Cutting Ball Makes a Beckett Play We Can Relate to--Too Bad

Around the time of the centennial of Samuel Beckett's birth a couple of years ago, The Onion ran an article about the discovery of a lost play by the modernist writer. According to the satirical newspaper, scholars in Paris heralded the find as "one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Waiting for Godot" and "a natural progression from his earlier works." The manuscript in question consisted of 23 blank pieces of paper arranged in a small pile.

As the author of such famously abstract dramas as Play, featuring a chorus of three heads sticking out of massive urns; Not I, a soliloquy for a faceless, floating mouth; and Breath, a 25-second work completely devoid of characters, Beckett's reputation as the theater's premier spokesman for the intangible remains intact. Even his major plays boasting roles for whole actors (as opposed to their disembodied anatomical parts) such as Godot and Krapp's Last Tape obstinately resist interpretation. Beckett may never have actually written a play consisting of 23 blank pages, but the idea may very well have crossed his mind.

It's hard to believe that Beckett's works, populated as they are with characters seemingly constructed from undigested leftovers and long-forgotten lint rather than warm flesh and blood, should speak so powerfully about the human condition. Yet as abstract as his dramas appear to be on the surface, they manage — when artfully staged — to embody the essence of what it means to be alive. Peter Hall's luminous 1997 production of Godot starring Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard at London's Old Vic, for instance, achieved this vision. Hall's staging featured the play's trademark barebones set design of a skeletal tree standing on an otherwise barren stage. But the play's main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, came across as down-to-earth, sympathetic beings rather than conduits for some existential concept.

It is this human quality that Rob Melrose, the artistic director of San Francisco's Cutting Ball Theater Company, foregrounds in his new production of Beckett's sepulchral 1957 masterpiece, Endgame. This is no small achievement when you consider that the play is, like pretty much all of Beckett's dramatic works, surreal and largely plotless. Taking place in a dilapidated room, it mostly revolves around the bickering relationship between a dyspeptic, blind, wheelchair-bound old man and a younger man with a limp who behaves like his indentured servant. The older man's legless parents rear their gnarled trunks at various points during the course of the action from two trashcans positioned next to each other onstage. Less a play in the traditional sense of the word than a terse set of parentheses containing the instructions "breathe in, breathe out and breathe out again," Endgame comes about as close to theatricalizing a death rattle as it's possible to get. Drawing upon Bertolt Brecht's edict that the artist's job is to either make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, Melrose's masterful mise-en-scène succeeds in its aim to accomplish the latter of these twin propositions. But while Melrose's intensely humanized, quasinaturalistic staging allows us to connect in a visceral way with Beckett's obscure world, the heightened proximity comes at a price.

The sense of familiarity starts with Fred Kinney's descriptive set, a facsimile of a rundown room in a San Francisco Victorian. The details give the locale away, from the big rectangular sash windows to the wooden door casings with their concentric-circle-shaped moldings. Like the characters in the play, the set is also "on its last legs." The space is strewn with trash, the ceiling is a bird's nest of broken wooden slats, and the windows are so thickly caked with grime that it's difficult to make out the ramshackle shutters falling off their hinges just beyond the filthy, ragged curtains. Yet thanks to the unmistakably local flavor of the set design, we instantly know that this Endgame isn't taking place in some bunker in Abu Ghraib (as was the case with director André Gregory's high-profile 9/11–inspired production a few years ago). We feel that it's unfolding right in our front rooms — or at least in some post-earthquake version of our front rooms.

Our sense of connection to this production also stems from its focus on mining the relationships between the people onstage as much as the philosophical ideas encoded in Beckett's text. As the aging couple Nagg and Nell, Paul Gerrior and Maureen Coyne find an engrossing way to tackle two of Beckett's most esoteric characters. Though the two are condemned to spend the rest of their days in miserable circumstances, Beckett gives them kind words for one another and fond remembrances of the past. Gerrior and Coyne give their absurd situation a conversational quality, popping up and down from their bins and nattering away like two old neighbors enjoying a jaw session over a garden fence.