BOOKS OF THE TIMES: REVIEW

Although Mr. [Alan Schneider] displayed a catholicity of taste over the years -among his early efforts were stagings of such plays as Thornton Wilder's ''Skin of Our Teeth,'' Robert Anderson's ''All Summer Long'' and Clifford Odets's ''Country Girl'' - he would become best known for his more experimental work, and in one of the few passages of self-assessment in this volume he makes it clear where his affinities lay. ''I am the only American theater director who ever went from the avant-garde to the Old Guard without having passed through the Establishment,'' he writes. ''I have always favored the poetic over the prosaic, siding with instinct over reason, swayed by the power of symbols, images, metaphors, all of the substances lurking behind the closed eyelids of the mind. To me, these are more faithful signs of essential truths than all those glossy photographs that seek to mirror our external world. I've always preferred Chekhov to Ibsen, Tennessee Williams to Arthur Miller, and Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy; but [Samuel Beckett]'s metaphors reach deepest into my subconscious self.'' Having been signed up to direct the first American production of ''Waiting for Godot'' in 1955, Mr. Schneider spends a week looking for the elusive writer in Paris and finally succeeds in trying to get Mr. Beckett to answer his questions about the play. ''According to him,'' Mr. Schneider writes, ''Godot had 'no meaning' and 'no symbolism.' There was no 'general point of view involved,' but it was certainly 'not existentialist.' Nothing in it meant anything other than what it was on the surface. 'It's just about two people who are like that.' That was all he would say.''