RICK CLUCHEY: 
BRINGING BECKETT TO L.A. STUDENTS

Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer
Mirror contributing writer

   The day I met Rick Cluchey, I told him that I’d just read Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” for the first time. It was— at least for me — a difficult play to comprehend off the page, and I had nothing bright to say about it. 
   Then halfway through our interview, Cluchey said, “So, you’ve just read Endgame?” and he launched, suddenly, into a rich little piece of the script. The words began to unlock.
   A few days later I attended a dress rehearsal of the same play at Mt. San Antonio Community College, directed by Professor Ralph Eastman with S.L. Wellen. Playing the role of Hamm, the blind, lame master of a nearly uninhabited world, Cluchey sat center stage in a cobbled together wheelchair, wearing silver goggles and a red smoking jacket in the fabric of old mover’s blankets. When he came to the part he had acted for me at his dining room table, now in context, the words just went “pop.”  Indeed, they are words he has spoken countless times, but for audiences and actors he makes them new.
   Since 1961, Cluchey has directed and performed the works of Beckett, often under the playwright’s direction, in prisons and theaters all over the world. His passion for these works and his commitment to bringing hope and education to the incarcerated have taken him from San Quentin Penitentiary, where, as an inmate, he discovered Beckett and went on to direct and act in more than 35 prison productions, to Broadway, where he performed his play, “The Cage,” to Paris, where he befriended and began working with Beckett, to London, Berlin, Dublin, Perth.
   But most recently, Cluchey, who now lives in Culver City with his wife and youngest son, has brought his intimate knowledge of Beckett to some fortunate local students. The production of “Endgame” at Mt. SAC, which wrapped last week, was the last in a series of Cluchey/Beckett events at the college, including Cluchey’s performance of “Krapp’s Last Tape” and “An Evening of Conversation” with Cluchey and Alan Mandell, co-founders of the San Quentin Drama Workshop. 
   In March of this year, Cluchey also directed a cast of junior high and high school students in Act One of “Waiting for Godot,” produced by Antonia Carnevale of Santa Monica’s New Roads School. That production was also preceded by an evening with Cluchey and Mandell, at which students and parents were lent some personal stories of Beckett in Paris and of Cluchey’s first contact with the texts while in prison.
   Because the aim of both the Mt. SAC and New Roads programs was to introduce students to Beckett and to stretch their acting skills, the plays were approached as workshops rather than “vanity” productions. This process-over-product style proved beneficial to both casts, who found that the simple act of reading the plays aloud put them in contact with characters who at first seemed remote.
   To help his New Roads cast access “Godot,” Cluchey began with the play’s rhythms and choreography. I asked him how his own directing style was influenced by Beckett.
   “One learned to look for the music in a piece because [Beckett] had a great sense of the musicality of his own work and the rhythmic structure in which it was written,” Cluchey remembers. “The second thing you learned was the painter in Beckett, the painter in living flesh, the man who could compose the picture for you and then give you special instructions on when to move and when to speak.”
   Says Antonia Carnevale, head of theater programs at the Santa Monica campus, “Rick almost ‘conducted’ the boys during the rehearsals, rather than just block movement or direct acting. He made them understand how essential every syllable and every beat were to the play.”
   Cluchey’s methods also made quite an impression on his young cast: Grady DiPietro (Eighth Grade) as Vladimir; Thomas Martinez, (Seventh Grade) as Estragon; Michael Feldman (Eleventh Grade) as Lucky; and Christopher Kaufman (Twelfth Grade) as Pozzo.
   “The boys adored working with Rick,” said Carnevale. “His passion for the play was contagious. He was a real theatre artist, and he knew Beckett! The boys really understood that this was a unique opportunity.”
   14-year-old DiPietro, who had only played small roles before he took on Vladimir, says of his director, “The amazing thing about him is that he knows the script line for line, every part. So if you’re having trouble with anything he can show you how to work through it.”
   And 16-year-old Feldman, an aspiring director himself, remembers how at Cluchey’s first rehearsal Beckett’s text began to come into focus: “Everyone sat down, read the first act, and it seemed like a door opened in our minds. For whatever reason, reading Godot out loud really helps with comprehending the play and interpreting the messages tucked within the dialogue.”
   Cluchey, who may reunite with his New Roads cast at a different venue this summer, says he was fascinated by their ability to assimilate “some pretty tough stuff.” He adds, “I’ve seen various productions of it and invariably they’re bad. So it was a thrill for me to see that they could do it.”
   Mt. SAC’s Professor Eastman experienced similar thrills working with his “Endgame” cast and watching his students act with Cluchey.
   “This is not an easy play,” says Eastman, who undertook the direction of “Endgame” by a more typically American, method acting route. “It’s first getting them over the alienation from the characters...to see that life goes on, that there is this spirit, there is this hard-wired life force that Beckett has managed to capture. Then, it’s how to handle the language.”
   The relationship of Cluchey and Eastman as actor and director took months to foster. (The two got acquainted in a summer of afternoon visits before Cluchey agreed to the project.) Eastman admits that he was somewhat intimidated by the arrangement at first, but when the work began, he was awed by Cluchey’s generosity.
   “I was absolutely amazed at his willingness to diverge from the tried-and-true, as he has done ‘Endgame’ a gazillion times, directed it...and certainly been directed by Beckett himself— yow!  But he was perfectly willing to try it my way... It’s just a remarkable ability and a remarkable gift to me and these students,” Eastman says.
   Christopher Kaufman, the New Roads twelfth-grader who portrayed Pozzo, had a like experience with Cluchey after watching a tape of the San Quentin Drama Workshop performing “Godot.” He recalls, “Now, I was already intimidated by the myth I had created about the HUGE Rick Cluchey with the baritone voice, but him playing Pozzo on this tape only scared me more. I felt like I would have to live up to Rick’s standard, and in our first read-through, I tried to emulate Rick, hoping that that would keep him satisfied with me. Well, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Rick did NOT want me to be the Pozzo he had played. He allowed me to find my own character.”
   This openness and ability to discover things anew is indeed one of the fascinating things about Rick Cluchey — who reminds me, with his easy chuckle, that he’s “fast approaching 70.” Of the plays he has known for over forty years, he says: “They’re closed systems, and that’s not my quote, that’s Beckett’s quote. And the more you realize and rail against that, the more they become open. But you have to know what you’re doing, you have to trust, and I think you have to pull and push and if it doesn’t fit, forget it. If it works, thank God.”