Endgame
Samuel Beckett has a well-deserved reputation as a genius, and his play Endgame is modern classic of bleak comedy and existentialism.
It’s a hard combination to pull off--how, after all, do you bring out the sublimely funny in the jarringly hopeless? For Beckett, the reason for the play’s grimness is simple to bring into focus: he does it with a simple exchange between Hamm (Will LeBow), a bossy, wheelchair-ridden complainer, and Clov (Thomas Derrah), who is, in effect, his adoptive son, a doormat who threatens to abandon Hamm even as he wonders aloud why he continues to obey his whims.
Hamm asks Clov why he doesn’t simply go off; Clov asks Hamm why he tolerates Clov; and when the two answer one another, it’s a perfect example of cross-talk, their replies passing each other as though they were arrows in midflight:
"There’s no where else."
"There’s no one else."
Clever Beckett: he boils down both the resentment of human attachment and the panic it entails in that one moment, but instead of seeing this as an answer, the playwright uses the exchange as a metaphysical crowbar to pry open the seams of the familiar world and snatch a few glimpses at the mystery and desolation of what lay behind it.
Hamm and Clov seem to live in a place situated just beyond nature: there are no more people, and it’s even a surprise that there are still fleas and rats.
Are they in Hell? If so, it’s an evanescent sort of damnation, because they’re running low on all sorts of supplies: there are no more sugar plums, for example, and precious few biscuits to be had. They could just as easily be the last survivors of a war or a plague; they could be shy shut-ins stranded in a bad inner-city neighborhood. Beckett never explains whether these people, and the run-down room they live in, exist on earth or in some metaphysical plain, but either way, the usual fears and hauntings of human life are still with them, though in an extreme sense.
Hamm’s parents Nagg (Remi Airaldi) and Nell (Karen MacDonald) have been consigned to makeshift dungeons, fashioned from trash cans, that are buried in the floor. Their semi-interment lends a sense of mortality and dread to the play, even as it speaks volumes about their half-dead status in the eyes of their son, who sits like a monarch in his throne-like, jury-rigged wheelchair. Half-dead, they are also half-deaf and half-blind; yet, their romantic croonings to one another are the sweetest and most tender thing about the play, and their nostalgia is both piteous and immediately relatable: "Yesterday!" sighs Nell, when Nagg frets that at some point in the last 24 hours he’s lost his one remaining tooth.
As for Hamm, if he’s the King of this particular underworld, he’s makes for an especially fitting example of kings in general: driven by imperiousness, petulance, and insecurity, Hamm is white-eyed and sightless, easily fooled by the exasperated Clov, who caters to him ceaselessly but not without taking joy in occasionally exploiting Hamm’s blindness.
Derrah adopts a stiff gait for the role of Clov, playing up his aspect of court jester and giving Clov’s sense of confusion a deeper nuance: Clov isn’t stupid, but he is often baffled and disoriented, and the distinction is important to make.
As for LeBow, he’s not at all hindered by being restricted to the chair and having to wear sunglasses; his voice and gestures explore a spectrum of expression, and his vollies with Derrah are nothing short of painfully acute and funny. Director Marcus Stern allows them to be each other’s inadequate crutch, but also allows their steady alienation to mount, giving the play a final flourish to demonstrate how things fall, and fly, apart. The play, unlike a sitcom, doesn’t return things to a reliable equilibrium, but unravels degree by degree, its tiny universe the victim of physically and emotionally manifested entropy.
Airaldi and MacDonald don’t have much time in the play’s 75 minutes--particularly MacDonald, who disappears after having one major scene--but they make their mark.
The set design, by Andromache Chalfant, is deceptive in looking minimalist, but embedding so many details crucial to the play’s tone and theme, from the incompletely boarded-over windows to the waterstained walls and the suggestions of a wider world that once had meaning and no longer has a bearing on this room and its occupants: the turned-over picture hanging from a wall, the pipe that must lead outside, where the characters never venture, but which offers no egress.
Scott Zielinski’s lighting is always intelligent, and here works superbly with a blend of ambient and spot-lighting. Never have shadows seemed so merry, and so cruel, as they wash up like a final deluge.
All in all, the ART’s production is everything Beckett would probably have wanted it to be: acidly funny, rollicking in its despair, unflinching and even proud to be trembling on the brink of oblivion.
