By Edward Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

I first fell in love with the work of Samuel Beckett when I was in college. At eighteen, what I perceived as aridly funny nihilism held irresistible appeal. In the intervening years I’ve strayed promiscuously, but have often returned, and never fully left. Now, as I sit squarely in the advancing shadow of middle age, I know this lover differently.

I chose to direct Endgame this season while I was reading a number of new plays from American writers that seemed to be confronting loss. Not personal psychological grief, although that was present, but loss as it has an impact on a wider community. It seemed to be in our zeitgeist. Perhaps we are now distant enough from one of our latest national tragedies that we are trying to process the impact.

Beckett (at right) in the French Resistance

Beckett’s own world view, as many artists of his time, was informed by experiences during World War II; in Beckett’s case including direct participation in the French Resistance under German occupation. As I write this, one American community and by extension all of us, has suffered a tremendous, heartbreaking loss. Each time such a thing happens, I find myself thinking, well surely this is the last. We can’t be punished anymore. Then I remember World War I, which Beckett also lived through, was called the “War to End All Wars”. Until it didn’t.

It seems I must accept that personal and communal calamity, destruction, cruelty and inhumanity are inevitable. As Beckett has Didi say in Waiting for Godot, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth … Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.”

Beckett also wrote a phrase in his notebook: “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned. ” He said he was not so much interested in the theology of the saying, but in its shape. That in his drama, every darkness contains the “perhaps” of light.

If it is true, if things like slavery, oppression, violence and war will always happen, if the thief is damned, then so do we also always have opportunity to respond. The possibility remains of being wiser, more forgiving, more compassionate, of laughing and loving more than we did the last time. One of the thieves was saved. What we do with our perpetual calamity, as individuals or as a country, is up to us. Such is the nature of hope in this world.

Making plays is an act of optimism. While you may never be sure that what you are saying has any value and that you haven’t just messed up your own life for nothing, you live in the faith that the creative act animates possibility, even if only for an hour and a quarter, in the dark.

Making a play is also a communal act, and I have been given the gift of an exceptional family of actors and designers, all of whom have dedicated their considerable talents to this production with a fervor that has been inspiring. I am grateful to them, and to you our audiences, for being willing to enter Beckett’s unique theater with us.

So here we are. I am stuck with Beckett, and apparently for this production anyway, him with me. And you with us. And all of us with each other. What are we going to do now?

A version of these notes appear in the stagebill for the Arden’s production of Endgame

By Edward Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

A critic once described Samuel Beckett’s two-act masterpiece Waiting for Godot as “Nothing happens. Twice.”

Understandable, but not correct. A careful reading, and a good production, reveal a lot to actually be happening. And while repetition is important to both the play’s form and its meaning, Act One is not a simple mirror of Act Two.

This is not Endgame.

A similar challenge faces us with Endgame. If one enters the play expecting conventional events and the kind of story one is used to in a play (A ghost appears and urges me to exact revenge on my father’s murder. I hire actors to make a play to catch the conscience of his murderer. I kill everyone in sight, and get killed myself.), then one may be in for a confusing 80 minutes.

Obvious dramatic events don’t seem to have a place in Beckett’s world. Godot never arrives. (Sorry, should that have had a spoiler alert?) and in Endgame, the huge event (the apocalypse) has already happened. Beckett seems interested in what we do in the non-overtly dramatic moments instead. Are we waiting? Are we ending? But we are doing something. What is the drama of our quotidian existence? What is its meaning?

It seems the task of our ensemble, as I prepare to begin rehearsals this week, will be to make sure we know what seemingly small thing is happening, and communicate it with clarity, humor and visceral energy. There is no question the central characters, Hamm and Clov, have a different relationship at the beginning of the play than at the end. They also have individual views of the world that change during the course of the play. I’ve spent the last weeks tracking through the script to uncover the moments those changes happen, and what causes them.

It is also clear that part of the genius of the play is treating language as a kind of music. (Beckett himself, when directing the play, did not always talk to actors in terms of a character’s motivations — sometimes he would resort to musical terminology – “that line needs to be more staccato”.) We don’t listen to music expecting a linear story – music operates on us emotionally, and is ordered through themes, counterpoint, and repeated motifs (there’s that repetition, again.) We will need to honor that music, and play it for all we are worth.

So, what is the story? Something is taking its course. And part of the fun, both in the doing and the watching of the play is figuring out what.

Scott Greer and James Ijames, from the cast of Endgame, at a recent photo shoot.

By Edward Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

In my previous post I mentioned Beckett’s early drafts of Endgame contained specific information about time and place which he subsequently edited out. In the design process, we have tracked along a similar path.

The world of this play is fundamentally different from what many people expect walking into the theater. If you step into our production of Freud’s Last Session, you will see a striking facsimile of Sigmund Freud’s office – there are doors and walls and windows, and a radio and knick-knacks and books and glasses with drinking water and… you get the picture.

Beckett called for a reconfiguration of how we see theatrical space, and the theatrical event. He was not writing “realism”. He wrote, well, something else. Some have called it absurdism, though Beckett never took that title. Others call it minimalism. Whatever the label, the demands of this play are different.

The challenge we have been confronting is how specific we need to be, and what is the right level of abstraction. Given Beckett’s economy, and our attempt to match it visually, every choice we make becomes that much more magnified. The opening stage directions are “Bare Interior. Grey light.” But what is the nature of this bare interior? Is it, as some have suggested, antiseptic, like a hospital or nursing home? Something more domestic? Is it even a self-contained room? Is “bare” meant physically, metaphysically, or both?

The play is an examination of what happens after cataclysm. To Beckett, the cataclysm is being born. While I don’t fully subscribe to that philosophy, we nevertheless have used as a starting point the specifics of American cataclysm, both of its founding and of our own time. We have now begun the process of removing the inessential to arrive at… well, time will tell.

Below are few of the images set designer Kevin Depinet and I have been using as inspiration.