New Haven Independent

That would be “Beckettian” as in Samuel Beckett. Lovett has an unusual take on the playwright — he doesn’t consider him gloomy, for starters. He and his wife founded a Paris-based company, Gare St. Lazare Players, and through it they have been bringing adaptations of Beckett prose works to the stage for two decades.

The Irish actor is bringing a bravura new one-man adaptation of a little-known early novel by Beckett called First Love to New Haven this summer as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

The show has received rave reviews at venues around the world.

Tickets go on sale Monday for this year’s festival, which runs June 13-27. The theme: Global Identities/Local Heroes.

Enter Conor Lovett. Lovett stopped by town recently to help the festival promote this year’s offerings. In a conversation at the festival’s downtown offices, Lovett revealed that he came to Beckett, in part, through Catcher in the Rye.

NHI: You were saying you first read Beckett in high school, as a lot of Americans do.

CL: Many people come to Beckett through the plays. But I read the novels first when I was about 18 years old. Molloy, I think. In school we were also at that time reading Catcher in the Rye. Beckett and Salinger both have that great confessional tone, Holden Caulfield and Beckett’s narrators speaking right to the reader, and those long, sinuous sentences! I fell in love with them both.

NHI: I know you’ve done five or six Beckett prose adaptations before First Love, which is a novella of some 60 pages. Beckett’s estate often requires those who stage or adapt to follow strictly his directions and notes. Did you, for example, abridge any of it? Are you permitted to cut?

CL: With the longer works we dramatize sections, but the shorter ones like First Love, we don’t skip a word.

NHI: The tale is about a miserable guy who leaves home, hangs around graveyards, sits on a bench by a canal, sires a child with a prostitute, then abandons them. In the end he hears the cries of the child. The last line is “I could have done with other loves perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don’t.” Sounds a bit like Waiting for Godot.

CL: My understanding is that he wrote First Love and lots of other prose, in a kind of fever of prose, and then needed to do something different, a play; that was Godot. Is it related? Theme-wise, maybe. But each genre he chose, Beckett took it to the limit. I’ve done a lot of Beckett plays and I see them, let’s say, as just different territory.

NHI: Some people feel “cheated” by solo performance. You’re up there all by yourself. How do you engage the audience?

CL: People respond to a kind of speaking directly to them. The audience is in effect the reader. It’s a big risk for them to accept it. If they do, then I’m in. Beckett is also saying things people don’t usually say. I’ve always found the work very funny too. I’m surprised actually that Beckett has a reputation for being gloomy. I see his work as a celebration of what can be got from life.

NHI: “Celebration of life” is not a phrase I associate with a Beckettian atmosphere.

CL: What I meant is that the celebration is that here’s an artist whose body of work, taken together, goes to the furthest possible destination in his art, his vision, even as he changes genres, he’s totally faithful, like Picasso or Bob Dylan.

NHI: How do you work with your director, Judy Hagerty?

CL: I get up there and I say the words. I make it that the text is a kind of musical composition, the words are the notes. She’s the conductor. She says, here there’s anger coming through and it shouldn’t. There, soften it up. And so forth.

NHI: You got a spectacular review when you did the show earlier in January at the Public Theater in New York. I’m sure that was gratifying, but do you alter the show from night to night, or venue to venue, such as now that you’re bringing it to New Haven?

CL: Not really. I try to be open to the energies where they present themselves each night. Sometimes the energy is mine, sometimes it’s the audience’s.

NHI: And what’s up next for you and Ms. Hagerty? Another Beckett?

CL: Moby Dick, which is not by Beckett. We’re adapting it.

NHI: Not going to use every word in that one, are you?

CL: [No answer]

NHI: Why the Melville?

CL: Judy and I both love the book. In Ireland, older people have great respect for it, younger people don’t know it and think it’s a story for mainly for kids.

NHI: I suppose everyone asks you about working with your wife as director.

CL: Everyone. It’s really not germane. It works for us. I think, in part, it’s because both my parents and Judy’s had parents who worked together. My parents ran a restaurant, and Judy’s ran a boat yard and chandlery that sells rope, sail, and so forth.

NHI: Chandlery. Does that have anything to do with your Moby Dick project?

CL: Who knows. I’ll tell you this, though: We’re going to premiere it at Youghal, in County Cork, not far from where we both grew up. Youghal, by the way, is where the great John Houston movie adaptation of Moby Dick, with Gregory Peck, was filmed.

NHI: Wow. Will it come to us?

CL: I hope so. If it’s good.

NHI: Good luck, and thank you very much.

On Feb. 2nd tickets go on sale. The Festival this years runs from June 13 to June 27.