The Beckett Trilogy is made possible in part by Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater.

This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center.

Friday–Saturday, November 3–4, 2017 at 7:00 pm Sunday, November 5, 2017 at 3:00 pm

The Beckett Trilogy (New York premiere)

Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable By Samuel Beckett

Gare St. Lazare IrelandConor Lovett, ActorJudy Hegarty Lovett, DirectorSimon Bennison, Lighting Design

Molloy

Intermission

Malone Dies

(Pause)

The Unnamable

This performance is approximately 3 hours long, including one intermission.

Please join the artists for a White Light Lounge following the performance onFriday, November 3.

WhiteLightFestival.org

The Duke on 42nd Streeta NEW 42ND STREET® project

Please make certain all your electronic devicesare switched off.

American Airlines is the Official Airline of LincolnCenter

Nespresso is the Official Coffee of Lincoln Center

NewYork-Presbyterian is the Official Hospital ofLincoln Center

Artist Catering provided by Zabar’s and Zabars.com

“Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable” bySamuel Beckett presented through special arrange-ment with Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of The Estate of Samuel Beckett. All rights reserved.

UPCOMING WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL EVENTS:

Wednesday, November 8 at 7:30 pm in the RoseTheaterThe Moth: Blinded by the LightA diverse group of storytellers share moments ofillumination.This show is presented by The Moth in partnershipwith Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.

Thursday, November 9 at 7:30 pm at Church of theAscensionDarkness and Light (U.S. premiere)Bernard Foccroulle, organLynette Wallworth, videoWorks by BACH, BUXTEHUDE, MESSIAEN,GRIGNY, ALAIN, TOSHIO HOSOKAWA, BERNARDFOCCROULLE, and SOFIA GUBAIDULINA

Wednesday, November 15 at 7:30 pm in the Rose TheaterThe Routes of Slavery Jordi Savall, directorJohn Douglas Thompson, narratorHespèrion XXILa Capella Reial de Catalunya The Fairfield FourJordi Savall and international artists representingEurope, Africa, and the Americas explore the extra-ordinary resilience of the human spirit.

For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visitWhiteLightFestival.org. Call the Lincoln Center InfoRequest Line at (212) 875-5766 to learn aboutprogram cancellations or to request a White LightFestival brochure.

Visit WhiteLightFestival.org for full festival listings.

Join the conversation: #WhiteLightFestival

We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members.

In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leavebefore the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking of photographsand the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building.

WhiteLightFestival.org

Director’s NoteBy Judy Hegarty Lovett

I first directed Conor Lovett in Molloy as asolo work in London in 1996 and at theEdinburgh Festival the same year. We thenpresented Malone Dies at Kilkenny ArtsFestival in 1999 and added The Unnamablethe following year in a three-hour perfor-mance we called The Beckett Trilogy. Inall, the staging of these three novels per-colated over a five-year period and inspireda further exploration by us into Beckett’stexts for many years to come. We hope formany more.

No other writer equals Beckett’s reach forme. Every sentence is, as Irish Beckettscholar Gerry Dukes puts it, “a languageevent.” Beckett is a master of his craftwith the widest lens and sharpest apertureat hand. With him I can face into the dark-ness and see the light. I come away withmore always. Beckett steers with a quietconfidence into the deep. I love the wayEnglish playwright Harold Pinter describedhis attention to detail: “He leaves no stoneunturned and no maggot lonely.”

The Trilogy puts us at the center of all thatmatters and asks us to question endlessly.These questions form part of a quest insearch of the self. They eliminate theworld of others until we finally hear thevoice alone, that inner voice we all have.It’s an incredibly daring work of art and awonderfully successful one.

On a very simple reading, Molloy consistsof two stories (two sides of the same oneperhaps) where a man goes out into theworld as a stranger in his own town andanother goes out into the world to find astranger who has come to town. MaloneDiesmight be seen as an instance of a sto-ryteller trying and failing to tell a story. Andin The Unnamable, a voice speaks, know-ing that he has no hope of telling a storyand that all stories have failed. Of course,there are many, many more layers avail-able to the reader, depending on her owngrasp of things therein, and this makes thenovels even more impressive. What isclear is that mastery of form even as itbreaks new ground and the great warmthand compassion of its creator even as hetopples, brick by brick, the foundations ofWestern understanding and broadens theboundaries and clears the way for us all.

Collaboration has been the hallmark of mytime on Beckett’s work. Together withConor Lovett, as well as many other excep-tionally talented artists, we have honed astyle that avoids character representationand instead situates the speaker in a roomwith you the audience, creating an experi-ential performance that allows the writingto shine and Beckett’s voice to cry out.

—Copyright © 2017 by Judy Hegarty Lovett

Please turn to page 64 for an article on inter-preting Samuel Beckett’s prose for stage.

Samuel BeckettBy Mel Gussow

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) was a tower-ing figure in drama and fiction who alteredthe course of contemporary theater. Hisplays became the cornerstone of 20th-century theater beginning with Waiting forGodot, which was first produced in 1953.As the play’s two tramps wait for a salvation that never comes, they exchangevaudeville routines and metaphysical musings—and comedy rises to tragedy.

At the root of his art was a philosophy of thedeepest yet most courageous pessimism,exploring man’s relationship with his God.With Beckett, one searched for hope amiddespair and continued living with a kind ofstoicism, as illustrated by the final words ofhis novel, The Unnamable: “You must goon, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Or as he wrotein Worstward Ho, one of his later works offiction: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Beckett wrote six novels, four long playsand dozens of shorter ones, volumes ofstories and narrative fragments, some ofwhich were short novels. He wrote poetryand essays on the arts, including an essayabout Marcel Proust (one of his particularfavorites), radio and television plays, andprose pieces he called residua and disjecta.In 1969 the Irish author, who wrote first inEnglish and later in French, received theNobel Prize in Literature.

For more than 50 years Beckett lived in hisadopted city of Paris. Though he wrotemost of his work in French, he remaineddefinably Irish in his voice, manner, andhumor. Even in his final years, when helived in a nursing home in Paris, he joinedfriends in a sip of Irish whisky, whichseemed to warm his bones and open him togreater conviviality. In no way could Beckettever be considered an optimist though. Inan often repeated story, on a glorioussunny day he walked jauntily through aLondon park with an old friend and exuded

a feeling of joy. The friend said it was thekind of day that made one glad to be alive.Beckett responded, ‘‘I wouldn’t go that far.’’

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born inFoxrock, a suburb of Dublin, on GoodFriday, April 13, 1906 (that date is some-times disputed; it is said that on his birthcertificate the date is May 13). He majoredin French and Italian at Trinity College,Dublin. At school he excelled both in hisstudies and in sports, playing cricket andrugby. He received his Bachelor of Artsdegree in 1927 and his Master of Artsdegree in 1931.

In 1938, while walking with friends on aParis street, he was stabbed with a knifeby a panhandler. A young piano studentnamed Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnilcame to his rescue and telephoned for anambulance. One of his lungs was perfo-rated and the knife narrowly missed hisheart. Beckett fully recovered from thewound but it left psychological scars.When he asked his assailant the reason forthe assault, the man replied, “Je ne saispas, Monsieur.” More than ever, Beckettbecame aware of the randomness of life.The episode had one other long-rangingeffect: He began a lifelong relationshipwith Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom hemarried in Folkestone, England, in 1961.With her, he chose to remain in France dur-ing World War II rather than return to thesafety of Ireland.

In the last year of his life, Beckett lived in asmall, barely furnished room of a nursinghome. He had a television set on which hewatched major tennis and soccer events,and several books, including his boyhoodcopy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian.He died on December 22, 1989.

—Excerpted from The New York Times, Decem -ber 27, 1989 © 1989 The New York Times. Allrights reserved. Used by permission and pro-tected by the Copyright Laws of the UnitedStates. The printing, copying, redistribution, orretransmission of this Content without expresswritten permission is prohibited.

WhiteLightFestival.org

—”Her Beckett” from DECREATION: POETRY, ESSAYS, OPERA by Anne Carson,copyright © 2005 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, animprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin RandomHouse LLC. All rights reserved.

For poetry comments and suggestions, please writeto programming@LincolnCenter.org.

Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece byBeckett.

You know that sense of sinking through crust, the low black oh no of the little room with walls too close, so knowable.Clink and slow fade of toys that belong in memorybut wrongly appear here, vagrant and suffocated on a page of pain, Worse she says when I ask.And as in Beckett some high humor grazes

her eye— “we went out rowing on Lake Como”— not quite reaching the lip. Our love, that half-mad firebrand, races once around the roomwhipping everything

and hides again.

Illumination

Her BeckettBy Anne Carson

Meet the Artists

Conor Lovett is joint artistic director of GareSt. Lazare Ireland with director JudyHegarty Lovett. He trained at ÉcoleInternationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq inParis. His Beckett work with Gare St. Lazarehas gained him a reputation as one of theworld’s foremost Beckett interpreters, hav-ing performed 19 Beckett roles in 24Beckett productions internationally, in over83 cities in 25 countries around the world.

Highlights include the role of Lucky inWaiting for Godot, directed by WalterAsmus, at the Gate Theatre’s 50th anniver-sary revival (2003) and as Vladimir in GareSt. Lazare’s production at the GaietyTheatre, Dublin (2013); What Where andActs Without Words 1 and 2 for the GateTheatre’s Beckett Festival (BarbicanCentre, 1999); and in Gare St. Lazare’smusical work Here All Night, alongside fivedifferent solo shows for the Beckett inLondon Festival (2016).

Non-Beckett work includes ConorMcPherson’s The Good Thief for Gare St.Lazare (2006), Lucy Caldwell’s Leavesdirected by Garry Hynes with the DruidTheatre Company (2007), and FabulousBeast Dance Theatre’s production of TheBull at the Dublin Theatre Festival (2005).Other theater roles include Ferdinand inThe Duchess of Malfi, Joey in The Home -coming, Army in Requiem for a Heavy -weight, Les in Bouncers, The Torturer inThe Possibilities, Gus in The Dumb Waiter,Orpheus in Orpheus, and Ed in EntertainingMr. Sloane. On television, Mr. Lovett hasappeared in Versailles, En deavour,Acceptable Risk, Charlie, Father Ted, andFallout. His film credits include Music, War

and Love, Small Engine Repair, Inter -mission, Moll Flanders, L’Entente Cordiale,and The Kings of Cork City.

Judy Hegarty LovettJudy Hegarty Lovett (director) is joint artisticdirector of Gare St. Lazare Ireland with actorConor Lovett. She has a bachelor’s degree inperformance art/mixed media from theCrawford College of Art & Design (Cork,Ireland), a post-graduate diploma in dra-matherapy from the University ofHertfordshire (U.K.), and is currently pursu-ing a PhD at the University of Reading (U.K.)with research on performing Beckett’s proseunder the supervision of Anna McMullan.

For Gare St. Lazare Ireland, Ms. HegartyLovett’s directing credits include Waiting forGodot, Rockaby, The Beckett Trilogy(Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable),Lessness, Enough, Texts for Nothing,Worstward Ho, First Love, The End, TheCalmative, Here All Night, and How It Is:Part One. Other directing credits includeBouncers (John Godber), The Possibilities(Howard Barker), The Dumb Waiter (HaroldPinter), Swallow (Michael Harding), …tanksa lot! (co-written by Ms. Hegarty Lovett andRaymond Keane), The Good Thief (ConorMcPherson), and Moby Dick.

Ms. Hegarty Lovett’s festival directingcredits include a staged reading of TomMacIntyre’s The Great Hunger (AbbeyTheatre, 2004) and Beckett’s First Love,which enjoyed a sell-out run (2008), both atthe Dublin Theatre Festival; as well as newversions of Beckett’s six radio plays: AllThat Fall, Embers, Roughs for Radio I and II,Cascando, Words and Music, and Beck -ett’s translation of The Old Tune (RobertPinget) in a co-production with Gare St.Lazare Ireland and RTÉ Radio 1 at theBeckett Centenary Festival in Dublin(2006). In 2012 she directed Conor Lovettin Will Eno’s Title and Deed (written for thecompany) at Signature Theatre Company(New York), and in 2015 she directedMichael Frayn’s Copenhagen for Rubicon

Conor LovettROS KAVA

NAGH

WhiteLightFestival.org

Theatre Company (Ventura, California).Next year will see the world premiere ofher latest work, Beckett’s How It Is: PartOne with actors Conor Lovett and StephenDillane, set to open in February at theEveryman theater in Cork, Ireland.

Gare St. Lazare IrelandGare St. Lazare Ireland is an Irish theatercompany run by joint artistic directors JudyHegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett, who areinternationally considered leading inter-preters of work by Samuel Beckett. Overthe past 21 years, the company has built arepertory of work that includes over 18Beckett titles in addition to work byMichael Harding and Conor McPherson.Gare St. Lazare has premiered work inIreland, followed by extensive tours. To thisend, it continues to visit many of the 25countries where it has already played andis continually seeking new pastures.

Gare St. Lazare has developed ongoingrelationships with theaters and festivalseverywhere, from Kilkenny to Shanghai.Past ventures have included several workstravelling together within a festival. Touringrepertory includes Molloy, The BeckettTrilogy, First Love, The End, The Calmative,Texts for Nothing, Worstward Ho byBeckett, and The Good Thief byMcPherson. The company is currentlypreparing the world premiere staging ofBeckett’s novel How It Is, directed by JudyHegarty Lovett and featuring actors ConorLovett and Stephen Dillane, with an originalsound design by Tony-nominated sounddesigner/composer Mel Mercier, set toopen in Cork, Ireland in 2018. From 2015 to2018, Gare St. Lazare serves as artists-in-residence at the Everyman in Cork.

White Light Festival I could compare my music to white light,which contains all colors. Only a prism candivide the colors and make them appear;this prism could be the spirit of the listener.—Arvo Pärt. Now in its eighth year, theWhite Light Festival is Lincoln Center’sannual exploration of music and art’s powerto reveal the many dimensions of our inte-rior lives. International in scope, the multi-disciplinary festival offers a broad spectrumof the world’s leading instrumentalists,vocalists, ensembles, choreographers,dance companies, and directors, comple-mented by conversations with artists andscholars and post-performance White LightLounges.

Lincoln Center for the PerformingArts, Inc.Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts(LCPA) serves three primary roles: presen-ter of artistic programming, national leaderin arts and education and community rela-tions, and manager of the Lincoln Centercampus. A presenter of more than 3,000free and ticketed events, performances,tours, and educational activities annually,LCPA offers 15 programs, series, and festi-vals including American Songbook, GreatPerformers, Lincoln Center Festival,Lincoln Center Out of Doors, MidsummerNight Swing, the Mostly Mozart Festival,and the White Light Festival, as well as theEmmy Award–winning Live From LincolnCenter, which airs nationally on PBS. Asmanager of the Lincoln Center campus,LCPA provides support and services for theLincoln Center complex and the 11 resi-dent organizations. In addition, LCPA led a$1.2 billion campus renovation, completedin October 2012.

Lincoln Center Programming DepartmentJane Moss, Ehrenkranz Artistic DirectorHanako Yamaguchi, Director, Music ProgrammingJon Nakagawa, Director, Contemporary ProgrammingJill Sternheimer, Director, Public ProgrammingLisa Takemoto, Production ManagerCharles Cermele, Producer, Contemporary ProgrammingMauricio Lomelin, Producer, Contemporary ProgrammingAndrew C. Elsesser, Associate Director, ProgrammingLuna Shyr, Senior EditorRegina Grande Rivera, Associate ProducerDaniel Soto, Associate Producer, Public ProgrammingWalker Beard, Production CoordinatorNana Asase, Assistant to the Artistic DirectorOlivia Fortunato, Programming AssistantDorian Mueller, House Program CoordinatorJanet Rucker, Company Manager

For the White Light FestivalNeil Creedon, Production Manager

For The Beckett TrilogyPeter Crudge, LX & Production ManagerAoife O’Sullivan, Stage ManagerMaura O’Keeffe, ProducerEimear Reilly, Company InternNik Quaife, PR (New York)Christine Monk, Publicist (Ireland)

Gare St. Lazare Ireland receives funding from The Arts Council of Ireland, Cork CityCouncil, with regular support by Culture Ireland for their touring outside of Ireland.

Gare St. Lazare Gold Circle Patrons Paul Ralston & Deb Gwinn, Catherine & Mark Reid, Christopher J. Herbert & NancyWelch.

Gare St. Lazare Ireland wishes to extend their thanks and appreciation to The Arts Councilof Ireland, Culture Ireland, Cork City Council Arts Office, Everyman Theatre Cork,Vermont Coffee Company (Middlebury, VT), Georgann Aldrich Heller, Steve and BarbaraIsenberg, John and Suzann O’Neill, The Consul General of Ireland, Her ExcellencyGeraldine Byne Nason (Irish Ambassador to the UN) Edward Beckett, John WilliamDunlea, Eoin O’Shea, Julie Kelleher, Mary McCarthy, Janet Roderick and RandyBuescher, Der Lovett & Kate Brandy, D. Kern and Elisabeth Holoman, Irish Arts CenterNew York and The National Theater Institute, Waterford, Connecticut.

WhiteLightFestival.org