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Bare interior, gray light. A door, a wall, a picture, a chair. Three characters trapped in immobility, a fourth trapped in movement. Sound familiar?
Next month the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will close out the millennium with Samuel Beckett's classic work of modernist austerity, "Endgame."
Performances begin at 8 p.m. Dec. 2, 3 and 4, with matinee performances at 3 p.m. Dec. 4 and 5. Performances take place in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, Room 208 Mallinckrodt Center.
Beckett's second full-length play, "Endgame" debuted in 1957 and was considered by its author to be his finest dramatic work. The story, such as it is, follows the personal dynamics among four characters -- Hamm, the blind tyrant; his parents, the elderly Nagg and Nell, who live in a pair of trashcans, and Hamm's much put-upon servant, Clov. Like the author's "Waiting for Godot," "Endgame" is set in an anonymous, rather bleak and vaguely mythic nowhere that seems to represent the limbo between life and death.
"You can't really reduce 'Endgame' to a plot synopsis," said director Andrea Urice, PAD artist in residence. "It's more like a climate -- bleak and dark but laced with Beckett's sensibility, his rhythms and wonderful humor."
Urice, who previously has directed several of Beckett's short works, said that she chose "Endgame" partly in recognition of the coming millennium.
"I think there's something interesting about performing 'Endgame' in December of 1999," she explained. "Beckett was one of the most important, influential playwrights of the 20th century, and I think it's appropriate to explore him again now, before we go into the next millennium.
Tickets are $10 for the general public, $8 for senior citizens and Washington University faculty, staff and students. Tickets are available at the Edison Theatre Box Office, 935-6543, and through all MetroTix outlets, 534-1111. For more information, call 935-6543.
