Endgame

BLIND CHANCE Turturro gazes into the void.

Photograph: Richard Termine

Since BAM recently hosted Deborah Warner’s Happy Days—one of the finest renditions of Beckett you’re likely to see in years—the new restaging of Endgame has big tramp shoes to fill. The project features marquee names John Turturro and Elaine Stritch and, unlike most theatrical shows at BAM, it’s domestic. Even though I’d rather see the great Brooklyn institution pouring its cash into coproductions with the city’s living avant-garde playwrights and troupes (especially since we’re getting more celebrity-driven Beckett this summer at the Lincoln Center Festival), Endgame is still a bleak masterpiece worth revisiting.

Veteran director Andrei Belgrader has apparently not lost his touch after a few seasons working on TV’s Coach and Monk. His production is taut and austerely compelling. Max Casella makes a sympathetic Clov, the surly clown tending to his master ward, the blind, crippled Hamm (an inconsistent, roaring Turturro, who seems to have taken the character name as his only direction). Stritch and Epstein, playing Hamm’s ancient parents Nag and Nell, bob in and out of ash cans in this absurdist classic.

Endgame is a sardonic tragedy about many deep things—the curse of living, the cruelty of time, the pain of love—but what comes across forcefully in this version is how much it is an extraordinarily sad depiction of fathers and sons. There sits Hamm, tyrannical but dependent on his surrogate son-slave, Clov. Hamm keeps his own (infantilized) patriarch in a garbage can, spitting insults at him. Given that Beckett is the Irish father of absurdism, the production duly honors him.