Yale University - PRESS RELEASE

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                                                                                    SAM BECKETT'S ACTOR SPEAKS OUT

                                                                                                      Bud Thorpe in

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                                                                                          "ONE OF THE DAMNED FEW"

One of the last actors left alive who's worked with Samuel Beckett with Beckett directing, Bud Thorpe for the first time speaks out about his work with the Nobel Prize laureate in the world premiere of ONE OF THE DAMNED FEW, under the auspices of the World Performance Project at Yale University.

What Thorpe learned from Beckett has shaped not only his work but his life. He is frank about how.

The performance will take place January 16 and 17 at 7 pm and January 18 at 2 pm in Nick Chapel of Yale's Trumbull College, 241 Elm Street, New Haven, Connecticut. It runs just over an hour with no intermission.

Designed as an educational outreach program for college and university students, ONE OF THE DAMNED FEW was created with the permission of the Samuel Beckett Estate and the encouragement of James Knowlson, Beckett's "sole authorized biographer" (in DAMNED TO FAME, 1996) and the founder of the Beckett Archive, now the Beckett International Foundation, at the University of Reading.

Thorpe presents the words, work, and world of Samuel Beckett, one of the most important playwrights of the 20th century. The performance is enhanced by numerous photographic images, half of which have never before been seen publicly, and the use of almost all of which has been granted by photographers in England, Italy, Germany, Australia, France, and the U.S. exclusively for this presentation. Thorpe's accounts of Beckett in rehearsal, Beckett's sense of fun, his receptiveness and musicality, his evolving revisions of his own plays ENDGAME and WAITING FOR GODOT are theatrical gold. There's even a glimpse of Beckett's own portrayal of the character Nell in an ENDGAME rehearsal.

Beckett himself cast Thorpe as Clov in ENDGAME in Berlin in 1978 in a San Quentin Drama Workshop production, and their artistic collaboration continued into the late 1980s. As one of "Sam's bad boys," as the San Quentin troupe was sometimes  nicknamed, Thorpe played Clov in ENDGAME and Vladimir in WAITING FOR GODOT in the landmark PBS video series "Beckett Directs Beckett."

Thorpe teaches "integrated arts classes," combining history and theatrical scenic design, at the Theatre Arts Production Company (TAPco.), also known as MS/HS 225, a New York City public school in the Bronx, where he is director of theater and has taught for the past ten years. 

Toni Dorfman, co-creator and director, has worked with Bud Thorpe in production for twenty years. Thorpe's and her 2000 collaboration in WAITING FOR GODOT with a student cast at Yale was revived almost immediately in the New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas, playing to sold-out houses. That production was Dorfman's Yale directorial debut. She is the director of undergraduate studies in theater at Yale, where she teaches acting, directing, and playwriting, and where she co-founded the annual Yale Playwrights Festival in 2003.