Editor’s note: The author wrote this appreciation after earlier this month seeing a series of Beckett plays at Unadilla Theater, a Vermont gem located in a rural part of Marshfield.

Ode to the Unadilla Theater

(It was the particular broken chord of our lives. The unscreened architecture was left bare, open, swung in the breeze, and yet we were still brave enough with open eyes to listen.)

We were not in a hurry.

We had driven miles on a dusty road, a picnic basket filled with carefully selected things.

Heirloom tomatoes, Vermont mozzarella, Asian stir-fried chicken, kale salad with chopped apples and walnuts.

Favorite napkins and utensils.

Pauses between questions and answers.

The theater itself was miraculous. Unadorned. But lyrical. Quiet. But magnanimous.

She was known there. A ninth generation Vermonter.

Inside the commitment of the place. Celebrated birthdays on its grounds.

We had hiked all day. Talked of our lives. Our children, parents, relationships.

We shared patience, an understanding at life’s loss, the pathways at midlife once you have somehow lost the map.

And there was Beckett.

The architecture of his chord structure. Haunted, beautifully sonorous.

Undigested, from a place of hope.

Painfully aware of the power structures in human society.

Subtly hilarious.

The resonance in that little rustic theater stripped the arts back into a place of prominence.

To where time was channeled. Emissaries from another moment. Alive on stage. Peering into the light from it. Bathed in his mysticism. A fusion of language and art, time and movement. Beckettian.

At intermission, we browsed two tables of one-dollar books under the arches of a well-loved barn. Highland cattle grazing in the twilight dusk. Called out the titles to one another like the swordplay of two intimates daring each other.

The house manager switched on the light for us overhead, her persistent work ethic and cheery devotion to the grounds evident in her eyes and hands and trickling, hard won laughter.

There is always a feeling of being inside a clock with Beckett, his precision, well run echoes, beauty, mercilessness, music.

We came to its conclusion. And gasped for air.

We talked to the director, his talented actress wife, and a couple of the cast members who had been in the show until we were the only ones left, walking out in the dark to an empty grass field parking lot.

Our hearts fuller.

The night deepening into the sound of insects and occasional bird flight.

The wisdom in Vermont for that moment echoing in our shared silence.

Ethan Miller

Weybridge