Friday the 3rd
Information and Guide to Anglo-Irish writer Samuel Beckett created and maintained in Dublin, Ireland

Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider was born in a suburb of Kharkov, Ukraine on November 28, 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. On July 4, 1923 Schneider and his family emigrated to American. Schneider grew up in Brooklyn, Connecticut and Maryland as his father sought positions as a medical doctor, eventually specializing in tuberculosis treatment.

Schneider attended Johns Hopkins University and originally intended to study theoretical physics before transferring to the University of Wisconsin to study journalism. However, once in Madison, he began actively to pursue the theatre. In 1940 he attended Cornell where he received an MA in Literature and the Dramatic Arts. He taught at Catholic University before helping to found Studio 63 in New York in 1947 and directed A Lona Wav From Home. In 1956 he agreed to direct the American premier of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. This began a lifelong artistic partnership with Beckett that lasted until Schneider's death in 1984.Schneider, Alan, Entrances, New York: Viking, 1985.

Invited by the BBC to write a radio play, Beckett in 1957 produced .After the Fall,. a drama both moving and comic, about the arrival of a delayed train at a rural station and the villagers who go to meet it, each with a separate, identifying voice and story. They include Mrs. Rooney, who has come to the station to fetch her blind husband from the train, a porter, a racecourse clerk, the station master, and youngster Jerry, who for a penny leads Mr. Rooney to and from his job. Amid the many sound effects Beckett writes into the script, rural sounds of birds and animals, and human sounds of voices and feet of the passengers, we hear the rain start. Mr. Rooney asks, .Who is the preacher to-morrow?..Has he announced the text?. Mrs. Rooney: .The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.. .(Silence. They join in wild laughter.).
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