In a performance that "embodies an exquisite existential tension suspended between self and poetry," John Farrell's recitation of T.S. Eliot's poetic masterwork brings us into the calm eye of Eliot's turbulent philosophical and religious questing. Deeply concerned with humankind's approach to the divine, Four Quartets is an extended meditation on our existence within and without the flux of time and place, where our ultimate goal is "to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
The experience affords audiences an opportunity to immerse themselves in these 1,000 lines of poetry, spoken from memory, and renew their understanding of one the 20th century's most exceptional poets.
"I want to say, no I will say, this was the most intense theatrical experience of my life."
"John Farrell's performance of Four Quartets is not only technically flawless, but also deeply moving, as he transforms himself into an instrument through which Eliot's poetry can pour and embody itself, a cry from one human life to another. As a poet, critic, and teacher, I have long read, thought, and written about Four Quartets, but John's recitation offers them to us with unprecedented impact, as newly living music. This is a top-notch performance in every way."
"Why, as an audience, listen to an hour-plus reciting of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets? Why, as a performer, devote oneself to memorizing these difficult poems? And why these particular poems by Eliot – whose only lines I remember vaguely as something about getting back to the beginning and knowing it for the first time – and that I link with being in a literature class, with England and World War II, and with the religious imagery of Eliot's corpus? Why this remarkable, unusual, unique performance of this poetry and why now?
"When I witnessed John Farrell's performance of Four Quartets, I understood why. Because something happens in the twilight of the room, in the intimate space among performer and listeners, in the openings between the words and our selves as we leaned forward and toward the poetry, as we heard the language that Farrell listens into being. Something more happens, the something more of what we can learn in no other way than through a performance like this one, something perhaps like this:
"A poem becomes itself when it's spoken through a body moving in space and unfolding in time. The poetry is not spoken until it's heard. Once heard, it changes and changes us. What John Farrell does is to give Four Quartets a hearing that is itself a listening out loud to its gestures toward transcendence. With humility and respect for the language, within the awe and ache of the poetry's desire, his hushed and incandescent voice turns listening inside out into speaking. His body, neither transparent nor self-focusing, becomes a zone of contact where we, too, hear and speak the poetry. The spare stage, muted lighting, and restrained blocking position Farrell in close and open proximity to the audience, so the poetry emerges as dialogue, both measured and urgent, with the listeners, who answer in kind. We, too, are moved to the edges of our seats, the borders of our bodies stretching, nearly touching.
"The modesty of the performance belies its power and Farrell's prodigious mastery of the poems' intellectual images and sensual intricacies. His voice and body do not intrude but they do not let us forget that we are together in this time and space of performance. He gently declines to become the personae of Four Quartets or to personify Eliot the poet. He does not evacuate his own body nor does he flesh out himself as the fixed point of reference for the poems' body. More like a mobile and sentient sea anchor, he draws us irreversibly, irresistibly through the waves of the poems' body. As a membrane that is fragile and porous, his performance embodies an exquisite existential tension suspended between self and poetry, between being and becoming, between performer and audience – of coming close to but stopping just short of coalescence.
"Farrell's quiet passion and quest take us to the threshold of transformation and transcendence but leave it to us to explore their possibilities and limits in our own lives, on our own terms, after the joyous labor of being together in the time and space of Four Quartets. Those lines I could almost remember and now cannot forget?"
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive to where we started
And know the place for the first time.
"Dear Mr. Farrell,
"Watching you perform Four Quartets moved me deeply. The gentle presence you brought to the material felt as though you had tapped directly into the soul of the poet-- musing about life, its meaning or lack of meaning, its vagaries and its joys as though for the first time – a quality that conveyed such freshness that I was allowed to enter into the material with an access I'd never before experienced. You became the material and I was able to join you there – to experience the agony and the wonder of my own human frailties and yearnings.
"Your performance illustrated for me the timelessness of art, as you collaborated with the language and the intention of the poet to offer the material in a way that allowed me a depth of understanding I could never have achieved on my own by simply reading, or even "hearing read" the Quartets. You were able to shine a direct beam of light into recesses hitherto hidden by my own inability to construe meaning from certain expressions of language – Eliot's language, or any language, for that matter – and to almost transcend language by delivering the direct experience of Eliot's thought as it seemed to take place, through you, on the stage.
"I found myself entranced. I cried: from astonishment at your accomplishment and from joy at the beauty of the words given visceral experience (hearing, seeing and feeling) as you voiced the material, somehow overcoming the difficulties of language and form to allow me the purest experience of how another (Eliot/you) thought and felt.
"Many thanks, not only for undergoing the task of memorization, but for the generous gift of performing a work of great artistry with such great artistry.
"All the best,"
Development of "Four Quartets" was funded in part by a Good Idea Grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
