Last night I took a (smaller than expected) group to Pittsburgh to see the Pittburgh Irish and Classical Theatre's prodution of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. This is Beckett's centennial, and PICT is doing a festival of productions and readings of ALL of BEckett's plays.

The review linked above tends towards hyperbole, and it is generally a good production, though I find one major choice--the choice to actually set the play in a theatre. The audience seats were scaffolded in the backstage fly space, and we looked onto the stage, and then through onto what are normally the house seats, which we draped with drop cloths and clutter to give something of an abandoned feel. Hamm, the central character, then, became something of a faded old actor, something of a post-apocalyptic Norma Desmond, which gave the character a grandiosity that I find pressed to find anywhere in any of Beckett's work.

But the play did a fantastic job of exploiting the play's comic timing, and as anyone who knows Godot knows, Beckett is frequently trafficking in the bleakest of comedy, made all the more funny by its absurdity (Theatre of the Absurd, anyone?). Anyway, there was a sort of anxious chuckle that made its way across the theatre more than once.

Of course I was also nervous about the trip up to the theatre, with 5 of my students in the minivan, but by and large that turned out well, with lively conversation (we spent a lot of time trying to define what a hipster was) marking the way up and the way back.

And there will be plenty to talk about in class on Wednesday when it's time to discuss this play.