Martha on Endgame
Posted by Martha Lavey on 5/07/2010
I play Nell in Endgame. Nell has one scene in the play, which occurs about 15 minutes into the play and takes less than 10 minutes to perform. The unique aspect of this small role is that I enter from a garbage bin. My husband in the play, Nagg, played by Fran Guinan, also lives in a garbage can and both Fran and I get into our places by going into the basement of the theater, climbing a staircase under a trap in the stage floor, and wait on our perch underneath the bins until our entrance. It’s a peculiar way to experience the play. Our physical expressiveness is limited by our confinement in the cans and, further, we come to understand that both Nagg and Nell are losing their sight (and perhaps their hearing).
The other two characters in the play, Hamm and Clov, played by Billy Petersen and Ian Barford, respectively, are also physically confined: Hamm cannot stand; Clov cannot sit down. And by the way, Hamm is blind.
This constriction of physical capability is one of Beckett’s great themes in the play: he is tracking the loss of human agency in the physical world, and as the oldest characters in the play, Nagg and Nell are his most advanced case. We are relegated to, as it were, the ashbin of life.
The play is very much about family - about the succession of the generations - and Beckett images this on stage in a couple of hierarchies. The first, which I described, is of physical capability: the older one is, the less one has it. The other is a hierarchy of reach: Nagg and Nell live in the underground zone of the bins; Hamm, our middle-aged character, lives on his throne-like chair; Clov has a ladder which he keeps mounting to regard the horizon outside the windows. Beckett’s suggestion is that we sink into the earth, we lose a vision of the horizon. Clov is still young enough to mount the ladder and see the world, Hamm is blind to the world and visions only the current thoughts in his mind, Nagg and Nell are obsessed by memory (”Ah, yesterday!”), having abandoned, even, current ideation and thought.
All of us in the cast feel very privileged to have had Frank as our director. We’ve all worked with Frank in the past and his knowledge of Beckett is deep. He taught Beckett’s work at Northwestern for many years, he has acted in, and directed the plays, and the first professional acting experience was in Waiting for Godot. Frank said that the first time he read Beckett, “it rang his bell ” - he understood the humor and the theatricality of the playwright’s voice. The conversations we were able to have about the play in rehearsal were really rich. We talked about the craft of the play, the philosophical issues of the work, and our personal connection to those issues.
I love doing the play. My time on stage is brief and that’s a kind of liberation. Meanwhile, I get to spend time with Billy, Ian, and Fran, all of whom I’ve known for over 20 years. We chitter-chatter in our dressing rooms while we apply our white make-up (Ian doesn’t use make-up: he’s busy limbering up on the floor of his dressing room while the rest of us are powdering down). All us know that we’re lucky to have an audience at Steppenwolf that permits us to do Beckett - we recognize that the work requires a thoughtful, open-minded audience to receive it. We hope that the play offers you, as it did for us in preparing it, conversations that are rich, personal, and philosophical.
May 7th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Ms Lavey, You are truly the short lived ’star’ of this play! Nell is the only good, understandable funny character in this miserable household (but what would one expect from 3 generations of men living together?) Nell is not around long enough!
This is also a play that is hard to understand if the audience doesn’t “prepare” for it–the night I attended, a number of people appeared to take a nap, others were obviously confused, a few laughed–and the ‘laugh’ lines are difficult to catch at times. Do the actors feel these vibes or lack of participation by the audience?
It is an interesting play… second question: I’ve read that Beckett’s directions were for the stage to have the appearance of a skull, windows = eyes, Hamm the mouth, and the barrels = the nose (sitting apart and behind Hamm). Your barrels are to the left–any reason for this?
Third question: in discussing the play, did you decide–is Beckett presenting the circle of life? or is it a chess game? or is it a miserable old man who hates his current situation with a lot of it his own making? (well, that’s more than 3 questions, isn’t it!)
Thanks so much!
May 19th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
That this ENDGAME exhausts itself in a draw without ever approaching check let alone mate is a measure of what S-Wolf’s close-to-flawless production achieves. The dramatic balances are so perfectly stuck that the audience, throughout, remains delightfully yet uncomfortably ill-at-ease.
First, the acting. Yes, the twinkle Chris Jones mentions is present and works marvelously, as if Hamm is playing Prospero (sans book if not staff) to Clov’s Caliban-in-training. But Petersen’s performance goes way beyond that in both variety and technique. By turns commanding and needling, whimsical and pedantic, all-knowing and blissfully ignorant, he makes every expression, gesture, and intonation count. An actor absolutely locked in on a character? See this performance.
Barford matches Petersen move for move only to deftly castle him in the end and avoids being dull and tedious in a role that has trapped many an actor. Guinan is the best Nagg I’ve ever seen, effortlessly in touch with the humor, poetry, and pathos of the part. And you, Ms.Lavey, show off a talent too rarely seen on the bright side of the lights and, deep in that ashbin, are well served by your stemlike neck.
Second, the direction. If theater, largely, is much ado about nothing, ENDGAME is little ado about everything but transmuted by language and beats both vital and precise.The rhythm is crucial. Blow it and you’re in for a long night. Here the pace accelerates when appropriate, slackens when appropriate, halts and starts again when appropriate, yet never calls attention to itself. Galati has an ear for the allegro, andante, adagio, and scherzo of each character’s voice, and of Beckett’s. Yes, this makes demands on the audience. Who would wish it otherwise?
And third, design. Schuette’s set and costumes somehow make the familiar unfamiliar, and thus memorable. Ingalls’ lighting characterizes the bright hell of Clov’s 10×10x10 kitchen and the distant whatevers outside those windows. Pluess’s sound captures and fixes everything from Hamm’s chillingly shrill whistle to Nagg’s pathetic ashbin mumblings. Together with Galati they make Beckett’s “brief tableaus” pay off time and again.
There was a missed opportunity, I think, for a bit of Buster Keaton fun with that armchair on castors but that’s arguing for what isn’t there. What is there more than suffices, it excels, and I hope the production becomes part of an S-Wolf repertory with different actors revitalizing the roles for years to come.
June 3rd, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Attending this play was a tremendous learning experience for me. I had done some homework before attending because I knew that the play was not so much about a “story’ as it was about Mr. Beckett wanting the audience to have an “exprience”. Therefore, with the words being just as important as the acting ability/presentation of the play, it was necessary for me to read the entire play and review some essays. I am so glad that I did otherwise I would not have appreciated the play at all. One of the other things that I learned was when one attends Endgame, you bring life experiences, bias and expectations into that theatre. All of this tremendously affects how one feels about the play when it is over. For me, it sparked an interest in deciphering the play (where I come from that means picking it apart) and learning about Mr. Beckett. In doing so, I unraveled so many different ways of interpreting it and some fun facts as well. For example, the use of the number three (see if you can figure out what I mean!! This part was a lot of fun!!) is a big part of this play. Because of what I do for a living, I immediately understood the dynamics of the relationship between Hamm, Clov and Hamm’s parents. You all illustrated this really well (the night that I was there) because for a brief moment, I thought I was at work! : ).
However, because Beckett (so I have learned) is not about telling stories as much as he is about bringing a thought process or an abstract concept to life, the audience has to have a working understanding of what they are about to se/experience. If the attendee comes into the theatre with expectations of sitting there and letting the play come to life and flow over them, it is going to be a bit of a disappointment. You have to work a little bit to appreciate it.
As I am not an expert on the theatre arts, I can’t really comment on anyone’s expertise on this or that, but I will say this, Endgame is very much like Ravel’s Bolero, the timing of how things are presented is crucial to the success of how the audience goes through the experience. If the timing is off, the experience is not complete and becomes disjointed.
It has been over a month since I have seen this play and since then I have spent quite a bit of time reading about Beckett, his other works and even chess!
The only suggestion I would make that in the future, for thought provoking plays like Endgame, offer links from your website that patrons can go to so they can learn something about what they will be seeing.
Thanks for everything and keep up the good work.