Theater review by Carole Di Tosti
Those familiar with Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright Samuel Beckett know him for his striking and profound absurdist works, which often are produced globally. We are fortunate that Irish Repertory Theatre is presenting three of Beckett’s one-acts, Not I, Play, and Krapp’s Last Tape. Directed by Ciarán O‘Reilly, the 80-minute presentation is featured as a journey “from the cradle to the grave.” Importantly, Beckett Briefs is a tribute to Beckett’s extraordinary genius and salient themes of loneliness, trauma, stultifying relationships and failed reconciliations with life’s tribulation, impossibly answered or understood.
Not I is perhaps the most jarring and confounding of the three, until one understands that the character, “Mouth,” intensely portrayed by Sarah Street, is a seventy-year old woman, orphaned at a young age, who experienced an oppressive, mechanical life without love or friendships. Rendered nearly mute, as if paralyzed by her life’s torments, she undergoes an epiphany and is awakened to herself. We meet her after her revelation, as she grapples with the memories of various events that negatively impacted her. She gives voice to her recollections in a rapid fire, stream of consciousness monologue. As she attempts to make sense to herself, she forcefully communicates her emotionally laden feelings with increasing frustration and fervor.


O’Reilly is faithful to Beckett’s specific directions to feature Mouth, upstage audience right, about 8 feet above stage level, in pitch-black darkness. Thanks to Michael Gottlieb’s acute lighting design, a spotlight focuses tightly on Mouth’s white teeth and red lips in an extraordinary visual, which forces one to listen, though Mouth grates on one’s nerves.
Mouth expresses an incessant stream of words, pausing for breaths, with intermittent screams toward the last part of the monologue. She persists with her recollections, as the observing part of herself tries to mitigate her outbursts. Of the character, Beckett said, “I knew that woman in Ireland. I knew who she was — not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, besides the hedgerows.”
While Not I reminds us of the ineffectiveness of communicating the insularity of individual human experience, Play involves three stock characters in funeral urns, facing out to the audience, speaking of their experiences in relation to each other, though not recognizing each other’s presence. Two women W1 (Kate Forbes), the wife, and W2 (Sarah Street), the mistress, are on either side of Man, the husband/lover, portrayed by Roger Dominic Casey. Each confesses. They discuss their perspectives and reactions negotiating how the adulterous relationship between W2 and Man impacted their feelings and responses. The descriptions of their behavior and comments are darkly humorous.


Interestingly, their admissions are prompted by a spotlight (a symbolic fourth character), that focuses on only one speaker at a time to obtain their impressions, perspectives and emotions. All three characters obsess over “the affair” during their turn to speak about it. However, they don’t interact with each other. Space and time are vague, and indeed the confessional nature of each speaker’s comments lends to an interpretation that perhaps they are in purgatory or limbo as they go round and round reliving their emotional responses, unable to change, correct, apologize or reconcile their behaviors.
Once again O’Reilly is effectively faithful to Beckett’s stage directions, envisioned by Charlie Corcoran’s scenic design, Orla Long’s costume design, and assisted by M. Florian Staab’s sound design and Ryan Rumery’s sound design and composition. The overall theme of Play echoes how human beings with nonsensical, self-indulgence perpetuate self-defeating attitudes and perspectives without seeking to change them toward a different, more positive approach. With dark humor Beckett suggests this penchant may continue in the afterlife.
As the pièce de résistance of the evening, Krapps’s Last Tape, one of the most performed and celebrated of Beckett’s one-acts, stars the inimitable F. Murray Abraham in a bravura performance as the lonely and isolated elderly Krapp, who replays a tape recording of himself at a younger age, then records himself in the present day. Krapp’s abode is as scruffily arranged as his personal “style,” superbly conveyed by Charlie Corcoran’s scenic design and Orla Long’s costume design. Once again for Krapp’s Last Tape, O’Reilly assiduously follows Beckett’s stage directions.

As the play opens, we meet Abraham’s disheveled, shabbily attired Krapp who sits at a table with a tape recorder and boxes of tapes. However, with O’Reilly’s precise, particular staging we are mesmerized by Abraham’s humorous movements as Krapp locates his beloved, addicting, constipating food, a banana, which he previously stashed in the table’s locked drawer. As he appreciates its form, peels and eats it, then tosses the skin on the floor unwittingly, in contemplation about something, he forgets where the peel is, slips on it and nearly falls. Krapp’s seamless action which provokes audience laugher is harder than it looks to perform convincingly. Abraham enacts this bit to perfection.
Thus, we are prepared to like Krapp and go along with him on this journey back into time, as he listens to his thirty-nine-year-old self on a specific tape recording he has selected. We hear Krapp’s younger, vigorous voice comment about the unrealistic and idealistic expectations that he had in his twenties. Instead of taking his younger self in stride, the thirty-nine-year-old laughs derisively at his “youth,” and in the present, the elderly Krapp joins in the ridiculing tape-recorded laugher. After listening, taking a break, and locating another banana and swigging down some liquor, Krapp records his impressions of his thirty-nine-year-old self, which proclaimed a “fire in me.” However, Krapp finds he has nothing worthy to say as a tired old man who is “burning to be gone.”
Invariably, bitterness and age have swallowed up his youthful expectations. Krapp stops recording. He returns to the tape of himself at thirty-nine, overtaken with an affecting moment in his life, which he realizes he experienced with a woman who left an indelible impression on him. As the tape ends in a vast silence and poignance, Krapp is lost in reverie. We are struck by the evanescence of time, youth and life.Beckett Briefs runs approximately 80 minutes with no intermission at Irish Repertory Theatre (132 West 22nd Street), until March 9th. It’s wonderful. Don’t miss it. https://irishrep.org
Photo credits: Carol Rosegg