Endgame

I waited so long to write about this Mother's Day treat that I lost my program notes: that said, pardon my general recollections. Then again, it takes a good show to leave you with any pictures or images a month down the road, so understand that I found this production of Endgame to not only be visually striking, but emotionally accessible. Oddly enough, the high emphasis on the literary style of Beckett's words (such grand drabness otherwise) seemed to shift the story toward the metaphoric, with the play serving to reflect an artist's struggle to complete a work. Whether or not Beckett desired that metadrama on top of a play already loaded with the very real (yet statuesquely depicted) thoughts of death, I care not. Also worth noting, Max Casella was the star of this evening--though John Turturro held up well, despite (or perhaps because of) seeming to be in the grips of a Coen brothers film. Physical comedy is often spoken of as a motif behind Beckett's carefully choreographed shows, but it's rare to see a production that fully realizes the comic futility in acts as mundane as the absence and presence of a ladder.