Players are more than pawns in masterful 'Endgame'

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Strong performances by Anya Liftig, MC '99, and Sam Walsh, TC '99, add color the bleak landscape of Endgame.

The word "endgame" is chess-speak for the final few moves before a checkmate. Grandmasters rarely bother with these moves--they are predictable and formulaic, no more creative than memorized openings. Instead, they simply lower the king and resign. The real creativity and strategy of a chess game come during the few moves in the middle. Here, the better player wins, while the weaker player sees his chances dissolve. By the time an endgame arrives, the match has already been decided.

Beckett's Endgame also begins when the game is long over. The opponents are simply going through the final pathetic, pointless motions in hopes that they'll soon be excused from the board. But the game is not chess, it's life.

Hamm (Megan Campisi, DC '99) is a blind, crippled codger who is unable to get up from his castor-fitted armchair. He is tended to by Clov (Thomas Shaw, DC '99), who is also crippled, but in a manner that prevents him from ever sitting down. The men are constantly at odds, cursing each other, taunting each other's condition, and threatening each other with death. At first, their mutual mistreatment is disturbing. But as the play progresses, Clov does not desert Hamm despite several threats, and Hamm does not starve Clov. The empty threats and baseless jibes reveal the hatred to be a farce, an innocuous plot to pass the time until the game is called.

Beckett was said to have suffered from frightening prenatal memories of being trapped in his mother's womb. Campisi and Shaw deliver a version of this claustrophobic nightmare with grim precision. Literary critics have often pointed out that Endgame is by no means a normal drama. After all, it has no beginning, no climax, and no finale. The characters learn nothing about themselves or each other. They look out the windows periodically, but the landscape remains barren. The only perceptible change in their lives, the only thing they are capable of observing, is the passage of time. They inch at an excruciatingly slow pace towards death, their final release and only respite.

In another Beckettian metaphor for the rubbish heap that is existence, the stage contains two lidded "ashcans" that house supporting characters. One is Hamm's father, Nagg, hysterically portrayed by Sam Walsh, TC '99, with an extensive repertoire of hyperbolic facial expressions. Walsh is an experienced clown, which is why it's no surprise that he can sneer and ogle with the effortless poise of a master. His lover from a past life shares his sorry fate from the ashcan
next to him. Anya Liftig, MC '99, is a good ying to Walsh's yang. Her performance as the straight-woman Nell makes the duo's scenes the best in the play.

Beckett's minimalist plot development means the actors are in charge of holding the audience's interest. A few times, the dialogue's steady exchange of single sentences, often repeated with one word changed ("Then I'll leave you," "You can't leave us," "Then I won't leave you"), has a lullaby-like quality of making one want to close one's eyes just for a moment. But when we open them again, we can see even more clearly that this group of actors contains no amateurs. Under Shaw's direction, the players handles their characters with an ease that shows long study of the play and a deep familiarity with their fellow cast members. Powerful and emotional deliveries expose the beauty of companionship that Beckett tries so hard to hide between the lines.

Sartre must have been wrong when he wrote "Hell is other people" in No Exit. Beckett and the Endgame cast prove that while other people may torture us and make our lives miserable, we would be a hundred times more miserable and empty without them. This sentiment is underscored by
Max Dana's , BR '99, set. If all the actors were to leave the stage, the only thing
left would be a vacant room with four dirty, gray walls.

A production in which the acting supplies the color is always a pleasure to watch. It is no small feat that Shaw and Company pull off a good presentation of a complex and bewilderingly weird script. The play is a far cry from the pre-digested soundbite writing we enjoy on modern television. If you can't handle three-legged-dog-loving blind paraplegics in a post-apocalyptic world, The Hughleys are on Tuesdays at 8:30.

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