Beckett’s Endgame is canonical modern theater, and the American Repertory Theatre has staged it for the second time during the many years I’ve been a subscriber. An earlier production in 1984 was directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, a co-founder with Lee Breuer et al of the legendary theatrical mavens, Mabou Mines, which, along with Robert Wilson, were the most important theatrical influences on my life in the 70’s in New York City.
Is Endgame too bleak for these times? Well, maybe. But it is also hauntingly exacting in its archetypal austerity. And for me personally, it is a default measuring device for how the force fields of my life have shifted. I first saw it performed in the 60s in San Francisco during a time when life as we knew it was being ripped open and replaced with an unleashed wild energy of change. That shift was intoxicating, exciting and personal, and Beckett was a clarion reminder of the profundity of the revolution at hand. Or so it seemed to a wide eyed, teenaged idealist.
Twenty years later in Cambridge, the center of gravity of my life had turned domestic, having just had three children in three years (and yes, we did finally figure out what was causing that.) At that point in my life, the existential angst of Endgame felt more theatrical than a desperate call from an inchoate world consciousness.
Now, 25 years after that viewing, I watched the play last night and felt as though I had circled back into a world where catastrophic change is rampant and ubiquitous, where the unknowns are winning out against the knowns. Bleak and intense, Endgame has proven itself to be a play for all seasons—certainly in my life anyway.
A few excellent quotes on Beckett are provided below thanks to the dramaturgy work of ART’s Heidi Nelson:
One has to give up the comfort or security of a single interpretation of Endgame, recognizing that the play does not work towards the clarification of meaning but, rather, towards the clarification of the impossibility of meaning.
Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The radical simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature of the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties that plague the minds of his characters.
—Charles R. Lyons
At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man’s relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued living with a kind of stoicism.
—Mel Gussow