Samuel Beckett Archives • Jamie Lyons % %

The Beautiful Nothing

Samuel Beckett understood what most of us spend our lives running from: the magnificent terror of just being here. Not the sanitized, motivational poster version of existence, but the raw, uncut truth that we're all just killing time until time kills us, and somehow, in that acknowledgment, there's something darkly hilarious, maybe even ecstatic. He stripped everything down to bone. No romance, no bullshit redemption arcs, no clever resolutions that let you off easy. Just people waiting, talking, failing, trying again, failing better. It's pure negation as art form, except negation that somehow vibrates with this weird, stubborn life force. His characters can't go on, they'll go on. That's not despair, that's defiance wearing despair's clothing. What gets me is how funny it all is. Not joke funny, but the kind of cosmic absurdity that makes you laugh because the alternative is screaming into the void, which is also what his people do, more or less. They're trapped in garbage cans, buried in sand, shuffling through endless routines, and they just keep talking, because what else is there? Language failing, consciousness eating itself, the whole human project revealed as this glorious catastrophe, and somehow it's beautiful. Beckett didn't offer comfort or answers. He offered something better: companionship in the dark. He said look, this is it, this is what we've got, and it's terrible and it's nothing and we're stuck with it, and there's a strange dignity in facing that head on, without flinching, without the anesthetic of false hope. He made minimalism feel maximal. He found poetry in silence, grace in decay, truth in the admission that there's no truth coming. That's the gift: permission to stop pretending.

FalseArt 2023

To Finir with Your Bullshit: Artaud’s Last Noise

Antonin Artaud gets out of Rodez, nine years of psychiatric lockup, electroshock frying his brain, and the first thing he does is get near a microphone. Thévenin sets him up with this radio program, Club d’Essai, and Artaud records Les Malades et les médecins. The whole thing’s a middle finger to the doctors: You want […]

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Speculation 2014

Rehearsing Happy Days in a Los Feliz Sweatbox: A Play Nobody Will See

I know this thing is doomed. Katie knows it too, though we don’t say it out loud during our afternoon rehearsals in that sweatbox of a studio space in Los Feliz. Michael doesn’t know, which is somehow worse. Or maybe he does. The heat in LA is biblical, relentless. Beckett. Happy Days. A woman buried […]

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Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, Collected Works, Katie Sigismund, theatre, rehearsal

Seasame Street, Muppets, Waiting for Elmo, Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, Monsterpiece Theater, Muppets existentialism children's television

FalseArt 2008

The Tree Had Better Shit to Do: Sesame Street’s Accidental Beckett and the Puppets Who Made Existentialism Sing

Somewhere in the vast corporate labyrinth of Children’s Television Workshop, some lunatic. blessed, probably way underpaid, convinced a room full of executives that what American four-year-olds really needed was Samuel Beckett filtered through puppet nihilism. And they were absolutely goddamn right. Because here’s what Waiting for Elmo understands that most prestige television has forgotten: absurdity […]

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