There’s a special thrill in chatting with actors who continually challenge themselves. A lot of well-known stars have theater pieces they can easily bring on tour when their schedules open up. Leslie Nielsen and Henry Fonda were Clarence Darrow. Ethel Barrymore gave The Twelve Pound Look.
Brian Dennehy, by contrast, does Krapp—the wizened recluse pawing through audiotapes in his sparse apartment. It’s one of the most disconcerting yet exhilarating choices an actor could make for a solo show.
Dennehy’s other recent one-man triumph is only slightly chummier: Eugene O’Neill sordid hotel lobby two-hander Hughie; Dennehy played the play’s desolate Erie Smith at Long Wharf three seasons ago, opposite Joe Grifasi as the Night Clerk.
Another actor renowned for his risk-taking stage roles, Al Pacino, starred in Hughie back at the selfsame Long Wharf back in 1996. Dennehy’s follow-up of Krapp’s Last Tape is as audacious a choice as Pacino playing King Herod in Oscar Wilde’s Salome.
When Dennehy was in New Haven with Hughie, he’d already done Krapp’s Last Tape, and he even did the two one-acts as a double-bill at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario and at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.
Last month I chatted on the phone with Dennehy about bringing Krapp’s Last Tape to Long Wharf Stage II. The show starts previews tomorrow, Nov. 29, opens to critics Thursday and runs through Dec. 18.
I didn’t have to dance around the topic of Hughie and Krapp’s being presented three years apart rather than on the same bill. Dennehy talks readily about the plays’ similiarities—“They were both written when their playwrights were 57 years old, and when both playwrights were very successful. The subjects are similar: an aging man down on his luck. Hughie is about Erie Smith looking for someone else to prop him up in his illusions. Beckett is writing about a man and his younger self.
Dennehy appreciates the raucous humor that underlies Krapp’s Last Tape, just as he found the garrulous and bright-eyed side of Willie Loman amid the tragedy of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and the upbeat storyteller’s air of Erie Smith in Hughie. “Beckett has a philosophical point which he illustrates by setting up an elaborate comedy routine:
“A man eats a banana.
“He slips.
“He hurts his ass.
“This joke exactly describes life. There’s always a banana peel. This play can be regarded as both slapstick comedy and a profound understanding of what life is. To a great extent, it’s like any circus act. It demands great precision and timing. Samuel Beckett thought Buster Keaton was the perfect Beckettian character—at least until he got to work with him.” Keaton starred in the short Film, written and co-directed by Beckett (abetted by the playwright’s frequent collaborator Alan Schneider), in 1965, and a 1949 Keaton talkie, The Lovable Cheat, is suspected to have inspired the title and plotline of Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot.
“I fooled around with doing Godot,” Dennehy says. “Everybody puts me in as Pozzo, and that’s not the part I’m especially interested in. I would love to play one of the two leads. I would like to try Endgame sometime too. But [Krapp’s Last Tape] is the one that’s probably most available to audiences. It’s not only human but naturalistic. It’s not naturalistic at first—the banana gag is abstract to a point—but in a way it becomes naturalistic.”
Dennehy says he’s “seen many productions” of Krapp’s Last Tape, and “read all the material that can be read.” He’s keen to discuss, debate and justify some of the choices he and director Jennifer Tarver have made for this production. The technology involved for instance. The play concerns a man hoarding and playing recordings of his younger self. When Beckett wrote the play, reel to reel tapes were the medium for that. Later productions used cassettes, and now we’re out of the CD-R age and presumably into phone memos or cloud-based storage systems.
Dennehy notes that Beckett himself, when confronted with an environmental detail in the play that would have skewed its stated “Sometime in the present” setting, simply crossed out “present” in the manuscript and updated the vague phrase to read “Sometime in the future.” For the actor’s purposes, “it’s a tape recorder, not a CD player. Which feels right, but of course it also means you’ve got to deal with the goddamn tape recorder, which is a pain in the ass. The whole deal with arthritic fingers turning the thing on and off. This is what you rehearse.”
The show’s scenic design, Dennehy says, is details but not cluttered. “Some productions load the room with manuscripts, detritus. This is just a room that has walls and a door, which opens into a little kitchen area.”
Dennehy involvesd himself heavily in the productions he stars in, from doing original dramaturgical research to consulting on design, but he doesn’t see himself jumping into behind-the-scenes roles professionally. “I used to direct a lot. At this stage, I like the acting. Dealing with designers, all that other stuff, can be a pain in the ass.”
He could probably do Krapp’s Last Tape, and Hughie, comfortably on the regional theater circuit as long as he wishes—“with great plays, you never mind doing them again”—but Brian Dennehy’s already moved on to fresh challenges. This past summer he reunited with Krapp’s director Jennifer Tarver at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival to do Harold Pinter’s Homecoming. He describes the 1964 play as “Artaudian in that it’s a deliberate attack on the audience. Pinter did even more provocative things later, but this is his beachhead.” During the same summer festival that he blazed and blustered as Pinter’s insufferable character Max, Dennehy took on the jovially bloated role of Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, directed by Des McAnuff. It was McAnuff , the festival’s artistic director (who also helmed a well-received and now Broadway-bound Jesus Christ Superstar at Stratford this year) who initially suggested that Dennehy work with Tarver. Many of the actor’s recent theatrical triumphs, including Salesman and Hughie, were directed by Robert Falls. “I had suggested doing Krapp’s Last Tape at Stratford, and then Des McAnuff suggested Jennifer as the director. She’s a huge part of this—she and I were at least 50/50 collaborators on this. She’s a smart and capable taskmaster. Jennifer’s like me… I hate to use the word ‘deconstructionist,’ but we both are constantly looking at the work. They both, he says, strive to keep the work fresh. “Doing [Krapp’s Last Tape] at Long Wharf, even though I’ve done it twice now, will be different. I did Salesman 800 times and Long Day’s Journey Into Night 300 times, and I wouldn’t mind going back.”
As with Hughie and Krapp’s Last Tape, Dennehy delights in contrasting his Homecoming role with others he’s played. “Beckett was an influence on Pinter. Pinter was a great actor as well as a great playwright, and one of the last things he did before he died was star in Krapp’s Last Tape. Strangely, he did it without the banana bit.”
Dennehy’s clearly invigorated by larger-than-life, grandly flawed characters. Long Wharf Theatre audiences know this not just from his gregarious Hughie but from his Walter Burns in Arvin Brown’s production of The Front Page on the Long Wharf mainstage back in 1982 (one season after the theater presented Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as it happens). Imperious newspaper editor Burns, Dennehy says, “has to be full of piss, vinegar and sperm.”
So who would he like to play next? Dennehy suggests that there’s not much work for him these days in films—“it’s a fashion business, and I was in fashion for eight years or so”—and that “in movies or TV, you’re paid to do what you’ve done before. In the the theater, I can do things I’ve never done before. My ambition, especially in the theater was this: I want to do stuff I’m not sure I can do. So I want to do King Lear”—a project Dennehy was reportedly considering with Robert Falls as director as long as nine years ago, and now says he’s talking about with Tarver. “I’m not comfortable with Shakespeare, so it scares the hell out of me.
He sums up the prospect with Beckettian aplomb. “You can always fail. I’ve failed. It’s not the end of the world. The end is when they shovel dirt in your face.”
I have seen Krapp’s Last Tape in Chicago. I urge anyone who has not seen it with Brian Dennehy not to miss the opportunity. The first 12 minutes of the play revolving around bananas is well worth the price of admission.
Brian Dennehy is simply superb!
Can’t wait to see it! A wonderful play I saw once 25 years ago.
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