Last laughs in 'Endgame'
CAMBRIDGE - There is no better cure for February than Samuel Beckett.
This may sound like sarcasm, but it absolutely is not. Everyone knows that Beckett's world is bleak, gray, and absurdly devoid of hope. What we forget, though, until we truly enter into that world again, is just how exhilarating it feels to be there.
Yes, it's bleak. Yes, it's gray. And yes, there's no hope. But Beckett accepts all that - insists on it - and makes art anyway. And the poetry and power of his words and images have a bracing clarity unlike anyone else's. He won't let us forget for a second that we're going to die, and so we leave his plays feeling more alive than we have in years.
If you know this already, you will want to see the current production of "Endgame" at the American Repertory Theatre. If you don't know it yet, there's no better time to find out.
Marcus Stern directs the ART regulars - Will LeBow, Thomas Derrah, Remo Airaldi, and Karen MacDonald - with scrupulous fidelity to Beckett's famously domineering stage directions; they step and laugh and pause and pace exactly when and how they're supposed to. Yet within these rigid bounds they find a kind of freedom and grace that are as liberating as the work itself. "Endgame" is a poem as much as a play, and by hewing to its demanding rhythms this production releases its soul.
LeBow is Hamm, the mysteriously powerful master at the center of the single gray room in which the play takes place. Blind, bloodied, unable to stand, he issues commands to his limping servant/sidekick, Clov (Derrah), and to his ancient parents, Airaldi's Nagg and MacDonald's Nell, whenever they raise their heads from the ashbins to which they're confined. Outside the room, the world may have ended; inside, too. In fact it's possible that there's no room at all, only Hamm's imaginings as he inches toward death.
It's a comedy.
Actually, it is. That's easy to forget when you see it lying cold on the page, but as played - especially when played with the precision, timing, and unflagging attention to subtleties of language and tone that this cast supplies - it's frequently, surprisingly, gaspingly funny. The interactions between Hamm and Clov, particularly, have the rhythms and punch of a comedy routine; if we're never meant to understand just what game they're playing, there's no question that we know, as they do, that it is a game.
It's in a relationship like this that the value of a repertory company becomes clear. LeBow and Derrah have been playing off each other for so long, in so many roles in so many plays, that they can dance like Rogers and Astaire. Each one crafts a fully realized portrait with simple but indelible gestures - LeBow's lordly wave as he wheels in his chair, Derrah's clownish slide down the sides of a stepladder - and meanwhile the two of them together build something larger, a portrait of a relationship. A strange, incomprehensible, absurd relationship, yes, but a real bond nonetheless.
Confined to their trash cans, Airaldi and MacDonald must do most of their work with their heads (which, for good measure, bear wigs like raggedy dandelions about to flutter away). But they're funny, too, even as their evocation of discarded old age is painfully sad.
Dissertations could be - have been - written on all the possible meanings of this play; each reading, each viewing, opens up new possibilities, but part of its beauty is that no one meaning ever imposes itself definitively as the only possible one. And the beauty of this production, with Andromache Chalfant's spare gray set wonderfully suspended in a sea of darkness, is that it leaves itself open to all the possibilities. It does not impose meaning on the play or on us; it creates images full of many meanings, and then it lets them be.
One of Hamm's repeated lines, particularly, echoed in my mind as I left the theater. "Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that!"
No cure, perhaps. But solace, once in a while.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 