Endgame

The fact that nobody can be quite certain what Endgame means is, in the logic of the theater of the absurd, hardly a handicap. As interpreted by the Theater Company of Boston, the play is intended less to present an allegory or a message than simply to shock. Shock for its own sake, of course, would be merely discomforting. Shock as Endgame produces it wrenches the spectator into the absurdity of the drama and forces him somehow to identify with all the characters at once--they are all abstractions of the ages of man--and to share with them their monstrous conceits and their frustrations. By the tested technique of going to extremes, the play manages to leave the audience a little displaced from where it started.

The play, as you might expect, is in every way archtypically "absurd." Four characters with the unlikely names of Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell (the last two spend the entire evening in barrels) perform against a backdrop of webbed string, barrels, one chair and a ladder. The play itself describes the collapse of blind Hamm's strange world. The cause of the disaster, we gradually understand, is Hamm's conceit. He is, as his name suggests, the abstraction of Actor whose solipsism has reduced his world to a shelter-like setting of old age (his barreled parents, Nagg and Nell) and crippled youth (Clov, who limps and who may or may not be his son).

Nothing really "happens"--the characters only mouth rhetoric at a breath-taking pace--yet somehow a consistency works its way out of the cross-fire of symbolism and suggesion. The situation, the action, and above all the language conspire to assure the audience that the play does indeed have ulterior meaning however obscure. Hamm's awful dilemma seems to arise partly from his grotesque alienation from nature ("show me the sea!" he asks over and over) and partly from his urge to interpret anything--or everything--in the metaphor of theater. "We are getting on, we are getting on," he tells the audience at intervals; "I am preparing for my last soliloquy." Hamm, in other words, created his macabre world from his own imagination. At the center of the play, literally and figuratively, is his recital of how he came to be where he is and how, too rich in imagination, he imprisoned with him the other characters. He cries helplessly and regularly for his "pain-killer," just as his father cries for pap and Clov ponders escape. And at the end the stage is littered with superfluous symbols and phrases that express from all angles the meanness of a man without love and without courage.

The Theater Company has clearly expended a great deal of energy on this production. Dustin Hoffman as Clov, Frank Cassidy as Hamm, and Jerry Gershman and Naomi Thornton as Nagg and Nell all act with discipline and tact in a play that tempts them to noise and ranting. The set, by Alexander Pertzoff, is properly absurd. And David Wheeler's direction perfectly exploits the strength of this kind of theater. Experiencing Endgame is in a way like walking into the monastery chapel a few blocks down from Eliot House: we are thrown into another world and made to forget for a moment old sets of mind and values. The world of Endgame may not be your world or mine--it shouldn't be anyone's world--but it serves its purpose.