Written by: Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett
Showing: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
Through: Feb. 21
Tickets: $25-$83
Contact: (312) 443-3800 or goodmantheatre.org
Perfect for the bleak midwinter, these one-acts deliver theater’s favorite spectator sport—watching losers lose. Hardly trying because he’s so well cast, Brian Dennehy brings hard-boiled despair to, respectiveely, a gambling blowhard and an old man who tastes mortality as he reprises his lost youth.
Disillusionment is on the menu and in the air with O’Neill’s sardonic one-act “Hughie.” The name refers to the previous desk clerk of this once-lavish N.Y. hotel. Hughie was a happily married “sucker,” according to Erie Smith, Dennehy’s gasbag of a grifter. In less than an hour his Times Square denizen with his dead-end “pipe dreams” implicates himself with a confession of sucker bets, dames who were right to dump him, and an ill-concealed envy for Hughie’s happy family. Joe Grifasi is hilariously impassive as the new night clerk and, we conclude, Erie’s latest recipient for bad advice about love and work. He’s “jinxed” without Hughie to prey on but, with a new sap on tap, his luck may change.
A kind of vaudeville nightmare, in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” Dennehy perfectly plays a haunted codger clumsily eating a banana and listening to tapes he made 30 years before when he was 39 (and already convinced his life was in a tailspin). It’s the theatrical equivalent of infinitely recessed mirrors. Death was always implicit in the sex he remembers; his happiest memories seem retroactively cursed by the heartbreak to follow.
Dennehy’s only job here is to look like a geriatric clown haunted by a wasted life and, worse, those indelible hopes that refused to pan out. But then we’ve had a year-long crash course in just such “settling.” This one-man farce again proves how much the personal spawns the political. You’ll cry all the way home.
