Along with his beautiful classical delivery as an elegant King of France in Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well the night before, Brian Dennehy's strikingly contrasted performances in Hughie and Krapp's Last Tape made an impressively versatile Stratford debut.
Directed by Chicago's Robert Falls, who is something of an O'Neill specialist, Dennehy provides an energetic, nuanced portrait of Eugene O'Neill's sadly self-deluding Erie Smith in Hughie. One of the posthumous revelations of O'Neill's work, this almost-monologue seemed at its belated premiere to be a working sketch for the author's creation of "Hickey," the extravagant gambler whose long climactic speech animates The Iceman Cometh.
I might note that perhaps because his Theodore Hickman dominated the 1956 revival of The Iceman Cometh, which influenced the release of Long Day's Journey Into Night later that year and began the revival of major interest in O'Neill's plays, Jason Robards Jr.'s shadow overlies the roles that are apparently based, at least in part, on O'Neill's older brother, James. The connection between gamblers "Hickey" in Iceman and Erie in Hughie is obvious. Robards' creation of James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night and in his recreation of James in A Moon For the Misbegotten left an imprint on his subsequent creation of Erie. These are sad, haunted figures who make lightning shifts between manic self-delusion and depressed self-knowledge.
Dennehy's Erie Smith is not so mercurial as Robards' was, but he, too, holds us spellbound with his fluctuations between trying to con the bored night clerk into accepting Erie's bragging persona of a top-level gambler, ladies' man, and Broadway "swell" and his morose self-doubts and reminiscences about the previous night clerk, "Hughie." Erie admits fondness for that "sucker" and a sense of personal loss over Hughie's death. The night clerk's fairly unmotivated final interest in this talkative, intrusive stranger, based solely on the clerk's sudden notion that Erie might know the famed, colorful gambler Arnold Rothstein, leads to the play's questionable upbeat ending as the taciturn Night Clerk assumes the late Hughie's role shooting craps with Erie. But the guts of the play are in the raw sense of defeat both men expose.
Seeming to be born to Erie's jazz-age slang and con-man patter, Brian Dennehy is very funny, showy, harrowing, and darkly pathetic in this role. Joe Grifasi notably conveys the Night Clerk's despairing boredom and varying thoughts underlying his almost wordless responses. Patrick Clark's seedy lobby, Robert Thomson's moody lighting. Richard Woodbury's nighttime city sounds, and Robert Falls' impeccable direction all provide a completely convincing production.
It is difficult to determine just what Jennifer Tarver's apparently superb direction of Krapp's Last Tape consisted of, because Brian Dennehy so completely immerses himself into the distinctive persona of Samuel Beckett's Krapp. Dennehy makes him a rotting, stumbling old man who can amaze with sudden bursts of physical strength and even a startling strong young voice, though his "normal" voice is close to a croak. For pure theatrical virtuosity, Dennehy's change of style, hair, posture, and voice from his other performances, and his varyingly crippled and acrobatic physical acting seem like a showy stunt. But his incarnation of Beckett's iconic, dying, would-be author is far too authoritative and honest to seem to consist of anything like ordinary acting, much less acting tricks.
It is, of course, equally difficult to summarize the plot of Krapp's Last Tape, though what actually happens onstage is more obvious and understandable in this work than in most of Beckett's plays.
We have a man of 69, seemingly always alone, preparing to make the latest of his annual tapes about his life, taped each year at what he believes to be the time of his birth. But Krapp keeps returning to the tape he made just 30 years before in which he talks of his rejection of love, his refusal to ever become bound by love. And yet he takes obvious pleasure in recalling the physical details of his lovemaking with a beautiful woman. He becomes furious at his current physical difficulties, at his past comments and behaviors, which he now thinks stupid, and yet he also seems to be amused by his own taped comments, or nostalgic and sensually titillated by parts of his reminiscences as he replays the tape. He keeps rewinding to check or savor a passage that he has just played. Finally, he makes part of the new tape, seemingly a kind of farewell, and sinks into reverie...or is he dying, or dead?
That stark scenario has been variously described. (I left out the eating of bananas, turning on the light to go relieve himself in the next (dark) room, forgetting to turn on the light when he takes another toilet-break so that we hear him crash into things and curse, his spilling his other tapes and books onto the floor and one time retrieving them, another time leaving them, etc.)
One account calls this a story of lost love and regret. Another describes these actions as the withering away of a man with existential angst. And another is convinced this is a play about the failure of man to create.
Well, that's the Theatre of the Absurd for you: the safest description lies in assuming that it means exactly what we see and hear, as facts, not symbols.
Stratford's is a first-rate production of this great play, and Brian Dennehy seems to me to be even more completely authentic and impressive in this role than in his fine work in his other two at Stratford.
Brian Dennehy
