From New York to Savannah, actor Bill Irwin is still waiting on Godot with 'On Beckett'

Master clown, choreographer, director, Tony Award winning actor, and all-around legend of the stage and screen, Bill Irwin has been chewing on the works of Samuel Beckett his entire career.

Irwin may be best known for his (mostly) silent, hilariously limber physical performances in Broadway shows like "The Regard of Flight," or "Fool Moon" and "Old Hats" with his clowning partner David Shiner, but the words of Beckett have always loomed heavily in his mind.

Savannah Repertory Theatre is bringing Irwin to Savannah for a four day run of his acclaimed show "On Beckett" where for 90 minutes Irwin will share his ruminations on the comic and tragic qualities of Beckett’s work, as well as how he physically and verbally brings the author’s words to life.

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“It’s a difficult evening to describe, even though it’s quite a simple evening,” said Irwin.

“Let me say this, there is a certain point in life where pretty much anything you do is partly taking stock of what your life has been, and taking a look at what your story is, and whether your story might have any interest or usefulness to anybody else. It’s from that grounding that this theater piece came into being. It’s me sharing with an audience some passages from a writer’s work whom I find really important. I don’t always like him. Mr. Beckett’s work is a love/hate relationship, but I’m very much in thrall to this writing.

“I’m looking back at lots and lots of years, decades, of speaking his language on stage, putting his language into my head and thinking about it, being Irish-American, and in many ways it’s a look back especially through the lens of physical comedy.”

Irwin has decades of experience with Beckett including playing the role of Lucky in a 1988 production of "Waiting on Godot" with Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and F. Murray Abraham. Then in 2009, Irwin took on the role of Vladimir opposite Nathan Lane’s Estragon.

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“It’s a mysterious play, it’s great play, it’s a play I would love to return to, and on certain days I could happily never look at it again,” said Irwin. “That’s the kind of deep, intense mixture of feeling I feel about Beckett’s writing.”

As one of the greatest clowns in the world, Irwin has an affinity for the comic qualities in Beckett’s existential masterpiece.

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“Baggy pants comedy has a particular connection to Samuel Beckett's writing,” said Irwin. “I’m not sure I can say what it is, I just know it exists.”

Irwin had already performed "Waiting for Godot" before creating the Tony Award-winning "Fool Moon" in 1993 with David Shiner, but the two fools he and Shiner portray may have unconsciously been influenced by Beckett.

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“I had done the play many times by the time we started putting 'Fool Moon' together, and I’ve done it more since, but the play is something many of us actors continue to come back to from time to time,” explained Irwin. “Once you’ve read the play and been affected by it, or infected by it, pretty much everything you do in theater has some connection to this wonderful and weird and hard to define play.

“The muscle that exists in Beckett’s writing, because he sort of revolutionized 20th century playwriting, he brought baggy pants clowning into the dramatic realm. He brought huge physical energy into the theater, and he also brought a poetic language back into the theater.”

“Just the act of putting on baggy pants or an over-sized costume, it transforms both the viewer’s eye and transforms the person. I’ve seen it with people who have spent their lives in theater and people who have never worked in the theater. You put on a baggy costume and something happens. That’s why that genre, that deep long tradition has developed. Beckett was clearly thinking about these traditions, which he grew up on because the Beckett family went to the variety theater, what we’d call vaudeville, all the time. They saw wild baggy pants comedy, and in his most famous play, indeed a character’s pants fall down within the last minutes. You can barely hear a pin drop, you can barely hear a breathe being taken in when the play is done, but sure enough a guy’s pants fall down in the last minutes.”

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When Irwin isn’t clowning on the stage (or as Mr. Noodle on Elmo’s World), he can be seen in film and television playing against type as serial killers, mobsters, or superheroes on shows like "CSI," "Lights Out," and "Legion." In fact, just before coming to Savannah, Irwin shot more scenes as Dr. Peter Lindstrom on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

“I am so looking forward to it,” said Irwin. “Television — if Samuel Beckett were my age today, in this current time, I’m sure he would be working in television. That said, that’s traitorous talk from a theater actor, but God bless Savanah Rep and Ryan McCurdy, the artistic director there, for creating an equity company in Savannah. It is so exciting for a New Yorker to hear this.”

Sometimes it seems like a miracle seeing Irwin flop around comically on stage in one show and then earn a Tony Award for Best Actor for his riveting performance in "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" acting opposite Kathleen Turner.

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“One of the great gifts and challenges of my theater life, I’m standing there going toe-to-toe with Kathleen in this truly great, weird, but truly great play and up in the balcony you could hear a sneeze just isolated in time and space,” recalled Irwin.

“Now if that were 'Fool Moon,' and I was standing on stage with David Shiner, I wouldn't even have to look at him, I know he is doing a take up to the balcony and I do one with him and we do some kind of reaction to that sneeze happening at that moment in the life of the theater. The storytelling in 'Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe,' which is full of immediacy and is one of the funniest plays ever written,...it’s like playing baseball and football. You don’t use those muscles where you take to the audience. It’s like you’re onstage with the audience, but you’re not including them in the same way. There are different sets of muscles, there are different forms, but, ultimately it’s all the same thing. It’s a bunch of people in a room gathered together to hear a common story told.”

Irwin wanted to dispel any notions that his show about Beckett is going to be all seriousness about a serious writer. After all, he is still a clown.

“Can I just say that the 90 minute theater piece called On Beckett, it’s a lot of things, but I’m not earning my money if it doesn’t have quite a bit of comedy in it,” said Irwin. “Beckett was drawn to comedy. His writing, his plays, are in many ways a distillation of vaudeville, and you can spend a whole life trying to figure out how that may work. I hope people will be laughing a fair amount at the Savannah Cultural Arts Center.”

IF YOU GO

What: Bill Irwin presents 'On Beckett'

When: Thursday through Sunday

Where: Savannah Cultural Arts Center, 201 Montgomery St.

Cost: $25-35

Info: savannahrep.org