Famed actor Bill Irwin unpacks a legendary playwright in new SF show

Try as he might, Bill Irwin can’t get his mind off Samuel Beckett.

In his solo show “On Beckett” playing for just five days at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, the veteran clown and equally masterful actor attempts to unpack the intricacies of the notoriously challenging Irish playwright’s themes and language and his own relationship to them, reciting examples of Beckett’s work along the way.

“I find that as I’ve gotten older, both my Irishness and my response to Beckett’s writing are hard to put aside, and they’re more on my mind,” he says when asked what inspired him to create this piece. “I had so much Samuel Beckett language in my head that I needed somehow to cope. When I memorize Shakespeare, it goes away after the play’s over, but the Beckett language has stayed with me. So it was partly a coping mechanism and partly a desire to look with an audience at where Beckett’s language and the clown traditions intersect, and maybe how they don’t.”

Irwin’s first exposure to Beckett’s work was as a freshman in college.

“The first thing I ever read was a play called ‘Act Without Words I,’” he recalls. “Back in those days, they would just hand you, or you had to go and purchase at the bookstore, a big heavy anthology. And thumbing through it, there’s this little short play by somebody named Samuel Beckett. A little while later, I went to Cal Arts, and a wonderful scholar named Ruby Cohn was there. She was a personal friend of Beckett’s and one of the foremost scholars on his work, and she guided us in the reading of the ‘Godot’ play.”

In 1988 Irwin costarred with Steve Martin and Robin Williams in “Waiting for Godot” on Broadway, playing the very physical role of the servant Lucky. It was the first of five productions of “Godot” that he’s done to date.

While he was preparing for that Broadway run, Irwin actually had an opportunity to meet Beckett, who died in 1989.

“I was so overwrought and so shy, and he was, in many ways, a very shy man,” Irwin says. “So we sat in this little diner in Paris, which is where he mostly met people, and kind of mumbled across to each other. At that time in my life I didn’t know the writing well enough at all to take up his time. Now I wish I could sit with him, because now my immersion in the writing is great.”

Originally from Santa Monica, Irwin was one of the first clowns in San Francisco’s legendary Pickle Family Circus in the 1970s and went on to become a familiar presence on film, TV and stages all over the world. On Broadway he’s won two Tony Awards, one for his clown show “Fool Moon” with David Shiner and one for Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Irwin has played ACT many times before, with his clown shows “Fool Moon” and “Old Hats,” his Molière adaptation “Scapin,” and in Beckett’s “Texts for Nothing” and “Endgame.” Just this January he guest-starred there in a couple performances of the hip-hop improv show “Freestyle Love Supreme.”

He first developed “On Beckett” at ACT in two short runs at The Strand in 2015 and 2017 before its official premiere off-Broadway with Irish Repertory Theatre in 2018. Now he brings this more polished version of the piece to ACT’s mainstage, the historic Geary Theater that was renamed the Toni Rembe Theater just a few weeks ago.

Way back in 1974, he recalls, he worked as a night watchman in a hotel across the street from the theater’s stage door on Mason Street.

“I moved to San Francisco sometime in the early dawn of the ’70s,” Irwin says. “And it still is my home, somehow spiritually. It is always an artistic home for me, and that’s why it’s going to be a thrill to step onto the Geary stage with this very personal evening.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.