Director Laura Jones’ Career-Long Exploration Of Beckett Concludes With “Godot”

One day, Laura Jones was late to pick up her three-year-old daughter, Amy. Not a happy moment for the little girl, Jones’s tardiness would have a major impact on her career as a director. For the other passenger in her car was one Alan Schneider, whom Jones was chauffeuring around Denver, Colorado, in 1983. It was Amy’s completely justified attitude that altered, in Jones’s words, a “kind of a diva” Schneider into a “very lovely person.”

“She’s so angry,” Jones said, remembering her daughter’s reaction. “I was late again. . . . and Schneider found this hysterical. I mean, he really thought it was hilarious, and he, he melted. . . . So we bonded in a number of ways. . . . I got to know the man both onstage and off, and it was really quite pleasurable.”

Jones got the job as driver because she was a little older than the other graduate students at the University of Denver, where the Tony Award-winning director was guest lecturing in the theater department. Jones heard through the grapevine that she was one of only two students that impressed Schneider with the ability to be future directors. Jones took an interest in Schneider’s work and began attending some of his productions of Samuel Beckett’s plays (not, incidentally, her first love). At that point, Jones decided to approach Schneider and ask if she could write her doctoral dissertation on his directing of Samuel Beckett.

That was forty years ago. This past June, Jones, an Alton, Illinois, native, announced her retirement from directing. I was fortunate to see her final production—Waiting for Godot—at the Bas Bleu in Fort Collins, Colorado. My review of that show appears in the Fall 2024 issue of the Beckett Circle, but Jones’s retirement merits more attention than an estimation of her final play. As I learned in Fort Collins, she and a number of her colleagues have made Beckett a staple in that region of the United States.

Schneider gave Jones his permission to write about him. An eager Jones went to New York to see more of his work, including productions with Billie Whitelaw. Unfortunately, their time was cut very short. Only a few months after Jones started work on the dissertation, Schneider died in London, England. Jones only moved forward at the urging of her department. “Part of me said, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ . . . But my advisors at the University of Denver would not hear of it. . . . [They said], ‘You had his permission. Nobody else is going to have his permission again . . . so you need to run with this,’” Jones said. Run she did, interviewing the likes of Jean Schneider, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, John Lahr, and Edward Albee. “I think they were more candid about Alan because he was gone,” Jones said.

Jones earned her Ph.D. in Theater in 1989. In fact, she was the last student to do so, since the university closed the department while she was still completing her dissertation on Schneider and teaching speech and theater full-time at a community college. She then took a temporary teaching position at Colorado State University, later receiving tenure.

Top from left: James Burns as Vladimir and Dan Tschirhart as Estragon. Below: Matthew Smith as Pozzo (front) and Ryan Wilke-Braun as Lucky. Bas Bleu Theatre, Fort Collins, Colorado. Photo by William A. Cotton, courtesy of the Bas Bleu Theatre.

Jones learned much from Schneider, including the importance of art and image in Beckett’s work. Schneider also taught her about the need to provide specific circumstances for actors to do their thing. She makes sure to point out that she is not a publishing scholar; rather, she calls herself a “research practitioner.” She appreciates scholarly readings of Beckett’s work and has been part of many academic conferences, but she sees a difference between an interpretation on paper and a production on the boards. “I would take the research and then try to apply it in practice,” Jones said.

Jones indeed has been a practitioner. Throughout the 1990s, she produced a number of Beckett plays, some at CSU but others at the Petite Bas Bleu (the original incarnation of what is now the Bas Bleu). She met one of the key people of her theater life in Wendy Ishii, co-founder with Eva Wright of the Petite Bas Bleu. In an email, Ishii writes of Jones, “Laura takes huge risks and tackles challenging works. . . . Many of our awards and international acclaim can be attributed to Laura’s direction, academic research, and deep commitment to the craft.” Perhaps their most important work together was Happy Days. Jones directed, and Ishii starred. Beckett scholar Linda Ben-Zvi, who was a member of the CSU English Department at the time, loved the production. “Long story short, she [Ben-Zvi] was blown away. She really thought that Wendy had nailed it,” Jones said. Ben-Zvi encouraged Jones and Ishii to present Happy Days at a major Beckett conference in Toronto, Canada.

Her Endgame in a swimming pool might be the most bizarre of Jones’s creations. Jones stumbled upon the venue—an abandoned indoor pool at CSU filled with old furniture and random items—haphazardly. She and her students then went to work. “And what we did was we created this stage, this space, for Endgame with the found objects in the space, so it was found objects in a found space,” Jones said. Of the acoustics, Jones said, “The sound. The sound was amazing because it was like singing in the shower, you know? . . . and we put the play in the deep end, and the audience sat in the shallow end, natural rake.”

Jones gained a reputation and soon directed a stage production of Beckett’s short 1980s text Ill Seen Ill Said in Kent, England, at the request of Ruby Cohn and Ben-Zvi for the International Foundation for Theatre Research. Jones produced the play with the set design skills of Robert Braddy and help from her daughter (upset Amy now a teenager). The audience contained a number of major Beckett scholars, including James Knowlson, to whom Jones credits much of her success. “I was scared to death. I mean, I just thought, this is the best we got, guys,” Jones said. She was soon relieved when she saw Cohn “with tears in her eyes, and she just gives me this gigantic hug,” Jones said.

Eric Prince, another of Jones’s colleagues in theater at CSU and Beckett scholar, established the Center for Beckett Studies in 2002. In 2008, the Center co-sponsored The Beckett Project. Jones directed Happy Days, Play, Rough for Theatre II, Ill Seen Ill Said, and A Piece of Monologue (she involved CSU students in some of these productions), and Knowlson delivered a talk on Happy Days and modern art. Jones used some of Knowlson’s research for her Beckett Project productions, which experimented with Beckett’s original ideas. For example, Jones said Caravaggio influenced their use of light on the stage. Ever a research practitioner, Jones shared her experimentations with other scholars at a conference in Santiago, Chile.

From left: Ryan Wilke-Braun as Lucky, Matthew Smith as Pozzo, James Burns as Vladimir, and Dan Tschirhart as Estragon in Waiting for Godot. Bas Bleu Theatre, Fort Collins, Colorado. Photo by William A. Cotton, courtesy of the Bas Bleu Theatre.

Throughout her career, Jones has ventured beyond Beckett and produced musicals and children’s theater. She retired from teaching in 2018, but she had yet other aspirations as a director. I count myself lucky to have attended her last effort on the stage, Waiting for Godot at the Bas Bleu. I asked her about some of her choices, including references to Russia and the inclusion of a railway cart. What I learned is that Jones is not a stern, Pozzo-like director or one whose vision others must not interfere with. Quite the opposite: she gives credit to her team and listens to their ideas. She has a vision and clear ideas of where to commence, but she’s also a “what if?” type. “I don’t know exactly how I want to do this. I just know I don’t want to do it the way it’s always been done, alright?” Jones said.

Jones referenced Richard Eyre’s theories of Beckett and Brecht as she developed her Godot. She also asked questions Schneider taught her to ask: “How do you perform the act of waiting unless you’ve got some place to wait?” Jones said. Part of Jones’s doctrine is to provide actors with some precision rather than total ambiguity.

Regarding Russia, Jones explained her thinking: “Yeah, maybe these guys were fleeing Ukraine. Who knows? . . . I didn’t want to be blatant about it. I wanted that to be, if anything, very subconscious, and I certainly didn’t want to put it in the program notes and say, ‘Okay, look for this.’” In the end, Russia served as a “unifying nub or core.”

The handcart at center stage was the idea of scenic designer Roger Hanna. Jones expounded on its purpose: “[I]t took me a while to realize that it was the stone, it was the rock,” referring to Beckett’s revised text. Jones also said the cart was an impetus for drama, “to give [the characters] an obstacle.”

With the same spirit that yielded Endgame in a defunct pool, Jones saw Godot to fruition. “[B]y the end of the run, I was like, I’m satisfied. I am. I am satisfied with this production,” Jones said.

The most extraordinary event, however, occurred during the rehearsal process. After a particularly bad day for some of the cast and crew, they came in the following day to see actual leaves had grown on the supposedly dead tree they cut down from Ishii’s property and planted in the floor of the Bas Bleu. “Overnight, overnight, it had sprung leaves!” Jones said. “I was like, Sam, what are you doing?”