THEATER: DISPELLING THE GLOOM

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They came to the plays in limos or on Rollerblades, in bright summer colors or basic Beckett black. Inside, they toted books by or about the master. When the curtain rose, their attention was votive; they laughed and sighed and never dared cough. The dangling melodramatic ending of one play elicited a collective gasp, like that of a child hearing a ghost story's tantalizing punch line. At the curtain calls their faces beamed at the actors with rapture and gratitude. In the lobby afterward they bought T shirts reading GATE THEATRE--BECKETT FESTIVAL.

Why, even Samuel Beckett, the Irish pessimist who was born on Good Friday--the 13th--and whose fondest artistic hope was to "fail better," might have smiled at the glory of it all. Beckett (1906-89) would have been 90 this year, and to celebrate his indelible mark on the modern spirit, the Gate Theatre of Dublin came to New York City's Lincoln Center with productions of all 19 works he wrote for the stage, from the full-length Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days to the 40-second Breath. (Another 13 pieces were composed for radio, TV or film.)

The Beckett Festival, which ended last week, is fresh evidence of a bustling industry devoted to the Nobel-prizewinning author. He has inspired more than 100 books, including three essential studies this year: Mel Gussow's Conversations with and About Beckett (Grove Press) and two biographies--Lois Gordon's The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 (Yale University Press) and an authorized life, Damned to Fame, by Beckett scholar James Knowlson (due in October from Simon & Schuster). Knowlson's book is reverent, exhaustive--3,361 footnotes!--and full of fine detail on Beckett's dogged, monastic creativity. If anyone could know this private man, Knowlson does. And tells.

Together, the plays and books paint the fullest portrait yet of an artist whose vision of human existence as a painful, poignant marking of time between the crib and the crypt helped define our world view in the atomic age. In doing so, they correct the canard that Beckett's work is boring, mired in gloom; the Gate pieces were darkly funny and passionate. And they reveal Beckett, who may seem so forbidding and remote as to be of another species, as a stoic but gentle man, a hero of the French Resistance and a generous soul--he once impulsively gave his new jacket to a derelict in a Montparnasse bar--who tried to relieve the suffering of others because he felt his own so deeply.

Beckett was born near Dublin, into a comfortable Irish Protestant family. At Trinity College, Dublin, Sam was first in his class. He studied in Paris and discovered as strong a love for the city as he had a hatred for the small-mindedness of old Eire. Sam went home thereafter only to see his family, especially his mother May, whose lingering death from Parkinson's disease touched him as he stared into her pained eyes. "These are the first eyes I think I truly see," he wrote to a friend, in a letter cited in Knowlson's biography. "I do not need to see others; there is enough there to make one love and weep."