Summary
Maddy Rooney, an elderly woman, journeys to a rural railway station to meet her blind husband on his birthday while encountering various neighbors who reflect her own preoccupation with death and decay.
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:30 PM Jan 11, 2026, 5:30 PM
A good learning experience; I found a new kind of show I don’t like. Fair play, I didn’t do my homework and booked this purely on the basis that it’s a lesser-known Beckett written for radio, which I assumed meant a crossover staging à la Lincoln Center’s recent Amahl and the Night Visitors. Not so! It turns out that one of the stipulations of the Beckett estate for licensing All That Fall is respecting its original format, which here means no actors appear on the stage at all.
In lieu of typical staging, director JoAnne Akalaitis and scenic designer Thomas Dunn have cooked up this enormous diorama which they and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton use as a sort of game board of the proceedings. The diorama is really neat; we follow Maddie’s journey to and from the train station as she encounters farm animals and bicycles and discusses precipices and the Titanic, each of which is lit up in turn. It’s really unique. The problem is—at least for me—that in the absence of human visual elements, the little houses and things drew my eye to such an extent that I lost the plot. It was the rare show where I thought I’d be better off with my eyes closed, taking in the performances and the sound design, which was thoughtfully atmospheric if occasionally stock-soundboardy. (It’s a festival!)
Not my cup of tea, but would love to read other perspectives on this one.