If you know this already, you will want to see the current production of "Endgame" at the American Repertory Theatre. If you don't know it yet, there's no better time to find out.
Marcus Stern directs the ART regulars - Will LeBow, Thomas Derrah, Remo Airaldi, and Karen MacDonald - with scrupulous fidelity to Beckett's famously domineering stage directions; they step and laugh and pause and pace exactly when and how they're supposed to. Yet within these rigid bounds they find a kind of freedom and grace that are as liberating as the work itself. "Endgame" is a poem as much as a play, and by hewing to its demanding rhythms this production releases its soul.
LeBow is Hamm, the mysteriously powerful master at the center of the single gray room in which the play takes place. Blind, bloodied, unable to stand, he issues commands to his limping servant/sidekick, Clov (Derrah), and to his ancient parents, Airaldi's Nagg and MacDonald's Nell, whenever they raise their heads from the ashbins to which they're confined. Outside the room, the world may have ended; inside, too. In fact it's possible that there's no room at all, only Hamm's imaginings as he inches toward death.
It's a comedy.
Actually, it is. That's easy to forget when you see it lying cold on the page, but as played - especially when played with the precision, timing, and unflagging attention to subtleties of language and tone that this cast supplies - it's frequently, surprisingly, gaspingly funny. The interactions between Hamm and Clov, particularly, have the rhythms and punch of a comedy routine; if we're never meant to understand just what game they're playing, there's no question that we know, as they do, that it is a game.
