Ghosts of Love

What is it about?

Ghosts of Love: ‘Ohio Impromptu,’ and ‘. . .but the clouds. . .’ S. E. Gontarski My association with “Ohio Impromptu” began, near its origins; I managed to get Beckett to write it then produced its world premiere performance at the “Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives” conference at The Ohio State University in May of 1981. Its follow-up presentations were at the Edinburgh Festival and subsequently off-Broadway, where it played with “What Where” and “Catastrophe” and where it won Beckett the sixth Obie of his career. I subsequently staged the play myself at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in September 1986 for a program called Visions of Beckett. This essay features my second staging of “Ohio Impromptu,” a bi-lingual, imagistic, multi-media performance that I directed in Sopot, Poland in May of 2016 with Polish filmmaker Elvin Flamingo as a laboratory performance in which the live image was only a single instance drawn from a space filled with images of alternate possibilities that, in some senses, overshadowed the live performance. In Poland I could again work with English actor, Jon McKenna, with whom I did Breath-Text-Breath in London in 2011 and which was performed in Sopot and Gdansk in May of 2012. I also worked with legendary Polish actor, Ryszard Ronchewski, who played Lucky in the original Polish production of Waiting for Godot in the 1950s. In this Polish version of the play, Ryszard would read from Antoni Libera’s translation of the play with Libera himself on hand for this performance.

Featured Image