Endgame Steppenwolf Theatre Company
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Samuel Beckett’s Endgame premiered in 1957, and so critics and scholars have tended to see it in a cold-war context, as a parable of atomic annihilation. But now that the apocalyptic odds have shifted from nuclear winter to global warming, it’s equally easy to take the play as a vision of an industrially produced Armageddon. That interpretation even makes a certain amount of sense historically, since Rachel Carson’s pioneering environmental exposé, Silent Spring, was published just five years later, in 1962. Maybe there was something in the air, as it were—something the great artist sensed before the great journalist was able to document it. In any event, I was creepily conscious of how long and by how many routes we’ve been going to hell in a handbasket as I watched Frank Galati’s witty, occasionally powerful, but never quite successful Steppenwolf production.
Galati’s aesthetic strategy seems to draw on Hamlet, too—and, generally, on metaphors having to do with the theater. He tips us off to that right at the start by playing with an absurd little sight gag Beckett wrote into Endgame‘s stage directions. Beckett specifies that Hamm is initially covered with an old sheet; when Clov pulls it off, Hamm’s face is seen to be covered with a much smaller sheet, a handkerchief. That comes off, too, to reveal that Hamm is wearing dark glasses over his blind eyes—an onion-peeling effect that’s completed when Hamm takes off the glasses and wipes them with the filthy handkerchief. At Steppenwolf, most of James Schuette’s set is initially covered with an enormous, sheetlike curtain, adding yet another grimy veil that has to be parted before the other actions can take place. The curtain is more than a joke; it’s a signal that what we’re watching is to be understood as a play within a play. And maybe even a few plays within that.
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