Hail and Farewell. Alan Mandell, the distinguished, 88-year-old L.A. actor, has said that his performance in Endgame might be his final one, citing the difficulty of learning lines at his age. If that’s the case, he has gone out in a blaze of theatrical glory, giving us a Hamm we will long remember, a blind tyrant with a sly, sardonic sense of humor. With his oracular voice and instinctive feeling for the music and rhythm of Beckett’s language, Mandell is a commanding presence from beginning to end. Miraculously, he has managed to direct CTG’s production of the play, as well. Drawing on his long history with Beckett — he toured in the original productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame directed by the Irish playwright himself – Mandell has been able to put together a superior revival of the latter, one that co-stars his longtime Beckettian sidekick Barry McGovern as Clov, Hamm’s shambling servant and confidante. (The two of them appeared last year in the CTG’s prize-winning production of Godot). Filling out the cast are James Greene as Nagg and Anne Gee Byrd and Charlotte Rae alternating as Nell. These performers, as all theatergoers know, do their acting while imprisoned up to their necks in garbage bins, which is why some critics have called Endgame the “ashcan play.” John Iacovelli’s womb-shaped set and Jared A. Sayeg’s forbidding lighting scheme help create Beckett’s strange, horribly beautiful world, one which incarcerates not just Nagg and Nell but Hamm and Clov as well in an existential hell (which is softened by Nagg and Nell’s love for each other and by Hamm’s comic asides). The interpretations of Beckett’s elliptical, mysterious tone poem are many: some see it as a tragic vision of life, a prayer to a God who might or might not exist. Others see it as the third act of Godot, with Clov and Hamm as Pozzo and Lucky, or as an allegory on authority. I tend to agree with Polish critic Jan Kott, who called Endgame “the Book of Job as played by clowns.” There’s no debating, though, that this production of is a memorable one, thanks largely to Mandell’s expert acting and directing. If this is, indeed, his last hurrah as an actor, let’s hope that he will stick around to direct more Beckett in the years to come.
