Alvin Epstein (May 14, 1925 – December 10, 2018) was an American actor and director.
He was a founding member of both the American Repertory Theater and Yale Repertory Theatre.
He was particularly admired for his performances in the plays of Samuel Beckett.
He also served as Artistic Director at the Guthrie Theater.
Born in the Bronx, Epstein was the son of Harry Epstein, a physician, and his wife Goldie Epstein (née Rudnick).
He graduated from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan and the Queens College, City University of New York.
After serving in the United States Army during World War II in Germany, he studied dance in New York with Martha Graham and mime in Paris.
His early performances in New York City included appearing in mimes with Marcel Marceau.
In 1956 he made his Broadway debut as the Fool in Orson Welles’ 1956 production of William Shakespear's King Lear.
That same year he portrayed the slave Lucky in the Broadway premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Epstein continued to appear in many productions of Beckett's plays, including Clov, the servant, in the United States premiere of Endgame in 1958.
He portrayed two more characters in that play during his career: Hamm, Clov’s tyrannical blind master, in a 1984 Off-Broadway production that he also directed, at the Samuel Beckett Theater; and Hamm’s aged father, Nagg, who lives in a garbage can, performed at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan in 2005 and again, in 2008, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
21 monologues written by American playwrights form a sort of fractured portrait of the American collective psyche. Ranging from the sad to the hilarious, from the angry to the tentatively celebratory, many of the major and recurrent issues associated with our fraught but beloved union are reconsidered with elegance, wit, brutal honesty, and a little outright insanity.
An elderly woman enters a Manhattan subway station only to find herself sitting on a bench beside an elderly man of roughly the same age. As they sit and wait for their train in silence, two complete strangers on a bench, what the audience soon learns that they themselves don't know, is that they once shared the happiest day of their lives, playing together as children. Yet it's now too far back for them to remember anymore, too far back for them to recognize each other anymore. The story then shifts back and forth between the breathtaking landscape of their unconscious', as Isabel Lucas and Oliver Ackland play more youthful representations of how they see themselves inside, and search for the memory they once shared.
Three teams of criminals share the same Brooklyn block, but each exists in a separate genre of film. The Amateurs are trapped in a 1970's anti-hero movie. The Sputniks live in black and white. The Moolies can't escape their rap video life.
Still living at home with his avant-garde actress mother, constantly rejected by art schools, and without a lover, aspiring painter Andrew decides to enter a contest in hopes of winning a six month stay in Kenya. Though things aren't great for Andrew, neither are they wonderful for his lesbian friend Lucy who constantly bickers with her lover Ingrid. Lucy complicates Andrew's life when she introduces him to the suspicious-looking, enigmatic Jerry.
Follow the adventures of Belle, a bright young woman who finds herself in the castle of a prince who's been turned into a mysterious beast. With the help of the castle's enchanted staff, Belle soon learns the most important lesson of all -- that true beauty comes from within.
Tony Danza stars in this prison drama about Jerome "Jerry" Rosenburg, a self-professed "jailhouse lawyer" who defends himself against the homicide charge that has put him on death row. This tense movie, made in Canada, has the feel of a biographical documentary.
Everybody Rides The Carousel invites the viewer along on eight "rides" through the different stages of life. Based on the work by Erik Erikson, one of the most influential psychoanalytic theorists of this century, the film explores the inner feelings and conflicted emotions experienced during each stage of personality development. With distinctive and poetic animation, John and Faith Hubley visualize the conflicts, joys, problems and delights we all experience on the carousel of life.