An Exciting Endgame

The Steppenwolf Theatre Company continues its season, exploring the power of belief, with Samuel Beckett's Endgame.  Endgame, featuring ensemble members Ian Barford, Francis Guinan, Martha Lavey and William Petersen, runs now through June 6^th.  Beckett's absurdist comedy follows Hamm (Petersen), his servant Clov (Barford) and his eccentric parents (Guinan and Lavey), through daily rituals as they await the end of days.   Endgame is an examination of the stories humanity constructs to make sense of its role in the larger world.

Endgame is a compelling, well-done production of a really hard play.  Beckett wrote Endgame in the decade immediately following World War II and the birth of the atomic bomb, so the play exists on a far deeper level than four people merely stuck in a room.  For the first time, humanity was not just questioning mortality in wartime but facing the very real possibility of complete and total annihilation.  When Director Frank Galati was charged with bringing this piece to life, I can imagine that he was faced with a two-fold challenge.  He had to do justice to Beckett's treatise on existence as well as produce a straight-out enjoyable comedy - both of which he achieved.

When I first read Endgame back in college, I was not a fan.  I found it dense and pretentious.  However, I walked away from the show last night with a new found respect for the show.  You know the old adage that ninety percent of directing is casting?  Nowhere does this ring more true than with Endgame.  You cannot get more talented than this cast.  They found a musicality in the words, which allowed them to hit all of the humor, no matter how subtle, in the piece.  Special note should go to Barford as well as Petersen, who were not only funny but found the humanity in Clov and Hamm respectively.  

For a play that relies so much on the poetry of Beckett's language and a complete lack of set, Galati was also challenged with filling in the "holes" (for lack of a better word) to create this three dimensional world.  I absolutely loved the lighting design.  I found it very powerful how deliberately lighting was used.  Everything served to highlight the cast physically as well as metaphorically.  The only place I found this production to be lacking was in the sound design.  Endgame is a show that depends on silence.  However, I felt that the Downstairs Theatre wasn't equipped for this.  There were too many times where I could not tell if a noise was a part of the show, something going on outside, something going on with the production upstairs or someone's cell phone going off, which ironically leading me to my final point...

Let's face it.  The chance to see an incredibly dynamic cast, like Endgame, is an honor that does not come along every day.  The audience of last night's show behaved absolutely terribly and made the show incredibly hard to watch.  Yeah, Beckett is not an easy playwright to absorb.  I get that.  However, that does not give you the right to let your cell phone ring multiple times in a show.  Unless you are a doctor (and in that case, put it on vibrate), you are not that important.  Oh, and the coup de grace?   The man next to me was outright heckling William Petersen.  What?  This isn't Zannies (and even if it was, that's still not acceptable).  He was outright angry because he didn't understand why people found the show funny.  In fact, he yelled at me at some point for finding the show funny.  Ok.  I truly understand that Steppenwolf is a subscription house and survives on its patrons.  Nevertheless, they don't own the place.  Sometimes, they forget that there is a person sitting three rows behind them, who scraped together money they really didn't have, to pay full price for the honor of seeing great American theatre.  How dare you ruin the show for them?  Kudos to William Petersen for keeping the show moving as well as to the folks around this "enlightened" patron for shutting him down.

Online ticketing for Endgame is available at www.steppenwolf.org.  Check it out.  I doubt you'll be lucky enough to sit next to that guy.