Endgame opens tonight!
Samuel Beckett's dramas are often handled in extreme, uber-theatrical ways that make the characters resemble symbols more than people. The Cutting Ball's penetrating new production of Beckett's bleakest play at Traveling Jewish Theatre makes Hamm, Clov, Nag and Nell seem almost human.
-Chloe Veltman, theater critic SF Weekly
We invite you to explore Beckett and the production process on our website:
Video:
Watch the set being built in a mere 60 seconds!
Interviews:
Excerpts from an interview with Endgame dramaturg Brad Chequer
“[In] Endgame: Pick a theme, "yesterday," or "ashes," or the sea, the color grey, or Clov’s ladder, fathers and sons, or any one of many themes he works out in the play, and follow it through the play. You’ll find that he repeats and alters and develops that theme the way a composer develops a musical theme or motif. Listen to the way Clov and Nell contend with the word "yesterday," or the way Nagg condemns Hamm, as Hamm condemns Clov, to a future of loneliness and misery.”
“With the possible exceptions of Macbeth and Othello, this is probably the most intricated (intricate and integrated smashed together into a Carrollian portmanteau word) play ever written. Hindu myth has it that the thunder god Indra wore jeweled crown in which every jewel reflected every other jewel. What I’m finding is that everything in Endgame is reflected by everything else; to say the same thing another way, I’m learning that Beckett put this play together the way Mozart put together the five voice fugue in his Jupiter Symphony - every theme works in counterpoint with every other theme. I’ve listed a few of these themes in my copy of our working script, and have mentioned even fewer of them here; every time I hear the play I hear more of these themes and I have to add them to the list. I’m hoping someday to come to the end of it.”
Click here to read entire interview
Excerpts from Brad Chequer’s dramaturgical essay: Beginning to End – Ending to Begin
“One fine night while Joyce was in Zurich (to avoid the Nazis, like everyone else), he was standing on a balcony looking at the night stars; a priest came up to him (knowing that before he lost faith Joyce himself had got within about 3 millimeters of becoming a Jesuit priest) and pointed out to him the order and beauty of the stars - "all that order - all that beauty" - and offered it as proof of god’s existence, god’s love, god’s wisdom, and the order and beauty (not to mention ashes and ash bins) that god had created. To which Joyce responded: "A pity that it’s all based on mutual inter-destruction." That which destroys is that which creates; Hamm, like Beckett, is constantly trying to end, only to find himself beginning again, remaining in spite of his desire not to remain, going on in spite of his desire no longer to go on. Beckett famously ends his novel The Unnameable with the line: "I can’t go on. I’ll go on."”
“Hamm will go on making words, creating, in spite of the impossibility of creating or making words, in spite of his desire to end - and in spite of the impossible pile of individual grains that make a heap, the impossible heap of words that make a play - or a world. And this is why far better readers of Beckett than I call him one of the most optimistic writers we have.”
Click here to read entire essay
Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.
The Cutting Ball’s production of Endgame is made possible in part by grants from Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Mental Insight Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.