Irwin Incomparable In "Texts"

The earth moved at the Geary Theater on Wednesday night. It began as a trickle of loose dirt down a mountainside at the start of "Texts for Nothing" and ended, 70 splendid minutes later, with the inexorable pull of gravity on a man sunk to his neck in thought.

With this heroic appropriation of four Samuel Beckett prose works written in 1950, the master solo performer Bill Irwin approaches the peak that great theater aspires to reach. He melds the word to a body moving exquisitely in space, mind and spirit to a precisely imagined physical world, sublime comedy to the primal ache of existence.

Irwin does it by roaming the crevasses and stony outcroppings of designer Douglas Stein's inspired set like some explorer watchful and astonished at every step he takes. The language, an unmapped journey through the shimmering muddle of consciousness itself -- "answers to questions not understood," as Beckett writes -- gets a concordant blast of alpine freshness.

From bold rhythms and semaphoric gestures to microscopic facial tics and tiny sighs, Irwin tracks every declaration and contradiction on the page. He's infant and ancient at once, his bare head and forelock tuft popping out from beneath a jaunty bowler hat. His pleading eyes, panicky scrambling and flowing pratfalls all have a rich syntax of their own. Irwin can compass all the ages of man in a phrase or single staggering lurch.

"I'm holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness," the actor muses in one of the evening's many breathtaking vistas of self-awareness, "but faithfully, faithfully."

This American Conservatory Theater presentation of a show Irwin first performed and directed in New York last fall is rare and glorious stuff. It's mysterious, funny, grim, tender and undoubtedly not for all tastes. Those who insist on being told stories, with clear beginnings, middles and ends, need to reconfigure for the geography of these "Texts." The show invites a deep submission, not to something dense and unsolvable but rather to that inner hum of memory, mortal grief and joy daily existence drowns out.

"Texts," as advertised, is about nothing -- that plush Beckettian void of terror and self-consciousness and confounding language. It's also about everything -- the balm of being read to as a child, the delight and folly of sex, nightfall, wind, home, words, death, the feel of spongy earth and smooth stone, the shock of an unseen puddle on an unsuspecting foot.

For several silent and captivating minutes, Irwin is like some full-grown newborn on this bleak and tricky terrain. He clambers up a cliff and lopes across the plain. He disguises his tumbles as lolling rest stops, then hops up to peer out anxiously toward some horizon a universe away. He's the comic quester and eternal skeptic. There's a whole tangled history of man according to Beckett compressed into this brilliant, wordless overture.

Then language comes, in streams and waves and swirling eddies. "Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't anymore, I couldn't go on." So it begins, in a sentence foaming with assertion and cosmic hesitation. Irwin's in the current right away, riding each shift and pause and elliptical rush.

Written in French and translated by the Irish-born author into English, the four "Texts" (there are 13 in all) go where they go. The first is suffused with the childhood recollection of a boy clinging absently to his father, "the hands forgotten in each other." The second conflates life's beginning and end ("I'm dead and getting born").

The third reduces Irwin to a vibrantly physical torso and the last to a jabbering mouth. The scenes are set off by deliberate shifts of light (by designer Nancy Schertler) that could signal the passage of a day or perhaps a century. One's attention rests and idles at times. Then something snags, and the sleeper awakens to his own dream.

A lesser actor might be guilty of trying to illustrate Beckett's gnomic language. Irwin makes finger quotations in the air, wags his arm at the future and points to symbolic perils on the ground. But this performer, one of the great physical actors of his age, can turn something as simple as sitting on a stone or wiping his shoe into a poetic comedy on the dilemma of living in time and space.

The final scene recalls the earthbound characters in "Happy Days."

But even as it connects to Beckett's theatrical masterworks, "Texts for Nothing" has the heaven-sent astonishment of something new. Irwin and Beckett are artistic soul mates, in a collaboration that is only beginning for this performer as he reaches his full maturity.

ACT artistic director Carey Perloff deserves high marks for bringing the incomparable Irwin back to town. It's another rich homecoming for the long-ago Pickle Family Circus clown. And it comes with a bonus: A return engagement of "Fool Moon" follows these amazing "Texts" at the Geary from July 22 to Aug. 12.

Steven Winn is the arts and culture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, a position he assumed this spring after 22 years as a theater critic at the paper. His work has appeared in American Theatre, Art News, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, the Utne Reader and various other publications. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.) and the University of Washington (M.A.) and has held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.