Endgame (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

City Garage re-emerges from Covid 19 with Endgame by the late, great (and controversial) Samuel Beckett.  Many agree this play, a weird exploration of the moments and process of ending, perhaps exceeds his more famous Waiting for Godot in power and poignancy.  Certainly it remains an easy play to misunderstand.

Regular readers might experience a bit of deja vu, but methinks it crucial the note this show--as is the case with most of City Garage's productions, is not intended as a story.  To be sure it has a story, or if you prefer a plot.  Its real nature emerges once an audience member understands what they are seeing and hearing is more or less a dream.  A dream given form.  A dream acting out with all the beautiful, terrifying, hilarious "logic" of an actual dream.  Do not look for a linear tale here, but an experience.  I call this the Theatre of Dreams.

Within that context, we are in world winding down to its end.  Four survivors hold on for a little while, much reduced from what they once were, within nothing to do but focus on trivia--trivial desires, trivial attempts at pleasure, trivial cruelties, even trivial enlightenments.  All four characters know they are circling the drain.  This is the end.  And knowing that, they play games.

Hence the title.  Clov (Troy Dunn) pretty much is the only active one in the bunch, obeying the orders of the feeble, blind Hamm (Bo Roberts) who sits in the middle of a room surrounded by nothing, demanding answers to questions he asked minutes before, insisting Clov look out the window and describe what he sees, or push his chair around the room as a meagre substitute for travel.  Off to the side are two large garbage cans, where live--or at least dwell--Hamm's parents, Nell (Martha Duncan) and Nagg (Andy Kollack).  If this all sounds bizarre, then you've latched onto a basic truth about the show!

Events such as they are do take place, however.  Struggles even, especially between Clov and Hamm.  One longs to leave but fears to.  The other longs for everything to simply end, yet desperately tries to fill his time, trying to impose meaning upon things that mean...well, nothing.  Or, everything, since there is nothing else.  

What results from all this, especially under the direction of Frederique Michel, ends up startlingly compelling as well as rather surprisingly funny.  Dark humor, yes, but then is not humor one of the best vaccines we have against despair?  Michel's direction coupled with this cast and the quiet, profound design (costumes by Josephine Poinot, set and lights by Charles Duncombe) pulls us into this metaphorical world, and in the end we recognize it--not because we've survived any kind of genuine apocalypse, but rather we've all gone through a thousand tiny ones.  The death of childhood.  An ending of love.  One chapter in life starts, only after the previous one dies.  Friendships fade away.  Places change and cease to be what once they were.  So do we.  From such microscopic and inevitable catastrophes we find a reason to laugh when an overworked servant keeps forgetting a ladder when he goes to use it.

In this play, that happens.  A lot.  And it remains funny.

Endgame plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm until April 10, 2022, at City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave, Building T1, Santa Monica CA 90404 (right across the street from the 26th Street/Bergamont Station train station).

Covid safety protocols will be observed.  Proof of vaccination required.  Masks must be worn inside the theatre.