Brian Kennedy looking like Krapp at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago three years ago. The Jennifer Tarver-directed production of Krapp's Last Tape brings Dennehy back to the Long Wharf Theatre this fall.
Brian Dennehy’s coming back to Long Wharf Nov. 29-Dec. 18 to finish what he started a few years ago.
In 2008, Dennehy and Joe Grifasi brought their bravura version of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie to Long Wharf Stage II. It’s an established production which they’d brought to several other theaters before Long Wharf (which, coincidentally, had produced a Hughie starring Al Pacino and Paul Benedict in the 1990s).
But that very year, Dennehy had begun exploring Hughie in the context of a later one-act play by an Irish playwright: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Dennehy did the shows as a double bill at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in June of ’08 and did them together again at the Goodman Theater in 2010.
It was hope, nay expected, that Dennehy would do both Hughie and Krapp’s Last Tape at Long Wharf three years ago. Instead we got Hughie, which turned out to be quite a full evening in itself given Robert Falls’ stage-spanning direction and Eugene Lee’s layered, detailed, stairs-to-nowhere set design.
Now, at long last, New Haven’s getting Krapp’s Last Tape. The play (written for one man and a reel-to-reel tape machine) has been around for over half a century, beloved by small theaters, fringe theaters and college theater groups. Dennehy apparently hasn’t performed it since those Ontario and Chicago double-bills, so this may be the first time his Krapp has stood on its own.
Even when they were done together, Dennehy enlisted different directors for the O’Neill and Beckett plays. Krapp’s Last Tape is directed by Jennifer Tarver, known for her work with provocative modern playwrights such as George Walker and Will Eno, as well as lots of operas.
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