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Hughie/Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp, the old man who looks back on his life with bitterness and resignation in Beckett’s one-man one-act, is 69. Erie Smith, the small-time gambler in O’Neill’s Hughie whose sense of self-worth relied on the niceties shown him by the recently deceased night clerk at his SRO hotel, claims to be 55. Brian Dennehy is 71, and his years on the stage seem to combine with the years he’s spent inhabiting these two characters to imbue them with an especially deep and honest humanity.
Dennehy first played blustering sad-sack Erie under Falls’s direction in 2004, in the Goodman’s Owen space. Revived now in the larger Albert, Dennehy’s vivid, visceral portrayal of a man trying to talk himself into mattering feels somehow even more intimate than it did in the smaller theater. (Joe Grifasi, as the replacement for Erie’s sounding board, has similarly enhanced his comic timing.) In Tarver’s Krapp, first paired with Hughie two seasons ago at Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Dennehy flies solo. Listening to the tape of his 39-year-old self assessing his life, the older Krapp grimaces and broods, burdened with the perspective of age. The coupling of these two plays, so stylistically divergent on the page, was the actor’s choice, and they work together in ways a less-experienced performer might not have anticipated. In Dennehy’s lived-in performances, they burnish each other to a warm glow.
