Playwright: Samuel Beckett. At: The Ensemble Project at Signal Ensemble Theatre, 1802 W. Berenice. Phone: 773-347-1350;donations . Runs through: Aug. 7
We meet our "wearish" hero in his den as he prepares to revisit a chapter in the audiotaped journal he has kept since his youthfirst searching voluminous written indices to locate just the correct reel in the correct storage box, then having a drink and a snack, followed by a clean-up (casually throwing the banana peels on the floor). As Krapp totters arthritically between the distant corners of the Signal Ensemble playhouse's catacomb-like interior, we huddle silently in the darkness until, after 30 minutesnearly half the play's allotted timehe finally speaks, thrilling to the sound of his own voice.
If remembering is doomed to become this much trouble, it's no wonder that elderly people so often prefer to forget. Krapp's tragedy is not the trouble he must undergo to retrieve his past, however, but the cruel light it shines on the bleakness of his present life. Again and again, he relives his account of an idyllic boating excursion, thirty years earlier, accompanied by the girl friend with whom he would break up that same day, wondering in retrospect if his decision was wise and musing on the petty details he once thought sufficiently important to warrant recording (including abstruse words he must now fetch a dictionary to decipher).
The challenge to authors of monologue plays is to give their lone protagonists a reason to vocalize. Face it, people don't usually talk much when they're alone, and while oldsters are often stereotyped as self-absorbed dotards, that doesn't mean we must attend to their rambling apostrophes. Despite Samuel Beckett's resorting to thewell, mechanical device of having Krapp address his former self as preserved by cumbersome reel-to-reel technology, without empathy in abundance, the sensory strain produced by his chiaroscuro soliloquy can quickly turn soporific.
Ah, but Signal Ensemble is the company renowned for breathing fresh immediacy into the most ossified of classics (notably, Waiting for Godot). For this inaugural production in the Ensemble Project series, director Aaron Snook restricts the physical spaceonly 15 audience members are admitted for each performanceto invoke an intimate connection that renders the smallest twitch of an eyebrow at once palpable and significant. It helps, too, that Vincent L. Lonergan, playing the curmudgeonly Krapp, is a charismatic host whose Beethoven hair and unwavering gaze engage us with hypnotic charm.