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Theater Review Taking liberties with BeckettBy Joseph Hurley

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

ENDGAME, by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Sonja Rzepski. Featuring Tina Shepard, Paul Smithyman, Laurence Checler and Gerald Cosgrove. Interart Development Series at Interart Annex, 500 West 52nd St. Through April 10.

When Samuel Beckett was alive, he was notoriously strict about having his plays produced as he had written them, taking place in the venues in which he had envisioned them, and inhabited by the men and women with whom he had populated his bleak, despairing, but nevertheless often comic world.

With the Dublin-born author gone, certain liberties have been taken with his work, and New York at the moment is the scene of the second production of Beckett’s towering "Endgame" in which one of the play’s two major roles, written for a male actor, is being played by a woman.

Two seasons ago, Kathleen Chalfant played the restless Clov in a production at the Classic Stage Company on East 13th Street.

This time, it’s Hamm, Clov’s blind, immobilized partner, who has undergone a bit of gender switching, with Open Theater veteran and Talking Band co-founder Tina Shepard undertaking the role in a staging mounted as part of the Interart Development Series, sponsored by the Women’s Interart Center.

For the purposes of "Endgame," as directed by Sonja Rzepski, the small Interart playing area has been walled with loosely hung fabric resembling a painter’s drop cloths, while a raked platform of bluish-gray occupies the center space.

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Above the sloping stage space, a rigging of tracks and cables, somewhat reminiscent of a ski lift, on which Hamm’s chair hangs suspended in such a manner that Clov can maneuver it into a variety of positions above the working platform.

Meanwhile, Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, which Beckett’s text places in trash bins, the covers of which Clov removes from to time, are in this production housed in belowstage compartments whose hinged doors make it appear that the blind autocrat has relegated his, or in this case, her progenitors to what calls to mind a root cellar.

While actress Chalfant used her own somewhat androgynous quality to deflect attention from Clov’s gender in the CSC production, actress Shepard clearly plays Hamm as a woman. Her feet swaddled in rags, Hamm sits immobile in her elevated chair, a little like a customer stuck on an amusement park ride.

As Clov, Paul Smithyman refers to Hamm as "him," but that’s about the extent of the character’s "masculinity." For one thing, Shepard’s voice simply lacks the bass notes which might have helped another actress achieve a semblance of "maleness" in the role, and the lightness of her speech robs many of Hamm’s locutions of their inherent impact.

Beckett’s first version of "Endgame" had just two characters, Hamm and Clov, and was divided into two acts. The second revision added Nagg and Nell, and eliminated the act break.

One of the peculiarities of director Rzepski’s staging concerns Hamm’s supposedly aged parents, who appear to wither and die during the course of the play’s relatively brief running time.

Instead of finding an actress old enough to play Nell, or achieving the desired effect with makeup, this production features, in the person of Laurence Checler, a youngish actress who, decked out in a fox stole and a bright green dress, resembles, more than anything else, a performer doing an awkward Carmen Miranda impression.

The Nagg of Gerald Cosgrove is nearer the mark, at least in appearance, and he does a good job with the famous "tailor anecdote," a story based on an incident from Beckett’s life, when the author uncharacteristically set about to have a suit made to order.

Sadly, Rzepski and her colleagues throw very little in the nature of illumination on Samuel Beckett’s "Endgame." If anything, it diminishes the impact of the play, even to the point of bringing the inherent merit of the text somewhat into question, albeit only temporarily. All it would take to clear the air would be a curative staging of the work, one adhering with greater fidelity to what the author had in mind.

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