Video Game

NOBODY GOES to the Explosives B Cabaret, an obscure intersection of two steam tunnels below Adams House D-Entry, to see a play. You go to have a Theatrical Experience. Once the directors have locked you into that cramped little room under the pipes, with its black drapes and grilled slits of windows and 25 rickety wooden seats at most, all bets are off. They might perform one of Samuel Beckett's plays. They might blow the place up. They might just turn out all the lights and make you sit in the dark for an hour. Then again, that might be the Beckett play.

In the original version of Krapp's Last Tape, one of those Beckett masterpieces which do not number accessibility among their many virtues, the audience did essentially that--sat in the dark--while the 69-year-old Krapp listened to his own voice on a tape. The audience listened to him listen to himself, replay himself, and tape his reactions to the replays. Mercifully, by skillful use of some impressive high-tech equipment, director Adam Cherson has somewhat embellished the purity of this experience. In this new version, Krapp (David Gullette) sits facing a hidden video monitor, and his reproduced image faces the audience while the actor keeps his back to us, intently watching his younger self (Lorcan O'Neill) on a larger video screen. Having something to look at is a terrific relief; it just may be what turns the balance in this production from a potentially crushing, stupefying effect to one of satisfying and thought-provoking discomfort.

The scene opens in pitch darkness, except for the flicker of some electronic indicator and the calm cobalt face of the monitor. When time begins moving, it is with a queer jerky stylization, folding in on itself. Beckett's characters on paper are so surrealistic, so utterly removed from normal constraints or modes of reference, that it's an initial shock to see one walking around. The fifty-is Gullett, white hair frizzed, eyes bugged out, toddles and grumbles like a Monty Python animated character, and it's a long while before he talks.

Cherson and company have done a good job of mechanical wizardry, enough to eliminate any reminder that this is an amateur production. Though the videotape and monitor comprise the central metaphor for the action, the machinery focuses observations on Krapp rather than drawing attention to itself. Through it, the themes of the piece gradually and firmly emerge.

Krapp, stumbling through meaningless and totally self-referential rituals with his tapes, exemplifies life at an absolute standstill, paralyzed further by the authoritative presence of technology. His endless recycling of a few sparse impressions via his tapes serves only to lock him into the same room, situation, round of thought at the only new material comes in bizarre introspective snatches, such as his sensual enjoyment of the word "spool" (happened on by accident in the tape-playing instructions), or his momentary impulse to look up in a dictionary a word he once knew.

IN A PERPETUAL and steadily more disturbing self-absorption, the older Krapp apes the taped actions and words of his younger self, fantasizing each time Krapp the younger reminisces about a woman, and occasionally rousing himself to sing a song or swig from a wine bottle at the younger one's cue. In a device of mixed effectiveness, Cherson has chosen to splice actual slides of women into the fantasy sequence, which lends immediacy but punctures the script's hypnotic solipsism.

When the older Krapp records his analysis of his reactions to watching his younger self, who is in turn watching and discussing the tapes he made on his 28th birthday, he makes several false starts, "editing himself" on the tape, adding an ongoing self-commentary. Instead of illuminating Krapp's personality, the layers of introspection intentionally wrap the narrator in more and more mystery.

Gullette, forced to create the difficult illusion that he and taped actor O'Neill are the same person, echoes the young man's mannerisms with fairly convincing results. Both of them speak in one of Beckett's crazy derived dialects, a mishmash of cliches and rhetorical fragments, the refuse of a language long cut off from creative input. Both speak despairingly of (literally) endless struggles to break the same habits, particularly a fierce predilection for eating bananas; Gullette eats two at the performance's start, in a display that moved one audience member to bubble enthusiastically to him at intermission, "Wow, that was the most obscene thing I've ever seen in my life!" The sense of paralysis is properly stifling, but the show moves nowhere with commendable snippiness; both play with and director resist the urge to browbeat the audience, and things wind up in just over an hour.

Apparently repentant at charging full price for a half-length evening, Cherson has tacked on after the performance one of Beckett's self-directed made-for-T.V. shorts, untitled Ghost Trio, it makes Krapp's Last Tape look like Oklahoma! by comparison. While hardcore absurdist buffs may find this collection of long, gray pauses and slow, expressionless voices interesting Ghost Trio acts primarily as a soporific and is assuredly not worth staying for. Better to walk out during the brief intermission between the shows, however gingerly, with the oppressive miasma of Krapp still fresh in your mind.