Neal Tucker

Hughie & Krapp’s Last Tape

// January 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

I saw Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape tonight at The Goodman Theatre downtown, both starring Brian Dennehy, with a 15-minute intermission between them.  Having read Hughie, I knew what to expect (more or less).  Having not read Krapp’s Last Tape, I knew only to expect Beckett (more or less).

Hughie came first.  Dennehy walked onto the stage, a vivid hotel lobby in the 50’s, from backstage left, in a large pinstripe suit, smoking, already reminiscing about his lost friend, the eponymous character we never see, Hughie himself.  The night clerk, Charlie, vaguely listens to Dennehy’s garrulous character, Erie Smith, spin his yarn for upwards of an hour.  Erie tells him about Hughie, the prior night clerk, and he tells Charlie of the stories he used to tell old Hughie, before he got sick, “was took to the hospital,” and died, a week before the play begins.  He tells Charlie how he’s lost his luck since Hughie died.  How he can’t win anymore – he’s a gamblin’ man.

Charlie listens in a torpor.  He hangs on to the ends of Erie’s sentences like an old faithful dog, trying but failing to attend truly to Erie’s words.  Hughie tells Charlie story after story, stories within stories upon stories.  Erie says to himself as much as to Charlie, “What I fed to Hughie wasn’t all lies…They was stories….” Not lies.  Stories.  Erie tells the story of himself and Hughie, because he needs Hughie.  Hughie, now dead, can’t help him save for his presence in Erie’s long-winded stories.  Erie clung to Hughie, because Hughie gave him confidence, gave him, in essence, a raison d’être, a reason for being.  Without Hughie, Erie can’t find joy in anything, in the women or the gambling, in the old memory-haunted hotel, or, worst, in his stories.  Several times throughout the one-act play, Erie heads for the stairs, a few times climbing up a stair or two, before turning around, facing the lobby, telling another story.

Nearing the end of the play, Charlie opens up.  His stupor clouding his poor judgment and ability to converse for most of the play, he finally reveals that he wants something that Erie has, something Erie needs to give away in order to live again: his stories.  Erie needs to tell his stories to someone who will believe them, who will “lap them up” as Erie says, someone who will sit at Erie’s feet and beg for more.  That person, it turns out, is Charlie.  Hughie can’t play that role any longer.  But Charlie can.  Erie recognizes this immediately, and we see a hint of the old spark we imagine Hughie had earlier in life, a spark we hope returns.

As humans, we need food, shelter, clothes, of course.  But we truly need something that’s much harder to come by.  Those are the needs we cling to, what we hold on to even after it’s gone, what we grope for in the dark, what we frantically try to replace when all is lost.  Erie needed someone to listen, someone to hear his stories, someone to believe him, someone that would give him reason to live, reason to be.  Hughie was his reason to be.  Having lost Hughie, he mourned.  He spent a hundred dollars he didn’t have to purchase a flower arrangement for Hughie’s funeral.  He returned to the hotel where Hughie had worked and listened to him for nineteen years.  In the end, he found Charlie.

Next came Krapp’s Last Tape.  Beckett is known for his absurdist, existential plays, stories without stories.  In Hughie, stories were the essence of Erie’s life.  In Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp replays his own stories in order to remember, but also in order to forget.  He listens to tapes he has made on his birthdays, sitting in a black, dark room, with a single light handing from the ceiling.  He exits to a closet upstage a few times, but he always returns to his dark room.

Beginning as a return to vaudeville, the play draws us into the idiosyncratic life of Krapp, the play’s only visible character.  As the play moves on, we are invited to listen with Krapp as he plays a tape from thirty years prior, his 39th birthday.  We hear him recount events that he can now only imagine.  His 39-year-old self (the other character) is a different man in many ways, ways the 69-year-old Krapp would like, so he seems to intimate at times, to forget.  In order to forget, he must first remember.  Krapp listens and remembers, imagining the moments in his life, thirty years ago, living a different life, a life altogether unlike the one he is living now, the one in the dark room, alone.  We hear that 39-year-old Krapp also lived a solitary life.  What was once a refuge for a young, introverted man, has evolved into a hovel for a old hermit.

He eats his bananas and listens to his tapes.  He seems to have no life but the tapes.  Having listened to the tape he recorded thirty years prior, Krapp records one final tape.  He denigrates his young (depraved?) self.  He takes refuge in the simple fact that it is all behind him, or so he says.  He references old stories that his younger self engaged in, all those many years ago.  He talks of going to church, falling asleep in the pews, gathering holly at Christmas, being young.  He talks to himself and to the tape, though that distinction is dissolving, saying how he might be somewhere again, another time, another place.

He says, finally, “Be again, be again.”

The two plays are very different, but they have obvious similarities as well.  Erie and Krapp are similar men, longing for something they cannot have, Erie for his Hughie, Krapp for his younger self, though each claims he doesn’t want or need it, in so many words.  Erie finds Charlie.  Krapp finds his tapes.  Each has lost something, but each creates something else in its place, in their own, very different way.  Each clings to a life no longer lived, replacing it with stories and tapes.  Dennehy is brilliant, finding the (often comic) tragedy of both Erie and Krapp: living, telling, recording, but most of all, and most difficutly, being.

Project 365

// January 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

If you’ve been clicking my links on Facebook or Twitter, you’ve probably seen several consecutive posts with a prominent picture and a tagline beneath it.  This is part of one of my 2010 Resolutions, Project 365 as some have called it elsewhere.  Basically, the premise is simple: take a picture every day and post it online.  I’m posting all my pictures to Flickr, which automatically posts to Facebook, then I’m blogging it here, which automatically posts to Twitter.

For this first week, I’ve posted my photo of the day every day.  Subsequently, I plan to change up my routine a bit.  Having gotten into a kind of rhythm, I now think that it is a resolution I would like to stick with for the long haul.  We’ll see how that pans out, but I feel pretty good about it, and hopefully that’s somewhat realistic, something else that only Time Will Tell.

My new plan is to post my pictures once a week, each Friday or Saturday posting the previous week’s photos.  I’ll figure out some way to post them all to one blog post without appearing too cluttered.  If you have a suggestion, I’d love to hear it.  I don’t really have anything in mind right now.  I will always post them to Flickr as well, so if you want to see my whole growing 2010 gallery, check it out by clicking on any of the pictures I’ve posted (or by clicking here on this red text).

That’s all for now.

Talk soon,

Neal

Day: 7/365 – Date: 1/7/2010

// January 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

DSC02891, originally uploaded by Neal Tucker.

Chicago is covered in snow; this is a brick wall down the street, laced in ivy, topped and buried in snow.

Day: 6/365 – Date: 1/6/2010

// January 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

DSC02864, originally uploaded by Neal Tucker.

A miniature snowman down the street.

Day: 5/365 – Date: 1/5/2010

// January 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

DSC02856, originally uploaded by Neal Tucker.

Sheets of snow and ice on the balcony.

Day: 4/365 – Date: 1/4/2010

// January 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

DSC02836, originally uploaded by Neal Tucker.

We flew back to Chicago today after spending the holidays in the South.

Day: 3/365 – Date: 1/3/2010

// January 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

DSC02799, originally uploaded by Neal Tucker.

The young creatives at work. (Two of my nieces at Billy’s Bar and Grill in Birmingham.)

Day: 2/365 – Date: 1/2/2010

// January 2nd, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

My family’s dog, Tippy, at home in Birmingham.

Day: 1/365 – Date: 1/1/2010

// January 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // blog

One of my resolutions for 2010 is to take a picture every day for the whole year.  This one is of me and Ash on New Year’s, less than an hour into 2010.  I hope to upload all these pictures to Flickr and here on my site.

Review and Resolution, 10 Years On

// December 31st, 2009 // No Comments » // 2009, a year ago today, alabama, awesomeness, blog, the new year, us, world

Time for another year-end wrap-up along with my list of resolutions for the coming year.  If you don’t read this, I don’t blame you; there are a million of these written every few seconds, I’m sure.  But of course, this one is a decade-end wrap-up, which is obviously less frequent than the simple year-end ones.  Ignore this mundane first paragraph.

This decade was (and will remain) the Formative Decade for a generation (mine).  Some grew up in the 60’s, and they experimented with drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.  Others grew up in the 80’s and experimented with roller skates and hair metal.  We grew up in the 00’s and experimented with iPhones and Radiohead.  The coming 10’s will be the Formative Decade for another generation, but it remains to be seen what they will experiment with.

The 20th century was a transformative century for technology, and the first 10 years of the 21st century have continued the progress.  We don’t have flying cars, but we have cell phones that put the entire world at our (quite literal) fingertips.  2009 has been another year in the mass-market technological transformation of the global society.  We saw the unprecedented exploration of the social web, the explosion of Twitter, and the promise of a new mobile web (and an Apple Tablet, which I predicted a long time ago…if I do say so myself…and I do…say so myself…*ahem*).

Ten years ago I was at a friend’s house here in Birmingham, Alabama, awaiting the destruction of Y2K.  Of course, it never came.  The new millennium came, but Y2K didn’t.  Here we are ten years later, and Y2K10 is upon us (I don’t expect that to catch on, and not only because no one will read this far into this blog post – if you’re still with me, “You’re a trooper,” as my Mom says.)

What will the new year bring?  I don’t know for sure, of course, but I have my thoughts, my predictions, my resolutions.  What follows are those thoughts, predictions, and resolutions.

I think (like innumerable others) that the iTablet will revolutionize the tech-market, and TV will move to the web like Bill Gates predicted years ago, although not in the way he would have preferred.  I fear that the US will be involved in Iran (And Yemen? Or Israel? What about North Korea?) like we are in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the US/UN will further seek destruction of  nuclear weapons on a global level.  I hope that we lift ourselves out of the global recession (depression?) in 2010, though that remains to be seen.

As for my New Year’s Resolutions, they are as follows, more or less….

1. Finish the C.S. Lewis corpus.  I’ve wanted to read all of a particular author for some time, and I’ve read more of his than anyone else.  David Mamet is a very close second.  Maybe I’ll make him my 2011 goal, unless the world ends a few years early.

2. I have a few exercise/diet goals that I won’t detail here, but that’s a staple of any resolutions list, so I know you aren’t surprised or too terribly upset that it’s on my list and not detailed, respectively.

3. A goal for 2009 was to journal every day for a few weeks.  I will make that a goal for 2010, as well, because it was a very rewarding experience, and I would like to journal more often.

4. And here is my most ambitious goal for 2010, I think.  I saw someone do this on Facebook, and I think it’s a great idea.  I would like to take a picture every day for a whole year.  I’ll post them on Flickr in a specific gallery, and at the end of the year, I will hopefully make a book or poster or something to celebrate the whole endeavor and look back on the year in pictorial fashion.

Those are my big ones.  I might come up with a few more, but those are the ones that I wanted to share.  If you read any of this, thanks for doing so.  I don’t know what to write in expectation of the next decade, though it will be the formative years for most of my 20’s.  I’m excited about it, though, and I’m looking forward to a fantastic New Year and another influential decade.

I hope your New Year is bright and full of opportunity.  Goodbye 2009 and the 00’s!  Happy New Year!  2010!

Auld Land Syne,*

Neal

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*Means “long long ago” or “days gone by” according to Wikipedia.

P.S. If you’re looking for a good to-do app for all your resolutions, check out http://teuxdeux.com/