Much Ado About Nothingness

BARNEY ROSSET, personal friend and publisher of Samuel Beckett in the United States, has asked the A.R.T. to halt its production of Mr. Beckett's Endgame. Beckett himself has termed the production "completely unacceptable" and "a complete parody of the play as conceived by me." He added "Anyone who cares for this work couldn't fall to be disgusted by this."

Joined in a conspiracy of defiance, the curious opening night crowd enjoyed the pleasant sensation, so rare in our permissive age, of eating forbidden fruit. As the curtain rose for A.R.T.'s production of Endgame, a roar of applause--a symbolic note thumbed at Beckett's demands--greeted the unconventional set.

As conceived by Beckett, Endgame is a verbal battle between men on the verge of extinction. His stage directions call for a bare interior, grey light, and two small windows. The only furniture is an armchair and two garbage cans. In the armchair sits the blind Hamm who spends all his time lording over his adopted son Clov, who proves mysteriously, incapable of disobedience to Hamm's tyrannical dictates. Hamm's ancient and dying parents, Nag and Nell, dwell in the garbage cans.

The drama is about loss and negation, so, understandably, Beckett prescribes the simplest production possible. Director JoAnne Akalaitis stages the A.R.T. Endgame in a subway tunnel filled with metal barrels, debris, and a putted subway car. The subway lights, and those of the wrecked car, still illuminate the tunnel. Contrary to Beckett's designs, incidental music by Philip Glass introduces and embellishes the production.

Beckett once called Endgame, "Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot." Akalaitis humanizes Beckett's inhuman text. While Beckett clearly implies that his play occurs after a nuclear holocaust. Akalaitis attempts to describe physically the status of man after the bomb. She skirts the intellectuality that Beckett's bare setting forces on the play by giving the characters an identifiable environment and downplaying the metaphysical cleverness of the dialogue.

The fine cast helps considerably, Clov, played by John Bottoms, embodies the desperation of a man at the end of his rope, he hisses at Hamm like a confused animal trapped in a cage. Rodney Hudson is superb as Nagg. He is a frightened and helpless old man without the innocent irrationality that makes the similar state of infancy bearable. When Nell dies, his face twists in heartbreaking agony as he sinks into his garbage can.

Unfortunately, Akalaitis' re-interpretation loses some of the values of Beckett's conception. Hamm, looking like a Rastafarian king on his throne, lacks the self-consciousness befitting lines like, "An aside, Ape! Did you never hear an aside." Even the phrasing of that line suggests a more cultivated mind, acutely aware of his dramatic presence. Although Beckett's characters are painfully aware of their calculated, verbal chess match, Akalaitis' flail at each other in fits of rage. A more cold-blooded conversation would make Hamm's torture of Clov seem more horrifyingly vicious and his occasional displays of genuine emotion more shockingly pathetic. While the characters should be raw, they need not be barbaric. They need not, as this Hamm does, pee on the floor.

The multiple light sources, off-stage voices, incidental music, and those moments when Hamm and Clov overlap lines to create unintelligible gibberish all distract from the finely honed intensity of the play. Philip Glass's excellent score only works when the thundering drums and manic melody suddenly halt in the deathly silence that opens the show.

DESPITE these difficulties, though, Akalaitis presents a compelling version of this great play. It is funny, full of an ironic humor that makes its profundity palatable and insidiously convincing. It is frightening, describing a world that has run out of bicycles, sweet-plums, coffins, pain-killer, honor, time, and God. After a futile attempt at prayer, Hamm screams, "Bastard! He doesn't exist." It shows mankind, having walked to the edge of the plank, hesitate before the leap that threatens oblivion or promises a new beginning.

Perhaps the show would have been even more effective if staged according to Beckett's directions, but Akalaitis's alterations are nothing if not reasonable. They change neither the content nor the force of the message. Beckett need not complain.