Review: Endgame at American Repertory Theatre

Will LeBow and Thomas Derrah in Marcus Stern's production of Endgame.

The end of the world doesn't happen too often on stage, but American Repertory Theatre director Marcus Stern has managed it twice in the past year. Stern helmed last year's critically panned (but Bostonist approved) Donnie Darko and directs the current run of Samuel Beckett's Endgame.

Unlike Darko, which suffers from a surfeit of meaning, Beckett's one act deals with meaning's absence. The setting is a closed room, suffused by "gray light," which filters through windows covered by boards. Hamm (Will LeBow), positioned like a chess piece, is a grotesque of a king: blind, like Oedipus, paralyzed, and seated on a stuffed leather throne, fitted with casters. His servant Clov (Thomas Derrah) can't sit down, forgets where he puts things, and longs for order and proper proportions. Along with Hamm's parents Nagg and Nell (Remo Airaldi and Karen McDonald), two doddering, gray haired wraiths kept in trash cans, they would seem to be the last humans on earth. And, as Hamm might add, "there's no cure for that."

Beckett's end times come with a punchline, a cascade of them actually, as his characters engage in a game of verbal sparring. Beckett's inspiration was the Irish music hall; we know this sort of cross-talk from Vaudeville. It's all the same. There's no Godot in Endgame; no God or Turkish Delight, either. Just asides, soliloquies, stories, and arguments.

Stern's staging is faultlessly true to the text, give or take a dog biscuit. As he told the Globe, "We are literally coloring inside clearly drawn lines by Beckett," whose fussy insistence on following stage directions sparked a controversy last time the ART staged the play, 25 years ago. (Beckett didn't like the fact that the single room had become a bombed out subway station or that his white Frenchmen had become black New Yorkers.) There is no arguing with the staging's effectiveness. The light is gray. The walls are (mostly) bare.

Will LeBow's performance is the great triumph of the play. Confined to a chair, his eyes covered by shades, LeBow had to shape a character without his usual tool set: movement and facial expression. He succeeded without question. His Hamm is, by turns, cranky and imperious, solicitous and vain. His punchlines snap, his commands bellow. Thomas Derrah, a gifted physical comedian, plays Clov to LeBow's strengths, sprinkling his bantering with stammers. Paired, they make a classic comic duo.

Endgame, with its difficult wordplay, only rarely sees the stage, and a performance as good as the ART's is rarer still. Bostonist's advice? Take advantage of the ART's $25 "hot nights" and catch this play while you can.