Death Is a Cabaret

By T. E. Kalen

ENDGAME

by SAMUEL BECKETT

The stage is a hexagon, not much larger than a cockfighting pit. Four playgoers apiece are seated in wire-meshed chicken-coop enclosures. Visually, the audience becomes ghostly to itself, a spectral collection of selves in limbo, seemingly bodiless.

This is the physical setting of a venturesome and exciting revival of Endgame by Director Andre Gregory and the Manhattan Project. The same group two seasons ago made a vertiginous descent into the Freudian maelstrom of Alice in Wonderland, soon due to run again in repertory with Endgame.

Gregory is remarkable for sheer theatricality. His special gift is to alter the ratio of expectation between an audience and a work. In Endgame, he has taken an austere doomsday play and injected it with manic laughing gas.

The effect is right. Waiting for death, as the four characters in Endgame are, why not expire with a gag rather than a whimper? Gregory captures that aspect of Beckett that is too frequently scanted, his Gaelic gallows humor, his fascination with vaudeville turns, his boozy way with a monologue that is pure barroom oneupmanship.

The cast is superb. The two parents, Nagg (Tom Costello) and Nell (Saskia Noordhoek Hegt), are like moths whose wings have iced. They flutter feebly, not in the text's ash bins, but in a laundry hamper and a G.E. refrigerator carton. Their crippled son Hamm (Gerry Bamman) treats the universe as a sorry joke, his servant Clov (Larry Pine) as a straight man, and his fate as a glorious chance to play M.C. in death's cabaret.

T.E.Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.