Featured Theatre

Click on the title above to find our first featured theatre: a memory poem from the theatre theorist and poet Andrew Sofer. It braids strands of Samuel Beckett's childhood with threads of the writer's own making many decades hence. These six quatrains--the last appended by an abortive half-line that opens an unanswered call across generation and degeneration--wear the formal costume of a rondeau redoublé, a 16th century poetic invention that repeats entire lines and works around a single pair of rhymes. Even so, they flow with the ease of the everyday. Many who read Beckett feel this tidal give and take between extreme constraint and familiar stream; many who read Beckett feel his words infecting their own habits and recollections. In this way, as in so many ways, the great writer found his home in the theatre--that time-honored memory machine. So, too, Sofer's poem places us within the most intimate of black boxes: childhood.