Not I

This weekend, I read Samuel Beckett's extended monologue “Not I”. It had a particularly forceful impact on me. Reading the monologue, I took in the frantic nature of the lines, but I knew how different it would feel watching it performed. When performed, the actress’ body is completely obscured except for her lips, so when watched, it appears that the only object on stage is a pair of lipsticked...lips. When read, it's easy to follow the loose story of a woman and her repeated experiences. The lines are read at breakneck speed and are almost unintelligible. What was remarkable, was that Beckett captured the way that humans inner dialogue sounds like. It is relentless. It never stops talking. From personal experience, when I recall an event, I run over it multiple times, the same way the actress repeats the lines of her traumatic experiences. Theater has always had a different response to me than written prose has. Not that it is superior, it just serves a different purpose. To watch the pair of lips release the never ending dialogue, my own began to speak up. It’s almost deafening. Beckett has that gift of showing humans what they least like to see. I read in an interview that the audience tried to leave and escape out the door or to the bathrooms. Beckett had anticipated this and locked the doors and took out the lightbulbs in the bathrooms so that the only thing the audience members experienced for those fifteen minutes was the buzz of the lips and total darkness. Theater gives a tangible event to analyze, while written works leave it to the reader’s imagination. The reader only gets out as much as they put in, while theater forces the audience member to take in what’s happening. By comparing and contrasting that two, I don’t mean to rank them. Sometimes, certain messages have to be placed in different ways to be effectively sent across from creator to observer.