Rare Vintage 1986 Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape with Rick Cluchey Theatre Card Poster By JAN SAWKA Vintage Framed

Poster 14 x 22 Mint ; Artist: JAN SAWKA

(TimeFrame/ Provenance:

"THEATER: BECKETT'S STAGING OF 'KRAPP'S LAST TAPE'
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 5, 1986"

"KRAPP'S LAST TAPE, written and directed by Samuel Beckett; set, lighting and sound operation by Bud Thorpe; costumes by Teresita Garcia Suro; Presented by the Harold Clurman Theater, Jack Garfein, artistic director. At the Samuel Beckett Theater, 420 West 42d Street. Krapp...Rick Cluchey")

THE ARTIST:
In 1946, (JAN SAWKA) Sawka was born to an architect father and linguist mother, Jan and Maria Sawka, in the Silesian city of Zabrze. His childhood was overshadowed by his father's Stalin-era political imprisonment. Sawka completed two master's degrees; in painting and print-making from the Wroc?aw Fine Arts Academy and in Architectural Engineering from the Institute of Technology in Wroc?aw. By his late 20s, Sawka was a star of the famed Polish Poster School and a leading artist of the counter-culture. His oppositionist activities lead to his exile in 1976. After 1977, he resided in New York, becoming part of the American cultural mainstream. Early in his time in the United States, Sawka created editorial drawings for the New York Times, while developing a multi-faceted career that encompassed printmaking, painting, sculpture, and theater design. Numerous galleries have exhibited his paintings and prints, and he has designed for such theaters as the Harold Clurman, Jean Cocteau Repertory and Samuel Beckett Theater. Sawka's works are in over 60 museums around the world and he has had over 70 solo shows at international museums and galleries. His awards have included the 1975 Oscar de la Peinture in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France for painting and the Gold Medal at the 1978 Warsaw Poster Biennial. In 1981, when martial law was imposed in Poland, the AFL-CIO sponsored a bipartisan fundraiser that sold Sawka's Solidarity poster in the millions to provide immediate support to the besieged Solidarity movement. In 1989, Sawka designed a 10-story tall set for The Grateful Dead's 25th Anniversary tour. In 1993, he created his first full multi-media spectacle, "The Eyes" in Japan. This was the beginning of his collaboration with Japanese studios and corporations, which includes the creation of high-tech interactive sculptures and monumental installations, as well as designs for full-scale monumental architecture. Sawka designed "The Tower of Light Cultural Complex" for Abu Dhabi, U.A.E., presented to the Royal Family in 1996. A pilot version of "The Voyage", a full-length multimedia spectacle, won the Gold Medal in Multi-Media at the 2003 Florence Contemporary Art Biennial. He is represented ACA Galleries in New York's Chelsea arts district.

On August 9, 2012, Sawka died of a heart attack in his home in High Falls, New York.[1] He was 65. At the time of his death the artist was focused on completing the feature-length, final version of "Voyage."

*****Also, Lots of excellent information available on line Re: Samuel Beckett as well as Rick Cluchey:

THEATER: BECKETT'S STAGING OF 'KRAPP'S LAST TAPE'
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 5, 1986

IN Samuel Beckett's ''Krapp's Last Tape,'' a disintegrating 69-year-old man sits in a dark cell of a room, randomly reviewing taped journals of his life at age 39. As Krapp's life unwinds, we survey the detritus of a painfully familiar existence - the death of parents, the loss of love, the defeat of noble aspirations and resolutions, the eternally losing battle against the allure of drink and the unruliness of the bowels. How small and pointless the life of the 39-year-old Krapp looks, both to us and to the utterly defeated Krapp of 30 years later. ''The earth might be uninhabited,'' says Krapp - and so it might, even with him inhabiting it.

The play, first produced in London in 1958, is almost as old as Krapp's tape, but no theatergoer need fear that it, too, has diminished with time. Seeing the work now, even in Rick Cluchey's fairly routine performance at the Beckett Theater, is to appreciate again that Beckett's writing may well be mor4e durable (not to mention more enriching) than the ''old muckball'' of a world he describes. Poetry, drama, humor, horror and even a hint of redemption - it's all to be found in the 50 minutes of ''Krapp's Last Tape.''

The poetry is in the details of Krapp's remembered life. Whether we're hearing of ''a girl in a shabby green coat on a railway-station platform'' or even of a ''small, old, black, hard, solid rubber ball'' once surrendered to a dog, the specificity of the imagery always grounds Krapp as a character; he never becomes simply a symbolic vessel for the conveyance of abstract ideas. The play's drama exists not only in the gradual piecing together of the sad little stories of Krapp's autobiography but also in the contrapuntal psychological tension between the dying man at 69 and the still arrogant striver of 39. The humor is in Beckett's typical insistence on giving his lonely protagonist the costume, props and deeds of a clown: There's a banana peel handy for a near-pratfall, not to mention a verbal vaudeville gag featuring the unlikely consultation of a dictionary. Terror, of course, arrives in the gnawing threat of extinction; the gaping silence of death envelops the isolated Krapp and his room at every instant. And yet ''Krapp's Last Tape'' is not a wholly depressing play. In Krapp's pathetic attempts to rearrange, catalogue, evaluate, savor and combat existence with his tapes and their accompanying ledger, he is, in his way, making the one thing out of hopelessness that even Beckett concedes can be made out of it - art.

All this, and much more, is accomplished within a deceptively plain, breakthrough theatrical form that Beckett has continued to distill in the plays that have followed. ''Krapp's'' is a two-tracked monodrama, in which the consciousness of the older Krapp sifts through the younger Krapp's fragmented consciousness even as the taped Krapp is trying to reconstruct his own memories of still earlier years. Time stops and starts, advances and retreats, splits and merges. Theatrically and metaphysically, the effect created by the bifurcated soliloquy is akin to that produced by two facing mirrors. As with the mirrors, ''Krapp's'' gives one the sense of glimpsing into infinity.

The current production has been staged by Beckett himself, who first directed Mr. Cluchey in the role in England in 1978. Has Mr. Cluchey, a former San Quentin inmate turned actor, been at Krapp too long? His performance is perfectly fine, but it seems to have a ritualistic quality. Early on, we discover his repertory of devices: the wheezy laugh, the shuffling walk, the glassy-eyed look of longing and regret, the scrunched-up clown's grimace that curls the eyebrows up and the mouth down. Well-done and appropriate as all these gestures are, they often seem mechanically applied to the text - as if Mr. Cluchey were pressing buttons in his soul as well as on his tape recorder. Although realistic acting is not called for, neither is the kind of stylization that makes attending a Beckett play seem like going to church.

Presumably with the author's countenance, Mr. Cluchey appears in a costume more redolent of Hamm than of Krapp, and there are a few other tiny deviations from the text's stage directions. But the staging and Bud Thorpe's set and lighting designs are mostly meticulous: one needn't yet worry that Krapp will play his tape on a Walkman. What one does worry about, as always at ''Krapp's Last Tape,'' is one's own relationship to the ''extraordinary silence'' of an indifferent universe. It would take a smaller performance than Mr. Cluchey's to prevent this giant play from ushering us into Krapp's long sleepless night. Syllables of Time KRAPP'S LAST TAPE, written and directed by Samuel Beckett; set, lighting and sound operation by Bud Thorpe; costumes by Teresita Garcia Suro; Presented by the Harold Clurman Theater, Jack Garfein, artistic director. At the Samuel Beckett Theater, 420 West 42d Street. Krapp...Rick Cluchey