“Have you no respect for misery?” complains Maddie Rooney, Beckett’s first  female protagonist, on her stumbling journey to the rail station to meet her blind old husband Dan.  All That Fall, Mabou Mines’ 10th Beckett production in its 56 year history, is a visual and sonic landscape, a diorama from which spills “a text written to come out of the dark”  in which ordinary country folk talk is saturated with stories of  decline, decay, and death punctuated with morbid and sometimes ribald humor.  Overwhelmed by sounds of dialects, animals, machines, dragging feet, roaring trains, All That Fall leads us through an ordinary day to its shocking and tragic end.

 

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Photo by Michael Hull

Photo by Michael Hull

JoAnne Akalaitis is a theatre director, writer and founding member of Mabou Mines, whose first Beckett Production, Cascando (1976) was sited as “proof that the Mabou Mines is one of the most original experimental companies in the United States” by Mel Gussow of the New York Times. Outside of Mabou Mines she went on to direct Beckett’s Endgame and Beckett Shorts that included Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Eh Joe, and Rough For Theatre I.  She is the  recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Edwin Booth Award, and a Rosamund Gilder Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre.  Akalaitis is the former Artistic Director of The Public Theater and has staged works by María Irene Fornés, Kroetz, Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Janacek, Philip Glass, Jean Genet, Tennesse Williams, Harold Pinter in addition to her own work. She has received six OBIE Awards for direction (and Sustained Achievement), a Drama Desk Award and in 2023 was inducted into the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association Theater Hall of Fame.