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.
