In Sixty Story Animal Beau O Reilly Celebrates A Landmark Birthday With Samuel Beckett

• Jeffrey Bivens
• Beau O’Reilly in Sixty Story Animal

Beau O’Reilly turns 60 this year, on May 16. I haven’t done a hard count, but an educated guess would put the number of stories, songs, and plays he’s written in his time at “a lot.” A teacher as well as a founding member of the Curious Theatre Branch—which has so far produced 25 annual Rhinoceros Theater Festivals—O’Reilly has also fostered loads of work by a multitude of his fellow artists.

The Links Hall program features What Is the Word, The Old Tune, and a sort of internal dialogue, Rockaby, in which Harding—exquisitely—plays a woman who sits in a rocking chair and croaks the single word, “More,” even as she’s lulled to permanent sleep by a disembodied voice explaining to her that more won’t be forthcoming. It isn’t a jolly message for a birthday, but then I’m sure O’Reilly understands that Beckett was one of the great poets of mortality. And what subject could be more apt on the occasion of anyone’s 60th than mortality?