James Strahs | North Atlantic / 2010

shadowing the shadows

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Strahs North Atlantic, performed by The Wooster Group / first performed with the Globe Theater Company in Eindhoven, Netherlands in 1984 and at The Performing Garage, New York, 1985 / The production I saw was performed at Redcat (The Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, February 20, 2010)

 

James Strahs North Atlantic in Wordplays 5: An Anthology of New American Drama (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986)

It is 1983 aboard a U.S. military aircraft carrier, 12 miles off the coast of Holland. The action of the first four scenes all occur at the Operations Room, "Sometime," "Sometime Later," "Sometime Even Later," and "Sometime Even Later Than That," while Scene Five is supposedly at "The Club," and Scene Six "On Deck—Early the Next Morning." It hardly matters, for throughout all action takes place on a highly racked stage with a long table seemingly threatening to propel itself into the audience. Behind the table sit mostly women, most notably Ensign Word-Processor Ann Pusey (Kate Valk) and Master Sergeant Mary Bryzynsky (Frances McDormand), who along with others are seen busily threading and rethreading audiotapes while they toss sometimes banal, sometimes witty, nearly always bawdy statements at each other and the military men, Captain N. I. Roscoe Chizzum (Ari Fliakos), General Lance "Rod" Benders (Paul Lazar), and the two Marine Privates under whom and with whom they work.

     Their job, we are told, is to intercept messages, to gather intelligence. But their actions seldom betray any mental intelligence and involve such quickly spoken and clipped sentences that it seems unimaginable that anyone, including themselves, might comprehend the language. Rather, we glean, perhaps as they do in their "interceptions," only quick stutterings from hundreds of films referencing war (From Here to Eternity, Sands of Iwo Jima, Operation Petticoat, Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, even South Pacific), punctuated by brief musical ditties ("Git Along Little Doggies," "Back in the Saddle," and "Yankee Doodle"), and silly and puny sexual references. The girls are hot for the men and Captain Roscoe and Colonel Lloyd "Ned" Lud seem always about to duke it out over the gals—except for their fascination with each other.

     As in most the works by The Wooster Group, however, none of this "means" in the traditional sense. Most of the chatter, the dialogue of the play, is cut short time and again, with the sound of screeching aircraft, explosions, and doublespeak left hanging in mid-sentence. Like the messages these "sailors" are purportedly tapping into, what the audience gets is mostly feed-back, a perpetual chatter of cultural refuse that can never be truly decoded.

     Reading the play—albeit the version I read was clearly radically changed by the 2010 production—one becomes even more intrigued by the endless sexual innuendos. Indeed, no sex actually occurs in the play; the big bash which was to have ended in the Miss wet uniform contest, is, just like everything else in this play, a shadow, an event that never happens. The constant sexual metaphors that fly between the women of this ship ("Hey, career girl, they're all beer heads. They drink beer right from the tap. All I've got to do is press the lever and they take it right down the throat. I can put in a coke bottle I'm holding between by boots...You got to make them squirt.") are just that, things of language, potentially dangerous, but not of the world of substance. Many of the women may hope for conventional lives, but it is hard to imagine that after the insanity of their military duty that any of them will ever be able to endure normality—however one defines that.   

     Rather than serving any military purpose, this vessel might be most closely compared to The Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship doomed to sail the seas, sending out messages to people living and long dead. In fact, we later discern, this ship is only a decoy for the "real" work being done 500 miles from what we are witnessing. In short, the world we encounter in North Atlantic is only a mirror of another such floating machine of decipher, which may in turn be just a shadow of another, and on and on, with no reality possible in a world where culture and imitation, parody, and camp have become inseparable. In this prisonhouse of language, gesture—at the heart of The Wooster Group's art—is the only thing that saves people from whirling off into space. With a growl, a grin, a randy scratch, a wistful smile, a grit of teeth, Captain Chizzum and his crew of ghosts seem, at times, hilariously alive, even when serenaded by Bach's "Come Sweet Death."

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2010).

 

Alfred Kreymborg | Lima Beans / 1916 [reading of play]

food for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alfred Kreymborg Lima Beans / Provincetown Playhouse, New York, Autumn 1916

 

In the summer of 1914, Alfred Kreymborg was invited to the Connecticut art colony named Silvermine, founded by the British art critic Charles Caffin and his wife. While there, the poet and former editor of The Glebe, worked on his manuscript titled Mushrooms, published in 1916, in which several of the pieces were written as prose poems with rhythmic dialogues, an example of which I've reproduced below:

 

                                          IDEALISTS

 

                                          Brother Tree:

                                          Why do you reach and reach?

                                          do you dream some day to touch the sky?

                                          Brother Stream:

                                          Why do you run and run?

                                          do you dream some day to fill the sea?

                                          Brother Bird:

                                          Why do you sing and sing?

                                          do you dream—

 

                                          Young Man:

                                          Why do you talk and talk and talk?

   

     These dialogue poems, in turn, influenced in part by the thinking of Gordon Craig, who argued for directorial dominance in the theater, with the use of actors as mere marionettes, encouraged Kreymborg to try his hand at playwriting. Adding his own love of and knowledge of music as well, Kreymborg wrote a short play, "Lima Beans," one of many throughout his career.

     "Lima Beans," in particular, allowed Kreymborg to combine his poetic talents with his philosophical sense of humor, without applying the stylized poetic conceits that often appear in his poetry itself.

     Kreymborg's comic gem has very little "plot." A wife, recently married, decides to change the basic ingredient of her husband's diet, just for variety's sake. Calling out to the passing Huckster, whom we see briefly only twice from the window, the wife orders up some string beans instead of the usual limas. Upon the husband's arrival home from a day at work, the two fall into what has clearly become a pattern of domestication which, at moments, seems almost as abusive as Helmar's descriptions of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House ("good mouse," "queer little dear," etc.).  But their relationship is still fresh, and they remain in love, each kissing one another "daintily six times."

     Ready for his meal, the husband declares his hunger, as she nervously brings forth the serving bowl. His immediate disgust is quickly established, as he throws out its contents, sputtering out his anger as if he were a Shakespearian King having witnessed the downfall of his kingdom:

 

         I perspire tears and blood drops

         in a town or in the fields

         on the sea or in a balloon,

         with my pickaxe or my fiddle

         just to come home

         footsore, staring, doubled with appetite

         to a meal of —string beans?

         Where are my limas?

         .....

         You would dethrone it?

         You would play renegade?

         You'd raise an usurper

         in the person of this

         elongated, cadaverous,

         throat-scratching, greenish

         caterpillar—

 

     His victim collapses in horror, as the abuser hastily leaves the house. The comic ridiculousness of this domestic spat satirizes not only the role of any housewife who is subjected to her companion's tastes, but demolishes the notion that there can be any experimentation in this couple's relationship—culinary or sexual—making anyone who has lived with another being unable to accommodate changes in his or her life uncomfortable in the way that Henri Bergson argues comedy always does.

     With what Kreymborg describes as "housewifely shrewdness," the woman calls back the Huckster, quickly buys some lima beans, and deftly cooks them, just in time for her husband's return to apologize.

     The slightness of these themes, however, is more than made up for in the musical phrases of the quick-paced dialogue (including the stage descriptions); and, although I have never seen a production of this play, one can imagine the marvelous potentialities of the actors (or, perhaps, even puppets, with whom Kreymborg suggested it was to be cast).

      Evidently, the famed human cast, poet and artist Mina Loy, poet and doctor William Carlos Williams, and artist-designer William Zorach, easily took up the task, reading the "score" with great gusto, Loy clearly sensing the issues of the marriage theme, and Williams, according to Kreymborg, "in terror lest he blow up." Williams writes that Zorach sang his role "with zest and vehemence," looking somewhat like Harpo Marx.

     Both Loy and Williams wore costumes of their own making, Loy stunningly dressed in a green gown and one of her own hand-made broaches, which according to Kreymborg, was "not in keeping with Mrs. Lima." The curtain created by the Zorachs was dressed, apparently, as Kreymborg conceived it, "painted in festoons of vegetables," and performed admirably, coming down—since, the author admits, it cannot see and has no comprehension—in the midst of the husband's final question, which may have been an invitation to sex.

                                

Los Angeles, August 15, 2010

Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier | Albert Herring / 2012

celebrating liberation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Britten (composer), Eric Crozier (text, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant), Albert Herring / the performance I saw was at the LAOpera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, March 11, 2012

 

Benjamin Britten's comic opera, Albert Herring, as most critics have noted, is a rather light entertainment that, over the years, has been revealed to have darker and more profound messages beneath it. The excellent recent production of the LA Opera hints at a few of those more meaningful moments, but skim over some of the most important implications.

     On the surface Britten's fourth operatic work reads a bit like a Ronald Firbank story or like other works of the British dialogue fictions, filled with typological figures. Lady Billows (Janis Kelly in the production I saw) is just what her title suggests, an elderly autocrat, who literary "bellows" to all those about, demanding virginal girls and normative behavior. Her housekeeper, Florence Pike (played by Ronnita Nicole Miller) is a uppity slacker who keeps a sacred diary of all the village of Loxford's goings on, including the misbehaviors of nearly every young girl in town. Along with the head teacher, Miss Wordsworth (Stacey Tappan), the Mayor, Mr. Gedge (Jonathan Michie), and the Police Superintendent Budd (Richard Bernstein), these figures attempt to maintain the traditional moral values—however they might be defined—for all Loxford figures, particularly the feminine sex, whose virtuous model is celebrated each year in their choice for May Queen.

      The opera begins with the meeting of these important city figures, attempting to decide upon which young woman they will bestow this year's award. As they run through each of their lists, however, it becomes apparent from Florence's diary that none of the village girls is above recrimination, even though some crimes are no more important than where they wear the hems of their dress. Others have stayed out all night in barns, run off with boyfriends, or simply been gossiped about. In distress, the quintet struggles about their inability to make a choice until one of their members suggests a May King, all ultimately agreeing that the only choice can be Albert Herring, a woman shopkeeper's son, who has been carefully obedient to his mother. There is also a sizeable purse attached to the award, which pleases Albert's mother far more than he when the group announce their choice.

      At first Albert is seen as simply a do-gooder, with no personality whatsoever. But by the second scene of Act I, we begin to see him question his allegiance to obedience, and, comparing himself with the fun-loving and sexually busy couple, Sid and Nancy, realizing that he has nothing to show for remaining a mother's boy.

     Putting Albert on display, the town leaders could care less about Albert's feelings or any reality he might be experiencing within, dressing him in white and awarding him an absurdly orange wreath, which he is forced to wear throughout the luncheon. But Sid has other plans for Albert, with Nancy spiking Albert's lemonade with rum, an event which begins a series of adventures for our "hero" that ends, after another self-analysis of his life, with Albert going off into the evening to discover the life he has never before experienced.

     Meanwhile, the village, having noted his absence, is in a tizzy about his whereabouts, the hypocritical quintet of village elders meeting to lament what appears is his death. When Albert does reappear at the very moment that the others sing piously (and quite beautifully) about dying, he is shockingly filthy, having spent the night in at least two pubs and, after being thrown out of both, slept for some hours in the gutter. He has also been with two women and (more mysteriously) with a man. The sexuality of those situations is not quite established except for Albert's own admission that he has done everything to which he admits "and worse," and that "it wasn't much fun." The audience's imagination is important here, for how one defines "worse" would lead us to perceive how deep his rebellion against the Victorian notions of the community leaders has gone. Certainly he is no longer in thrall to any of them, particularly to his mother, as he virtually tosses the city leaders out of his shop so that he can get on with his business. Whatever that business may now be is uncertain; but it is clear that Albert has made a big transformation, as he rewards the children candies and graciously hands a peach to Nancy.

     Conductor James Conlon argues that the exact nature of his transgressions must remain vague. And probably that was what Britten also intended. But we must remember that, although he lived much of his life as an open homosexual, for Britten it might have been more difficult to more thoroughly explore the issue in small town life of 1947. Today, I, at least, would have liked a little more of the possibility of Arthur exploring something beyond heterosexual experiences. For that might even have made him a kind of exceptional figure in Loxford history.

     As it stands, Albert is simply a slow learner, a man who waited far too long to come to terms with any sexuality. Perhaps if we understood it as a truly exceptional sexual variance, we might be better able to explain Albert's slow awakening instead of merely explaining him as a kind of village simpleton or, as several characters describe him, not very bright. Let us hope at least that after his night of revelry he does not remain as a greengrocer for the rest of his life!

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2012

Reprinted from (Green Integer Blog, March 2012).

Lorraine Hansbery | A Raisin in the Sun / 2012

survivors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun / the performance I saw was February 18, 2012 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Culver City, California

 

I had not previously seen a stage performance of the original Lorraine Hansberry play, A Raisin in the Sun, although I had long ago seen the film version with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, and I had read the play some time in college, as well as seeing the sentimentalized musical version in its premiere on May 30th, 1973, my 26th birthday at Washington, D.C.'s Arena Theater. So I thought it only fitting that I check out a new stage production at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City, just a short drive from my Los Angeles home.

     Although the well-made play of political and social concerns is not generally my kind of theater, I thought it might be interesting to see how the play has stood, to use a tired cliché, "the test of time." And the fact that my previous physician, with the strangely appropriate name of Dr. Redcross, was married to a niece of Hansberry's, who was very involved in her aunt's estate and interested in theater, made the visit an even more appropriate event.

     When I mentioned my attendance of this play to an intelligent and highly esteemed friend, her response was: "I couldn't possibly ever see anything so sweet. If that makes an elitist, so be it."

     Although at times A Raisin in the Sun may be bittersweet, I would never characterize anything in this gritty story of the Younger family as "sweet." Even the mother, Lena (Kim Staunton), played to type as the sort of reaffirming, religious center of family life, is rarely joyful. And the rest of the family, Walter Lee (Kevin T. Carroll) and Beneatha (Kenya Alexander), particularly, battle it out in a Chicago ghetto world that has little room for anyone but survivors. The youngest of the Younger family, Travis, is forced to sleep on the couch, and is sent out of the house to play whenever there is a serious family discussion or argument—which occurs at regular intervals throughout the play.

     Walter Lee's wife, Ruth (Deidrie Henry), is again pregnant, and given the condition of their apartment and the family squabbles, is considering having an abortion. Her husband, an incompetent dreamer, is so belittled by his chauffeur job that he is near the level of despair suggested by the title's quote from the Langston Hughes poem, "A Dream Deferred."

     The family's major battle is over money, the insurance left by the death of the father. For Lena the decision over the money is an obvious one: a part of it will go for Beneatha's education as a doctor, the other for a new home in Clybourne park. But her son's loss of manhood and despair forces her to hand over some of the money so that he may play the role of the family head. Without even depositing the amount, he invests it in a shoddy deal with a friend to open a bar, only to find that the crook has absconded with the whole sum.

     What struck me as particularly interesting in this play is the fact that the issues it raises are still current. The most interesting character of the drama is Beneatha, a strong young woman determined to make a success through education, an opinionated being who is also fascinated by her lost African roots. When her education money goes missing, she is still determined to travel with her friend, Joseph Asagi (Amad Jackson) to his homeland in Nigeria, in order to experience new worlds and sights.

      The final straw that breaks this family is the racist reaction of the "welcoming" committee to their new home, represented by the white Mr. Karl Linder (Scott Mosenson), who tries to skirt the issue of racism by describing a sense of community difference from their own: this community is even willing to buy the house at a higher price than they have paid! At first, all family members join in their disdain of the proposal, quickly showing him the door. But the saddest moment of the play comes when, having lost the remaining money, Walter Lee, completely giving up their dreams, decides to capitulate, agreeing the Clybourne community's offer.

       No sweetness in these choices, I can assure you. That these troubling issues were spoken in a play of 1959 by a black woman, moreover, is startling. Hansberry may not be an adventuresome writer, but she is certainly a forceful voice and a strong social conscience.

     The only problem with the version, directed by Phylicia Rashad that I attended was some of the character's attempts to play to the obviously sympathetic audience. The character of Walter Lee, in particular, was often played for humor. There is indeed irony, if not outright humor, in many of Hansberry's lines, but to milk that in a role centered upon despair defeats the playwright's purpose. Since Beneatha, in her more sophisticated thinking, is almost an outsider to her own family, she was saved from these winking asides, and was the stronger figure for it.

      Yet overall and over all these years, Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun remains a strong American statement of faith and strength against the daily travails of innercity life. If that means these characters or this play are somehow "sweet," then call me a populist—something no one has ever described me as being before.

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (March 2012).

Rick Elice | Peter and the Starcatcher / 2012

wasted on youth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rick Elice (based on a fiction by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson) Peter and the Starcatcher / New York City, May 6, 2012

 

On May 6, 2011 I attended Mabou Mine’s Peter and Wendy at New York City’s Victory Theatre, a delightful rendition of Barrie’s Peter Pan story performed by actors and puppets. Quite by accident—although I now believe such “accidents” are “intentional coincidences”—almost one year to the date I attended, last evening, Rick Elice’s amazingly theatrical prequel to Barrie’s tale, Peter and the Starcatcher. Although I’m reluctant to compare it with the far less entertaining Wicked’s relationship to The Wizard of Oz, it stands in a similar position to the original.

     Yet Peter and the Starcatcher, in many respects, is the polar opposite of Barrie’s belovèd sweet bedtime story etched into senior citizen’s memories through Disney’s cartoon transformation. Clearly today’s children—a number of whom were in attendance at the Saturday evening performance I witnessed—are quite obviously more sophisticated than I and my peers were growing up in the 1950s. For, although the 7-year-old boy and his 13-year-old sister, sitting on booster seats in the row in front of me, could obviously not have comprehended all of the witty linguistic confabulation of this play—much of it enveloped in camp humor and vaudeville-like risqué asides—they clearly understood and enjoyed a great deal of its multi-layered humor. That Peter and the Starcatcher is basically an adult comedy embracing all tried and true tricks of old-fashioned theatricality that still appeals to children and to the children-in-adults speaks volumes for the work’s intelligence and sheer audacity. If I cannot truly describe this play as a great or even significant dramatic work, I have no difficulty in suggesting that it is a brilliant pastiche—which given our time’s disinterest in normative coherency, is perhaps a greater compliment.

     This is a work, moreover, so different from most of Broadway’s current theater offerings in that it thoroughly depends on its ensemble cast, as the actors transform themselves from sailors into pirates, mermen, and a strange band of Mollusk Island natives whose leader has suffered indignities as a servant in the home of a wealthy English family.

     All of this play’s figures perform delightfully, as one by one they get their individual turns to strut their stuff; but the clear “star” of this zany concoction is the dyslexic, spoonerism-spouting, “nancy-boy” pirate, Black Stache (Christian Borle)—an earlier manifestation of Peter Pan’s crocodile hating, Captain Hook—who discovers in the “boy” (who later changes his name to Peter and finally is awarded his last name, Pan) his perfect nemesis, a kind of kindred yin to his yearning yang. Even more delicious, when Stache prances forward to put his tongue upon the plank, is Smee (Kevin Del Aguila), close behind, to correct those incomprehensible twists of tortured syntax.

     Almost as enticing is the crowd-pleasing frivolity of Molly’s sexually assertive nanny, Mrs. Brumbrake (Arnie Burton) and Fighting Prawn (Teddy Bergmann) who cling to one another, pushing and prodding from every possible position.

     In contrast to these figures’ shenanigans, Molly and the orphan boys, Peter, Alf, and the ever-starving Ted are not nearly so much fun—although they might be forgiven when we consider that by comparison with their orphan torments, Dickens’ Oliver Twist might be said to have lived a life of luxury. They are, moreover, doomed to live in eternal adolescence as outsiders, perpetual kidnappers of generations of temporary girl-moms. No wonder Peter, as he often announces, hates adults. Might he not simply be taken home to be petted and loved?

     Evidently not, particularly after he has bathed in the star-leaden waters that offer him whatever he might desire to become. And although he never really flies in this production he does occasionally soar with the rest of his friends. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, he remains an innocent, who like most innocents and far too many children are capable, competent, and serious-minded, while the adults around them all ridiculously blunder through their lives. One can only mutter at the end of this splendiferous caprice: “What a waste of youth!”

     As I stood to leave the young girl in front turned to announce, as if to confirm her own seriousness of intent: “I read the book”; while her equally sure-footed brother asserted: “I liked it, did you?”

 

Aboard a United returning from New York to Los Angeles, May 7, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (May 2012).

Samuel Beckett | Endgame / 2011

nell’s death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett Endgame / Los Angeles, Sacred Fools Theater / the performance I saw was on April 15, 2011

 

hamm: We’re not beginning to…to…mean something?

clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something!

          (Brief laugh.)

          Ah that’s a good one!

hamm: I wonder.

            (Pause.)

            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.

 

Beware poor viewer (or reader), Beckett seems to warn, of putting too many of your ideas into the often quite meaningless actions of Clov and Hamm of the playwright’s marvelous Endgame. But of course Beckett is also suggesting, perhaps, that the play—carefully looked at—does mean something, a great many things! Beckett’s equivocation about several issues are at the heart of this play.

     Seeing it again, this new performance at the Sacred Fools Theater in Los Angeles directed by Paul Plunkett, and reading it again soon after, set me to thinking and rediscovering all sorts of meanings, some new, some old, some likely chewed up by many of the hundreds of Beckett critics over the years—but perhaps most worth mentioning.

    By accident I saw this play soon after seeing Benjamin Britten’s setting of the medieval miracle play, Noye’s Fludd, so that I recognized in Endgame this time round far more suggestions and references to Noah and his family.

   One should never see Endgame (or any Beckett play for that matter), however, as a kind of metaphoric telling or allegorical story of something else. Rather Beckett riddles his play with references to Noah’s ordeal, enfolding them within contemporary issues and other modernist concerns. This is not a play about Noah and his family, but certainly is a work that embraces the myths therein.

      Noah’s son Ham(m) (wonderfully played by Leon Russom)—shamed and cursed by his father to be the servant of his brothers for having seen him naked—is at the center of Beckett’s work, enduring his seemingly endless life on earth. Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood, a total of nine hundred and fifty years according to the book of Genesis. And each of the sons lived for hundreds of years also. So Hamm’s crying out for death is obviously no small thing. In the post-holocaust world in which Hamm lives, where life has been completely blotted out—there are no tides, no waves, all is gray—the end is certainly to be longed for.

     Hamm’s father, living out his old, old age in a ashbin beside his equally displaced mother, Nell, is called in Beckett’s play, Nagg, suggesting both his propensity to “nag” or scold (he, after all has cursed his own son) and the fact, clearly, that like an old “nag,” an old horse, he has been put out to pasture, so to speak, locked away in a covered ashbin. If one wanted to go further, and Beckett certainly does encourage this, one might play a game of anagrams, transforming Nagg into something like “Noah after God’s grievance,” or “Noah after God’s gift,” depending upon which side of the coin from which one sees oneself. But this is, after all, only a game.

     There is no question, however, of both Nagg’s, Nell’s, and Hamm’s memories of rain, water, sails, fins, and other flood-like images which Hamm insists that Clov inspect through the windows high above normal placement, with a ladder and telescope in hand. It is as if they live still in the ark, attempting to spot signs of some vestiges of new life or survival. Nagg and Nell, moreover, remembering before the flood, retell the story of how they almost drowned on Lake Como.

    The only animals remaining, humorously, are a three-legged child’s play-dog, a flea, a rat, and, possibly, some gulls and the fin of a passing shark. The animals, along with Noah’s other family members evidently have left long ago to be fruitful and multiply, while Hamm, his father, and his mother have remained behind, unable to witness that new green world the others may have discovered.

     Clov (Barry Ford) seems the only misplaced figure in the play. Hamm treats him, occasionally like a son, but none of his Biblical sons, Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan suggest the name Clov. Perhaps he is the son of the old man of his fiction which Hamm retells day and after day, adding details as he goes along? Whoever he is, he serves, like Lucky in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, as an overburdened, maltreated slave to Hamm.

     More likely, Clov is a manifestation of the cleaving process that daily occurs between the two, his name resembling the past-tense of the cleavage which may or may not occur at Endgame’s close. But he is also the matching opposite of Hamm. Both are red-complexioned, but the blind Hamm can only sit while the thin Clov can only stand. Yet despite the abuse that Hamm heaps upon him, Clov has no choice, it appears, but to serve his master.

     I think Beckett here is also playing with a wonderful pun, suggesting the perfect relationship of clove to ham, the two generally used in Easter dinners, one all plump asquat the platter with the other neatly studding it (on thinks of Clov’s constant orderliness). In that sense, Beckett has moved away from the intricacies of Noah’s story, but has brilliantly portrayed their lifetime relationship, and hinted at a new hope symbolized by any Easter dinner.

     With no immediate possibility of death, trapped in a world beyond the end where, as Clov reminds us again and again, all they can see is “zero,” it is no wonder that these two so suffer the pains of everyday life. Nearly everything around them has disappeared and provisions, including food and pain-killers, are fast running out.

     As many critics have agreed, theirs is a world of repetition, a day by day recitation of their sufferings that apparently have no end. As Hamm keeps suggesting, however, it will someday, must someday end, as Nell’s death—if it is truly a death—foretells. Like a bell announcing a funeral, or as in the knelling of a disaster, Nell’s demise demonstrates that despite the “game of dying” Nagg, Hamm, and Clov play each day, a real end is imminent, even if hundreds of years off. Clov’s glimpse of a young boy, a potential Christ (?)—which Hamm immediately describes as a possible “progenitor”—hints at a new world beyond the dead one in which they are trapped.

 

New York, May 6, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater (May 2011).