Endgame Comes to Conn

Waiting for pain medication. Looking out the window at a barren landscape. Savoring a stale biscuit. Such dismal actions comprise the lives of the characters in the post-apocalyptic world of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Di- rector Patrick Gallagher Landes ’16 brought such devastated world to Connecticut College on Saturday, April 2 and Sunday, April 3 in Palmer with the support of Wig & Candle, the College’s student run theater group. The recent performance fittingly corresponded with the 59th anniversary of the play, which originally opened on April 3, 1957, in London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Representative of the Theater of the Absurd, the play explores the meaning of life when most of humanity has died. Endgame, referring to the last part of a chess game when few pieces remain, takes place in the hovel of the crippled, blind and nearly deaf protagonist, Hamm (Cam Netland ’18). He sits in a rolling chair at the center of his shelter for most of the play describing the hopeless- ness of his existence and ordering his servant, Clov (Cory Carola ’16), to entertain him. However, with bad legs and a broken morale, Clov struggles to acquiesce to Hamm’s demands. Even the dinky tasks of rolling Hamm around the room or telling him a story challenge Clov. Just when existence in the hovel could not seem any more joyless, Hamm’s elderly and legless parents, Nagg (Khánh Nghiêm ’18) and Nell (Jessica Craig ’16), emerge from their separate ashbins. The couple attempts to find pleasure in futile forms. They try to kiss but cannot reach one another. Nagg tells Nell a tired story about a tailor, which no longer makes her laugh. Nell verbalizes a distant memory about riding in a boat on deep waters. She then dies in her arid world, leaving Nagg to cry and sleep alone in his putrid bin. Hamm and Clov resume the maddeningly few activities available to them until Clov eventually departs the hovel, leaving Hamm to await his death, the one escape from misery.
The outstanding actors tragically and comical- ly conveyed the bleakness of their lives. Netland’s amazing vocal control revealed Hamm’s frustration with life yet perseverant search for physical mental, and emotional light. With impressive physical acting skills, Carola conveyed the anguish that Clov feels upon serving Hamm in isolation. Playing Nell, Craig mastered the voice and facial expressions of an aging deaf woman desperately grasping onto memories as she loses touch with reality and her life. In the roll of Nagg, Nghiêm made the audience taste the dust of this dying world as he voiced his longing for extinct joys such as sugarplums and back scratches.
The actors, with the assistance of Stage Manager Natalie Boles ’17, Lighting Designer Anna Langman ’19 and Designer James Robinson ’16, offered con- temporary audience members a dark vision of life if humanity fails to protect the environment from global climate change. Landes asserts: “Samuel Beckett had a profound vision of the end of the world that fits with contemporary predictions of a world ravaged by climate change and worldwide conflict.” The performance occurred within the same week that scientists released a climate model predicting that an ice sheet will melt and destroy major world cities by the end of the century. Hamm recognized his own failure to protect posterity by sharing his wealth when he re- marked “All those I might have helped or saved.” Let this current generation stand up from its rolling chairs so as to avoid repeating Hamm’s tragic mistake. •