September 10–17, 1998

critical mass|fringe/theater

Nothing Doing

		Hamming It Up: Maggie Siff as Clov and Pearce Bunting as Hamm in Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Endgame proves a worthy beginning to the Fringe.

by Toby Zinman

Endgame

Big House (plays & spectacles) at Smoke, 233 N. Bread St., through Sept.13, 413-2070

Mark Lord's power as a director comes not only from his willingness to undertake not only difficult texts, but imaginative locations as well. I am happy to tell you he has done it again: a geniused venue. Staging Endgame in the cavernous, stifling, airless basement of a derelict warehouse was an inspired decision, and Hiroshi Iwasaki's set design is remarkably right. And if it's uncomfortable, well, it's an uncomfortable play (and, fortunately, also short). What is unfortunate about this makeshift theater is that the acoustics are terrible; the last three rows had to strain to hear, and when voices dropped to a murmur, as they did often, the dialogue was nearly unintelligible. Which is too bad, considering what amazing dialogue it is.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is arguably the most significant play of the 20th century; his later Endgame ups the despair ante considerably, although, as one character tell us, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," and there's enough misery here to keep us all laughing. Set in some undefined time in the entropic future when Nature is ending and life depleted, we are in a small gray bare room with two windows. Hamm, an old tyrannical blind man in a wheelchair, gives orders to a younger man, Clov. There are two trashcans in the room, inhabited by Hamm's legless aged parents, Nagg and Nell.

What's it about? You want plot?? From Beckett?!? Nothing happens. That's the point. (That's also what's funnier than unhappiness.) The invitation to the audience is to interpret. Maybe this is a play about post-nuclear holocaust. Maybe it's about aging. Maybe it's about fathers and sons. Maybe it's about the disintegration of a personality. Your interpretation of it may be religious or aesthetic or psychological or philosophical or metaphysical or environmental. ("Ah the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them.") These are characters so profoundly human that it is impossible not to see yourself reflected in them. This is dialogue so resonant that it is impossible not to have the words turn with endless meaning. This is drama so theatrical that it is simultaneously painful and amusing.

The problem of any production of a Beckett play is to meet such enormous challenges. Pearce Bunting's Hamm is a study in debased elegance: megalomaniacal, creative, tortured and torturing. He shouts, he demands, he muses (not always audibly); he grimly, gallantly resigns himself to the terrible limits of the human condition. David Warner as Nagg, Hamm's "accursed progenitor," is a wonder of toothlessness, managing to be both querulous and sweet, and Terry Guerin plays his wife Nell as superbly abstracted, dazed by age and by recollections of love and the beauty of the world. I wish their tenderness had been played up more, just as I wish their grotesque antiquity had. If this production errs it is, surprisingly for Lord, on the side of naturalism; it lacks extremity of style, and even its extremity of site is, essentially, realistic.

The weak link in the production was Maggie Siff as Clov. Clov should be, I think, as controlled and toneless as Hamm is chaotic and histrionic, someone who longs for "a world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust." Instead of this self-ironizing, disaffected personality, Siff gives us temper tantrums and flouncings and passionate outbursts and poutings (her mannerisms have become rather dangerously recognizable). The balance of the play as it seesaws between the two extreme central characters—diametric opposites and thus inevitably tied—is tipped by her showy, over-emoted performance.

Nevertheless, as they say, this is a moving, strong production of one of the great plays of this century, and an excellent choice for your Fringe.