Escapism and light comedy will not be the fare at Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s two plays Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame which run Feb. 23-27 at ETSU. Neil Simon is not here this week nor Thornton Wilder but rather the dark magic and dreams of the Irish playwright Beckett.
What makes Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame “unusual” is that they are not linear, said director Pat Cronin. “They are like a Jackson Pollock painting,” he said. “At first glance it seems as if someone has just thrown some paint on a canvas, and anyone can do that, but as you go into the piece you see the genius design and the sense of the chaos that is reality and then you look at death and you come to a halt or you still think it is all a bunch of nonsense and you move on untouched.”
Both Beckett plays are likely to induce theatregoers to do some reflection on their own lives. “I think most people live their lives for other people or for other reasons other than they want to live their lives,” Cronin said. “[Jean-Paul] Sartre says 90 percent of the people in the world are sheep and then there are 5 percent who know what real existence is but are cowards and live like the sheep, and then 5 percent get it and live lives that are authentic.”
Krapp’s Last Tape is a dramatic monologue, featuring an older man, reflecting on his youth. Every year on his birthday, he records the previous year’s events and on this, his 69th birthday, he listens to the tapes from his youth. The “dialogue” rotates between the elderly Krapp speaking and listening to his young voice on tape.
Cronin is starring as Krapp. He will be alone on stage doing, in his own words, “strange things with bananas” and with Beckett’s absurdist language.
Cronin’s vision for this show is to get people to look at their lives and see if there is more there than merely existing, living lives of quiet desperation. “Sartre says a man never knew he was alive until one day he woke up and he was dead,” Cronin said. “That to me is a sad and pervasive truth.”
The other play on the bill at ETSU is Endgame, also by Beckett. In this sardonically funny play, Beckett seems to view the world as a dark joke about death and the end of the world.
The play involves four characters: Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell. The main character Hamm is the “master” who is in a wheelchair. Clov plays his manservant who wheels him around the bare underground room where they live out the remainder of their days. Nagg and Nell are Hamm’s parents who are disabled and live in ash cans.
The underground room in which the play takes place resembles a bomb shelter after a nuclear holocaust, not such an odd setting in the 1950s, when the play was written. The four characters interact and torment each other because of their respective disabilities. Though they all talk of change, they all realize that the end of their lives is inevitable, Cronin said.
“The play is a study in existential despair vs. hope,” he said. “Existentialism was a philosophic movement of the 19th and 20th centuries in which it was believed that we as humans have the freedom of choice and we shape our own destinies and give our life meaning through the choices we make throughout our lives.”
Beckett’s plays are indeed about the meaninglessness of existence, Cronin said. “Even if God exists and he seems absent from Beckett’s world, he isn’t of any use because he has gone away and isn’t coming back,” he said.
“In Endgame we are blind and in ash cans and we are waiting to die and we are embracing it because death has to be better than the farce we call life. In Krapp’s Last Tape, a man listens to tapes of his life when he should have been living his life.”
This pair of plays, Cronin said, does not allow viewers and actors to hide from reality.
“We don’t live,” he said. “We endure. We don’t celebrate, we watch or listen.”
Do these plays sound like a cheerful escape into fantasy land? No, but Cronin said he hopes patrons will leave the evening with a deeper insight into life, existence and the world.

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