Spring Break
'Endgame' boasts worthwhile players
by William-Bernard Reid-Varley
Arts | 3/3/09
Posted online at 7:51 PM EST on 3/2/09
American Repertory Theatre's current production of existential playwright Samuel Beckett's 1955 play Endgame, directed by Marcus Stern, associate director of A.R.T., features a full cast of professional actors with nearly 300 productions between them. The nationally renowned American Repertory Theatre, which will celebrate its 30th year in Cambridge this fall, has won numerous awards including the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Time Magazine recently named it one of the top three theaters in the nation. A.R.T. is housed at two locations, the Loeb Drama Center, their mainstage and the location of the current production of Endgame, and the Zero Arrow Theatre, both of which are adjacent to Harvard University.
The play opens with a spotlight highlighting a cloaked, wheelchair-bound Hamm, played by Will Lebow, followed by the illumination of Hamm's adopted son/servant, Clov, played by Thomas Derrah. Finally, a harsh, white light, which remains throughout the duration of the play, fills the stage. Sparse and raw in every regard, the hour-and-a-half, four-character production unfolds on a single stark set that consists of three bare, off-white walls soiled with the brown residue of water leaks, two curtained windows (which Clov, to great absurd effect, determinedly opens to reveal boarded up glass with only a thin slit of windowpane visible), a radiator and a door to "Clov's kitchen." It could be a nearly normal, if drab and mundane, house. On the right wall, however, a picture is hung with the back facing out, and at the front of the stage, embedded in the wood floor sit two lidded metal trash cans in which live Hamm's pitiful, hoary-headed parents, Nagg (played by Remo Airaldi) and Nell (played by A.R.T. founding member Karen McDonald). The effect of the set is an absurd confusion of inside and out, "us" and the world-ambiguities which set the foggy air of absurd yet realistic contradiction which is the permeating, vivifying force of the play. An obvious tragedy, Beckett nonetheless intended for the play to be simultaneously comedic, through both the attempts at jokes by Hamm and Clov and the unintentionally absurd deportment of all four characters.
The play opens with a spotlight highlighting a cloaked, wheelchair-bound Hamm, played by Will Lebow, followed by the illumination of Hamm's adopted son/servant, Clov, played by Thomas Derrah. Finally, a harsh, white light, which remains throughout the duration of the play, fills the stage. Sparse and raw in every regard, the hour-and-a-half, four-character production unfolds on a single stark set that consists of three bare, off-white walls soiled with the brown residue of water leaks, two curtained windows (which Clov, to great absurd effect, determinedly opens to reveal boarded up glass with only a thin slit of windowpane visible), a radiator and a door to "Clov's kitchen." It could be a nearly normal, if drab and mundane, house. On the right wall, however, a picture is hung with the back facing out, and at the front of the stage, embedded in the wood floor sit two lidded metal trash cans in which live Hamm's pitiful, hoary-headed parents, Nagg (played by Remo Airaldi) and Nell (played by A.R.T. founding member Karen McDonald). The effect of the set is an absurd confusion of inside and out, "us" and the world-ambiguities which set the foggy air of absurd yet realistic contradiction which is the permeating, vivifying force of the play. An obvious tragedy, Beckett nonetheless intended for the play to be simultaneously comedic, through both the attempts at jokes by Hamm and Clov and the unintentionally absurd deportment of all four characters.
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