OnStage Magazine

Press, News & Events

OnStage Magazine

January – March 2010 Hughie and Krapp's Last Tape

January – March 2010 OnStage

Why Hughie and Krapp's Last Tape?

A number of years ago, my longtime collaborator and friend Brian Dennehy suggested that we take a look at Eugene O'Neill's Hughie, a short play that we both considered to be a mini-masterpiece. Through the years we had worked on a number of O'Neill's longer works—Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Touch of the Poet, The Iceman Cometh—and we found that many of the same themes that are explored in these works are contained in a perfectly realized form in Hughie, in particular the idea (analyzed at great length in Iceman) that we are the sum of our illusions—our "pipe dreams," as O'Neill calls them. In order to get ourselves through the day, we need to be able to look in the mirror and see ourselves as something. Without those essential self-created fantasies of ourselves to present to the world, and a mirror to see them in, we are nothing.

Since that time, Brian, Joe Grifasi (who so brilliantly plays the night clerk Charlie Hughes) and I have worked on several different incarnations of Hughie, and each time, Brian's interpretation of the wisecracking, down-on-his-luck Erie Smith gets better—richer, deeper, funnier and more heartbreaking. Somewhere along the line Brian decided that this play warranted a companion piece—and that the perfect selection would be another of his favorite plays, Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Although in many ways the dramatic styles of O'Neill and Beckett could not be more different—O'Neill's Broadway vernacular contrasted with Beckett's rhythmic, meticulously spare prose and eloquent silences—these two pieces have a great deal in common, apart from being quintessential works by two of the twentieth century's dramatic masters. In essence, both plays are about mourning: Erie mourns the loss of Hughie, the deceased night clerk who for years had given him the illusion of power and success; Krapp mourns the loss of his younger self as heard on the tapes he ritualistically plays on each birthday. Both pieces are leavened by the Irish black humor that was the heritage of each author, and both encapsulate the major ideas that inform the writings of its creators. And both pieces offer incomparable challenges to an actor, challenges which Brian negotiates with thrilling artistry.

I am very glad to have another chance to explore one of O'Neill's greatest works with Brian, and I am equally happy to welcome director Jennifer Tarver to the Goodman for the first time, to recreate the production of Krapp's Last Tape that she so successfully made with Brian at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival two seasons ago. Finally, I am thrilled that our audiences will have the chance to experience two of the great plays of the past century, interpreted by one of this generation's greatest stage actors. It is an eloquent showcase of the finest work by three of our theater's master artists.

Robert Falls
Artistic Director, Goodman Theatre