Not I

In reading Not I, I could definitely see how Samuel Beckett is considered a minimalist. Either all action and no dialogue, like in Act Without Words, or all dialogue and no setting or action. I'm really interested to see this one acted out because I know I'm not getting the emotional impact of all of this from just what I'm reading. I could tell towards the end the speaker was probably getting increasingly frantic, but I couldn't pick up the emotion from it.
It's really interesting looking at these two plays right after the other because they're so contrasting but they're still similar. In Act Without Words, Beckett is playing with the character to show what happens to characters in plays. And again, there's no dialogue, only emotion. Not I still has the raw emotion but it's going to come across comepletely differently because all we really have to look at is a mouth and the Auditor - neither of which gives us a face as far as I can tell. So the emotion has to come strictly from the inflection and the words the mouth is speaking. The way I saw it was the mouth was what the woman was saying, and she was obviously going crazy and speaking about herself, but because it was detached so much, you had to sort of wait until the end when she's babbling about nothing to really get that. I don't understand the part the Auditor plays, though I know when there are interruptions it's presumably coming from him. (I don't know why it's a male in my mind either, when I see the Mouth as a female - hopefully this makes more sense when I see it played out!)