Posted: 3 years ago

Last night we attended a Samuel Beckett play at our college. I watched the audience as they left, shaking their heads and frowning, and I too had questions. We had just visited Beckett's future to no where and it was quite a puzzling trip. Here is my review:

Endgame by Samuel Beckett:  A Post-Performance Review         by Joe Kagle

It takes real guts for a college Drama Department to put on a successful Beckett play and Endgame is an enormous challenge. As it states for its audience: “Endgame” refers to the final portion of a chess game (comment: where only the pawn now moves). It is set in a post-apocalyptic, bombed out subway station, four family members explore the comedic and tragic moments of life and try to grasp why we strive tirelessly (comment: although in a world where everyone sleeps more than wakes) to exist.” The production was mind-blowing, well-acted and well-staged and left more questions than answers (even with the introduction in the playbill). Isn’t that what a college performance should do in an academic setting- leave questions?

This viewer raises his glass of wine while eating dark chocolate (both good for the heart) in tribute to the production, its players, director and a Fine Arts Department that is not afraid to leave an audience with minds filled with questions. Since I am told that Beckett never told anyone what he was attempting with this play (except the obvious setting), let me fill in my own interpretation. First, when I attended Dartmouth College many moons ago, I read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, and since Frost was Poet in Residence during my years there, I went to him and asked what the poem meant. He said, “I do not know. I create poems with holes in them so that anyone coming to them can put themselves in those spaces. Therefore, if I get to know you better, I might be able to tell you what you get from my poems.” Later, much later, I got to go as a newspaper critic in Boston to Robert Wilson’s CivilWars (the third and fourth acts) by the Cambridge Repertory Theater. I did not understand much of what happened and panned the work as taking too much of its genius from copies of surrealism and Dadaism and happenings. I said it was not original. Within six months, I was a fan of Wilson’s work and traveled the country to see anything that he did (even his Hamlet in Houston where he played the lead in Wilsonian fashion and made the set pure Wilson). Therefore on leaving Endgame and driving home, I commented to my wife (after her comment to me: “What did you get out of the play?”), “I got out of Endgame what I brought to it and what suggestions lead me, through my life again, to mirror the surrealism and the reality that we all  live in our individual way.”

Most of the suggestions in the play were subconscious (in a broken subway where almost no one moves or journeyed outside, except by reflection or memory) where a would-be artist dealt with his irritating mother (a figure in a make-shift, shopping cart wheelchair throne who rose from concealment to fulfill yet overshadow her son’s need to serve his Oedipus Complex) and yet still not kiss his love, his MOM. Her discarded parents in trash cans tried to kiss also and could not but at least they could scratch each other to relieve discomfort (until the mother died and the father cried). The young man stated that he wanted to leave and end this endless game but he still played his servile part to the end when all were covered again in plastic. Is that our future: covered in plastic?

Was this real; was it surreal; was it just a play about a play that never ends; and was it about ending the play that cannot end (at least, covering it up with a nice ABA structure (from cover to pawn action to cover) at the seeming end which of course was not an end since each of us in the audience took it away with us and asked, “What did it all mean?” Oh again and again, yes! “  Did we want it to end? Oh, YES, many times, but we stayed and endured its sameness and difference (just like the young man who spray painted a wall to get away from what he never could leave). Was the play enjoyable, sometimes; was it something to rush back and see again, no or maybe, depending on your tolerant and need to explore the craziness of routine, small talk, endless people games and time passing with little motion. Now away from it, I enjoy thinking about it.  Next week I will try to explain Robert Wilson to one of my classes.  I should have sent them all to Endgame first.