
Lot Details
Lot 10
BECKETT, SAMUEL Mercier and Camier.
New York: Grove Press, [1974]. First American edition, an association copy inscribed from Beckett on the title page "for Teresita [Cluchey]/with love/from Sam /London/1.3.84," the front blank with the signature of Rick Cluchey dated 1983. Publisher's cloth, in dust jacket, housed in a folding cloth case. 8 x 5 inches; 123 pp. A few lines of the text underlined or indicated in ink likely by the Clucheys, an old dampstain affects the rear board, cloth joints and the rear dust jacket panel.
A notable association between Samuel Beckett and the co-founder of the San Quentin Drama Workshop, Rick Cluchey. Sentenced to life in San Quentin for armed robbery at 21 in 1955, Cluchey's transformation began with a performance of Beckett's Waiting for Godot within San Quentin in 1957 (the play was allowed in the prison because "its subject matter was deemed not to be rabble-rousing and because the cast required no women"-NY Times). Greatly impacted, prisoners including Cluchey formed the San Quentin Drama Workshop and performed The Iceman Cometh, Beckett's Endgame and Cluchey's own prison drama The Cage. Released on parole in 1966, Cluchey devoted himself to a career as an actor, playwright, and became a protégé and interpreter of the complicated plays of Samuel Beckett, including what became his signature role in Beckett's one-man play Krapp's Last Tape. The two met in Paris in the mid-1970s and remained close until Beckett's death in 1989. An interesting association.
C
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