By Geoff Hoff

“In 1964, Samuel Beckett, Buster Keaton and Alan Schneider made a film. That much is true…”

That is the tag on the posters for Theatre of NOTE’s production of Patrick McGowan’s play, Film, and it seems appropriate, as much of the script seems historically inaccurate. This is not necessarily a bad thing; drama, it is said, is “heightened reality” and certainly Beckett, who the play tries in part to emulate, cared very little for reality.

The play is, however, a frustrating mix of moments of sly brilliance and moments of ponderous self-indulgence. It is written by Mr. McGowan and directed by Trevor Biship as a mixture of vaudeville, burlesque, silent movie comedy and Beckettian theatre piece.

Film is the story of Alan Schneider, a stage director completely out of his element as he tries to pull together a twenty-minute, almost silent film called “Film”, written by Beckett and staring Keaton, in which you never see Keaton’s face. Schneider is described as “a man who directs plays no one goes to see”. He is friends with director Mike Nichols (an effectively slick Trevor H. Olsen) and spars with him in very funny vaudevillian stand-up bits about their respective careers where he is finally able to crow that he has a film.

(Here lie some of the historical inaccuracies; in reality, Schneider was the preeminent American director of Beckett’s plays, won several awards and had many successful productions, including the very successful premier of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for which he won a Tony award. He had also already directed a film version of Becket’s Waiting for Godot for television in 1961 staring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel before embarking on Film.)

Schneider is played slightly histrionically by Bill Robens. Phil Ward is wonderfully cast (although his brogue comes and goes) as Beckett. He absolutely looks and feels like what one imagines Beckett did and he has a wonderful, sly and surprising sense of comic timing. Keaton is played both by Carl J. Johnson and, as a young man, by Mandi Moss. Although Mr. Johnson stumbled a bit at the beginning, he was delightful, understated, compassionate and very funny and looks amazingly like the older Keaton. Ms. Moss is fine (although a bit too feminine) as the young, and mostly silent comedian, who first appears, in a very effective blend of film projection and live action, out of a classic bit from one of Keaton’s most memorable screen moments.

As for the play itself, I mentioned moments of sly brilliance, one being a delightful silent film-like chase scene in which Bert Lahr (a very funny Justin Brunsfield), dressed as the Cowardly Lion, chases the young Keaton, which turns (in one of the many delightfully obscure cultural references in the piece) into Androcles and the Lion. (Another subtle cultural reference is that, during the making of the film “Film”, Becket is taking notes for what will eventually become a play called “Play”.) Another bit of brilliance is the moment, in act two, where Schneider, in a single pool of light, is directed to direct in a direct reference to a moment in act one where he directs Keaton to run in place.

One of the moments of ponderous self-indulgence is a dance number, done to a blues song, which contains several odd vaudevillian bits, goes on for far too long and has no discernable point besides its final moment, which is quite funny. Another is an almost painful scene wherein a drunken Beckett, in pseudo-Beckett-like dialogue, tries to win the affections of the prop mistress, Gwen (played very sweetly by the talented Deana Barone.)

When the writer and director remember that they are doing a vaudeville (a form Becket often borrowed from), the play is very compelling, funny and a joy to watch. When they start to get dramatic and “meaningful”, as it does in the second half of act one, it gets very bogged down, melodramatic rather than dramatic. They might remember that neither Beckett nor Keaton cared much for meaning even if that was what they were ultimately searching for.

The set, a multi-layered vaudevillian stage, was well designed by Sarah Palmrose. The video, powerfully combining shots of the cast of the play with classic silent movie clips, was designed by Darrett Sanders. The rest of the cast, Doug Burch and Grayson DeJesus, playing both the film crew and actors in a production of Waiting for Godot, are uniformly good as is expected from Theatre of NOTE productions.

The play is performed Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 7pm through March 21^st, 2009 with a special performance Thursday, February 26^th at 8pm and no performance Sunday February 22^nd.

Theatre of NOTE is located at 1517 Cahuenga (just north of Sunset) in Hollywood, CA.

Ticket prices: $22.00 ($18.00 for seniors and students)

Reservations online at http://www.theatreofnote.com/ or by phone at (323) 856-8611

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The film, Film, can be seen on YouTube, cut into three pieces, here, here and here.