Liz Lauren
John Pribyl (left) and Brian Mani, "Endgame," 2016.
When you descend into American Players Theatre's indoor Touchstone Theatre to see their current production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a faint mist of smoke, like the last gasp of a funeral pyre, wafts up from the stage. It may also be the remains of an ashy fire and brimstone or nuclear blast. We’re never sure. What we do know of the world outside is that it’s irreparably scorched. The sun is a dull coin on the horizon. The sea has lost its tide. And the earth is “all corpsed." In other words, this is the end, my friend. This is the end.
Or is it? Beckett’s play takes place at an end of times officially described as “hopefully never” and in an anonymous everywhere called “hopefully nowhere.” The most existential of audience members will point out that Beckett never needed an environmental or atomic disaster to set the stage for absurdity. Life itself was hell, and existence a pointless repetition to be endured.
In the play, Hamm (Brian Mani) is a sightless, wheelchair bound patriarch, cruel and onerous. His lame son, Clov (David Daniel) is more of a manservant than a progeny, exclusively there to fulfill Hamm’s every whistled command. Hamm’s father Nagg (John Pribyl) and mother Nell (Sarah Day) are both legless, and live in a pair of ashcans in a trash heap of a bunker. They pop up and down into the plot with the measured regularity of a Jack in the box.
The character names are wordplay for tools — Hamm for “hammer” and Clov, the French word for “nail” — and these are good descriptions for their aggressive co-dependency. (It’s said that Beckett used his own intense marriage as the basis for their relationship.) Neither are made happier by the other, but each help keep the other alive, Hamm by providing food and shelter, Clov by using his working legs and eyes to take care of all household tasks. Throughout the play, Hamm asks Clov to leave; Clov, in turn, threatens to go. The act, for either, is suicide. But in an this ugly, irrational world, suicide may be the only rational act.
Now about that world, which as dim and dark as it is, is beautifully realized by scenic designer Nathan Stuber. His stage is a geometric box, layered in rich browns, golds, and grays. Costumes too, designed by Jesse Klug, perfectly blend into this scheme. APT’s players are, of course, the animators of this rich environment, and as always are competent professionals, finding all the moments of dark laughter scuttling about in the abyss.
Endgame, is a swift 90 minutes, served up with no intermission. But then, who needs a lobby run for a latte in the middle of the apocalypse? APT's production continues through Oct. 16.
