional characters trapped in starkly desolate and symbolic situations. These works permanently altered the Western world’s perception of the nature and purpose of dramatic art. Beckett received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 and at his death two decades later was widely considered the 20th century’s greatest dramatist.

BILL CAMP Broadway: The Crucible (Tony nomination), Death of a Salesman (Drama Desk nomination), Coram Boy, Heartbreak House, The Seagull. Off-Broadway: Homebody/Kabul (Obie Award Winner), The Misanthrope. Regional: Co-Adaptor and lead for In a Year With 13 Moons (Yale Rep) and Notes From the Underground (TFANA at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Yale Rep, La Jolla Playhouse), Olly’s Prison. Film: Dark Waters, Joker, The Kitchen, Native Son, Molly’s Game. Television: “The Queen’s Gambit” (SAG nomination), “The Night Of” (Emmy nomination), “The Outsider.”

 

JOANNE AKALAITIS is a theatre director and writer who has won six OBIE Awards for direction (and sustained achievement) and a Drama Desk Award. She is a co-founder of Mabou Mines and a former Artistic Director of The Public Theater. Akalaitis has staged works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Janacek, Philip Glass, Beckett, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, and María Irene Fornés, in addition to her own work. Akalaitis was the Andrew Mellon Co-Chair of the first directing programs at The Julliard School, chair of the Theater program at Bard College, and the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair of the Theater at Fordham University.