The good people at EgoPo made a living thing of Beckett's Endgame, deftly skirting one of the chief dangers of producing Beckett, namely mere re-enactment of the master's work. It was--admittedly--a risk to situate the dysfunctional family of Endgame in a circa-70's suburban American rec room, moving the Mother and Father from their usual garbage pails into a washer and dryer. But the risk paid off, showing us a new approach to the living matter here. It also opened up a new interpretation of the overall predicament of this family. The mother and father idly reminisce about their leggy youth, prior to a horrible accident that deprived them of freedom and mobility, describing in German accents what was clearly the privileged youth of elites in the Weimar Republic. This is paired with Hamm's story of rescuing a boy from one of many starving ragpickers--he notes there were so many that he could have helped--and the fact that some unspecified and uncontrolled extinction event has occured leaving them an island of stranded humanity. All of which leads to suspicion that we are exploring one possible outcome of WWII in which humanity has been extinguished by hate and a few survivors are left to speak about the great necessity of love without, of course, feeling it or displaying love in any of their invariant interactions. So rather than a purley abstracted play that begins and ends with an impossible dysfunctional family, EgoPo has produced a Beckett play the begins with a bizarre ritualized set peice of the walking wounded and leads out to one of the West's most significant failures of the 20th century.
