Samuel Beckett's Endgame @ Stone Soup
Back in 1981, Mike Nichols directed a famous version of Waiting for Godot at the Lincoln Center in NYC, starring Steve Martin and Robin Williams. We recall that at some point in college, we saw an interview with Steve Martin about that production, and Martin said something memorably apt: "We decided to serve the comedy of the play, because the ideas would serve themselves."
Steve Martin's intuition was on our minds Saturday, while sitting in the tiny Stone Soup Theatre space in Wallingford, watching 2 Hours Traffic's production of Endgame. The show was, with an important caveat, a mediocre performance of a great play, a mostly humorless two-hour slog, featuring three actors who struggled to make sense of their characters, and one whose performance makes the others look all the worse in comparison.
Beckett's second full-length play, which debuted in 1957, Endgame can best be described as a play in which four people—the last four people, for all they know—are holed up in a fall-out shelter after a nuclear holocaust. Beckett is not concrete about the scenario, but as a hypothesis, that's the most common and it works. Hamm (David Persson) serves as the over-bearing head-of-household. Blind and lame, bound to a makeshift wheelchair, he barks out increasingly insane commands to those around him, primarily Clov (David Kubiczky), the only one of the four who can still walk (barely). Hamm's father Nagg (Michael Brill) and his wife Nell (Alice Bridgforth) are nearly senile and—ostensibly legless—consigned to two trashcans, where they wallow in their own filth and occasionally emerge Oscar the Grouch-style to beg scraps of food in exchange for humoring Hamm's delusional whims.
We here at Seattlest like to be positive, and so we'll start with the one stand-out in the four-person cast: long-time Seattle actor Michael Brill. When we came to Seattle back in 2003, our first job was at Seattle Public Theatre, in the Bathhouse out on Greenlake. Back in the late 1960s, Brill had started the Bathhouse Theatre, and his achievements were legendary. Seattle Public took over the space after Brill's company closed, and we forever suffered in his company's shadow. It wasn't until Saturday night (the first time we've ever seen Brill) that this Seattlest contributor understood why.
There's a lot to be said for Brill's performance. Beckett's characters typically suffer from one sort of handicap or another, and a core component of the performance has to be wallowing in physical misery. Brill made that misery real; the other actors didn't. But the most important difference between Brill and his cohorts was precisely what Steve Martin referenced: Brill served the comedy. He made his misery funny; he made his lines funny.
David Persson, on the other hand, flounders. Beckett doesn't provide easy scripts, but contrary to popular wisdom, his characters are actually simple to understand. The actor's challenge is to take his or her lines—all of them basically double-entendres, a concrete statement within the action but loaded with meaning and significance for the audience—and make a character of them. In this, Persson fails. He fails to find chemistry with either Nagg or Kubiczky's Clov; he never seems to be responding to events or characters. He never delivers his lines as anything other than a lunatic's bark.
Yet Hamm is blind and lame and thus at at a fundamental level quite simple to understand: everything he says and does is an execution of a strategy to remain in control, particularly to keep Clov—without whom he suffers and starves—servile before him. His character careens between intimidating and ingratiating as the situation demands, but Persson manages to express none of it, and as Hamm is the gravitational center of the show, the production suffers for it.
We're tempted to excuse David Kubiczky more; he explores the space and his character's physical limitations, and manages a number of great vaudevillian sight-gags (such as breaking the imaginary wall by reaching around to the other side of a window-frame to extend a telescope). And Kubiczky elicits some genuine laughs despite a lack of chemistry with Persson. But on the whole, we can't help but feel that he could have created a more dynamic and multi-dimensional character, particularly when he has to carry long segments of the show solo, the points at which his performance is weakest.
As for Alice Bridgforth's Nell, that character is rather minor in terms of lines, and our opinion of Bridgforth's performance may be biased by her proximity to Brill. But is it really a complement to say that if the actor had been playing with someone worse, her performance would have seemed better? Our complaint is two-fold: First, Bridgforth basically performs a death scene, and failed to elicit sympathy, which detracted from Brill, whose mourning for her character did; and second, her aging make-up was distracting. Brill is at least fifty and has a grizzled face and scruffy beard. Bridgforth could be as young as 20 and in the tiny space of the Stone Soup Theatre, the make-up job just didn't cut it.
"Endgame" @ Stone Soup Theatre // Fri & Sat. w/ Sun. matinee // $10 - $30 // thru Dec. 2
Image: Michael Brill as Nagg and Alice Bridgforth as Nell.
