Liam Neeson's towering body stoops, hunched in a forest green wrapper--the only bit of real color in the grey brown space of a single man's room, though it too is rendered monotone and drab in context. Life itself is rendered monotone and drab here, and as Neeson, playing the titular Joe, skulks from window to door, giving quick paranoid looks outside before closing the drapes over each, the only sound we hear is from the stage accessories and occasional fidgets and flickers in the audience. The silence creates a strange vulnerability, and with tension emanating, it is a foreboding one. We are waiting with Joe for something that will inevitably hurt us.
Samuel Beckett, though giving moments of comedy within grey tragedy that elicit sharp barks of familiarity rather than chuckles, is a master of making both his characters and their audiences vulnerable. Even Breath, the 25-second piece comprised of, indeed, breath and "an instant of recorded vagitus," or birth cry, renders one hyperconscious of one's own act of breathing and its ultimate end. In Eh Joe, a 1965 television work (reprised by Mikhail Baryshnikov at New York Theatre Workshop in 2007), we confront a man's past, the skeletons in his closet that croon, whisper, and cajole us into unexpected complicity with his sins.
Joe is silent throughout the 30-minute play, and Neeson conveys this throughout in both his wordlessness and stillness; silence is never only aural, but visual, spatial as well. When words come, they are from an offstage recorded voice, read by actress Penelope Wilton, telling a story of one of Joe's lovers' suicide. Joe sits on his bed, his back to the audience, and on a scrim in front of the stage--casting a dreamlike smudge on the live presence--his face and torso appears. Even as his body remains perfectly stoic, his face transposes the quiet horror of the story he cannot escape. His eyes rage and glisten, but excepting the few moments, like cadences marking the end of phrases, when it seems too much and his face crumples, he sits motionless before the havoc he has wreaked.
Eh Joe is an experiment is virtuosity for both director, Atom Egoyan, and actors. Though recorded--and this, I must admit, was a slight disappointment--Wilton is pitch perfect in delivery; and Neeson responds with depth and fortitude. The camera cuts closer and closer to his face as the story progresses, casting shadows against his stubbled cheeks and chin that suggest he grows ever more gaunt, as gaunt as Beckett was, in this brief period. In the final moments, he brings his hand to his face, his fingers ever so slightly disfiguring his countenance. Neeson's face is not a new one to us, and there is an intimacy with it from years of film closeups. However, his hands are not, and this gesture offered a fresh if somewhat awful perspective: the first moment of feeling like this is something we are not meant to see. Which isn't exactly voyeuristic, but like watching grief happen to a person.
Neeson pulls his hand down his face, and his mouth hangs slightly open. This is the first and only time during which I was disappointed. Not necessarily in the gesture, but because Neeson isn't quite old enough for that expression. It is one I associate with much older men, sitting still in loungers or wheelchairs, perhaps also overwhelmed by the constant remembrance of their pasts; not with someone still as hopelessly vibrant as Neeson is. But this for sure an entirely subjective response on my part, marked by my own arbitrary associations. And what haunts after Neeson's image and body both dim is the promise of murky stories to come in our own agedness.
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