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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

A.R.T. revives bleak 'Endgame'

    There are no painkillers left. There is no light pouring in from the windows. There is no horizon and no sugar plums. The sky is grey. The temperature is zero. There is nothing to distract the audience from the grim view of life presented on the stage.
    "Endgame," written by Samuel Beckett, is being revived by the American Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square where it is now playing. The play centers around four characters in a single room. The windows are covered in planks, the walls are a yellowing plaster and death is imminent, evidenced by the characters' browning clothes and dismal, fragmented conversations.
    Hamm (played by Will LeBow) sits in his chair, blind and unable to walk, begging his servant Clov (Thomas Derrah) for painkillers. Hamm's parents, Nagg (Remo Airaldi) and Nell (Karen MacDonald), live in garbage cans half-submerged in the floor, appearing periodically to ask for biscuits. They all dream of yesterday.
    Lighting is used to isolate the stage so that it appears to be floating in a sea of blackness. It's a world unto itself, and dialogue draws parallels between the stage's appearance and the human existence. When Clov walks into the kitchen, Hamm chillingly warns that "outside of here, it's death." The audience gets completely caught up in the stage as if nothing outside the room exists. The scene is ironic, however: Except for Hamm's wheelchair, Clov's stepladder and a stuffed dog, little exists in the room, either.
    The images and scenes in the play are presented abstractly and disjointedly, hinting at pieces of the truth behind the plot without fully revealing it. Everyone gives in to ritual: Clov slides his feet down the sides of the ladder every time he comes onstage; Nagg tells a story, and the audience is led to believe that he tells it every day, and every day it gets less funny; Hamm demands that his wheelchair always be placed in the exact center of the room.
    A natural curiosity to uncover the set of circumstances that brought these characters together draws the audience into the play. It's the cast, however, that keeps the audience's attention. The paradoxically deadened and passionate delivery of the lines suggests that the most important truths are the ones left unspoken. Hamm posits, "Imagine if a rational being came back to earth. Wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough? To think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!"
    None of the characters are especially likeable, which is exactly what Beckett intended. Nagg licks his corpulent lips and asks for sweets, Nell's sardonic laugh gives way to a hacking cough, and Hamm manipulates and alienates everyone around him. The actors successfully bring to life this strange world of cynicism and bleakness, delivering their dialogue skillfully with reverence for the past and pessimism for the future, but with no urgency to fully address either.
    Despite the show's bleakness, the audience is often able to laugh. For example, when Clov pushes blind Hamm in front of the boarded-up window and tells him there's light coming in, Hamm smiles and says he feels the sunlight on his face. At this, Clov simply stares out at the audience with his lips pursed, as if to suggest that the lie is safer than the truth.
    With a play like "Endgame," the audience needs to laugh in order to make the show's tension bearable. Though not outwardly comedic, the characters give the audience numerous opportunities to laugh through the sheer absurdity their situations as well as subtle references to the play itself. While laughing in the face of death may seem strange, Nell puts it best: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."

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Written by Samuel Beckett
Directed by Marcus Stern
At the American Repertory Theatre through March 15
Tickets $37 to $110