Reviewed by Kelly Kleiman
Court Theater's production of Endgame is grating in so many ways-Hamm's voice, Clov's walk, the pointlessly cluttered set, the gratuitous video-that anything less brilliant than Samuel Beckett's play would have been DOA. But like an overwatered cactus whose spines can still sting, even this version of Endgame left me in helpless tears for the last five minutes. In those final moments, the concept fades away and there's nothing left but the text and two actors who understand it completely. Hamm sits alone in his wheelchair, musing about the likelihood that he's lost everything after an eternity of trying to do so, while Clov stands in the shadows trying to decide whether he can inflict, or sustain, the loss-and that's the essence of Endgame. And then director Christopher Bayes gets up to his old tricks, treating the audience to a film cribbed from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with fetus afloat in the stars. This would be bad enough even if it didn't appear after the actors have taken their curtain calls-but it does. The night I was there, the audience watched dutifully for several long minutes and then, in a hundred separate decisions, rose and left. If Bayes was trying to drive home Beckett's point about the importance of deciding when to stay and when to go, he could have done it better some other way-like, say, by directing the play.
Instead, Bayes gives us high concept: there's barely room for the actors on Michael Sommers's overstuffed set, occupied as it is with screens showing black-and-white video of a roller coaster, and backlit skeletons, and a Ferris wheel behind a scrim, and an upended papier-mache crocodile's head, and calliope music of the kind that accompanies merry-go-rounds. (Josh Horvath) is the composer/sound designer.) While the text makes fairly clear that Endgame takes place after the nuclear holocaust, Bayes seems to suggest it takes place during some fusion of carnival, Mardi Gras and Halloween. If his point is that life is an all-too-short cabaret, I'd rather hear it from Kander and Ebb.
Endgame, of course, is the companion piece to Waiting for Godot-or, more accurately, the contrast piece. If Godot encapsulates what it's like to just keep on keeping on-even when, as was famously written, "nothing happens-twice"-Endgame demonstrates what happens when you don't. Let go of all the little rituals and attachments of life, however painful or foolish, and you're left staring into the abyss. Like Godot, Endgame is best done as a comedy whose end is unexpectedly serious and painful. Instead Bayes chooses to direct it as a grind whose conclusion comes as a relief. That's one way of interpreting Beckett and existentialism, but the playwright is surely difficult enough on his own without ladling on a heaping helping of Brechtian alienation.
Allen Gilmore, surely the most ill-used of Court's regular actors-last year he was consigned to play Cyrano while wearing not a long nose but a pig's snout-plays Hamm, and he seems to have been directed to be as off-putting as possible. The suddens sharps and flats of his speaking voice suggest the jarring vocalizations of kabuki, without the cultural underpinnings. But Hamm's supposed to be unpleasant; he's not supposed to be weird. He is, in fact, Everyman. Awareness of this should temper any concept of Hamm as an assault upon the audience, but there's no tempering here: three or four times Gilmore summons the full power of his voice, which literally shakes the sound baffles at the back of the house. So the audience cringes before Hamm just as Clov does, making it tougher for them to identify with him as they must for the play to succeed. Remarkably, Gilmore rises above all this in the final monologue, plumbing Hamm's vulnerability in a way that makes each of his quirks universal. He has a stuffed dog; he fights with his father and belittles his mother but is adrift when they're gone; he's forever retelling himself a story of his life, whether true or not is almost beside the point; and he's facing the ultimate loss, in this case embodied by his servant-cum-son Clov. When Clov finally does leave, it's wrenching, just as it is when Hamm finally takes off his dark glasses and we see through the distorting mask of lunacy to the ordinary face beneath. As trying as I found the beginning of Gilmore's performance, I can't say enough positive things about the end.
Likewise Joe Foust as Clov must overcome a directorial concept that has him walking with a mincing, Little-Tramp gait that's utterly wrong to convey Beckett's central point, that Clov is as crippled and damaged as Hamm. But as soon as Foust gets the opportunity to give an actual performance instead of a silent movie schtick, he's alight with the essence of the character: Clov's passive-aggressive rage against Hamm, his love for him, his terror and guilt and sorrow at leaving him. Maury Cooper and Roslyn Alexander dexterously combine pathos and humor as Hamm's parents Nagg and Nell; it's a shame Beckett gave them, her especially, so little stage time.
Usually when all the actors are excellent, the credit goes to the director; and it may be that Bayes's true strength is evoking fine performances. He should stick with that, and steer clear of concepts. For the concept here just gets in the way, and the buck for that stops with the director. Unfortunately, so does our enjoyment of the play.