Beckett, With a Pinch of Sentiment

Even had it not been written by him, it was a scene that Samuel Beckett might have found arresting. In the audience, four people sit, watching a lone actor on an almost-bare stage going through the paces of Beckett’s arid, oddly stirring one-act “Krapp’s Last Tape.”

When the play ends, the actor, Rick Cluchey, does not emerge for a bow (as per the author’s wish, says the program). This is theater without fanfare, theater that goes on in the face of indifference and befuddlement and that continues to offer meaning should anyone happen to be paying attention.

*

Rick Cluchey is a kind of a Krapp specialist; he’s been playing the old man around the world for 20 years, sometimes under the direction of Beckett himself. While in prison for armed robbery, Cluchey started the San Quentin Drama Workshop, and after his release the company continued, performing Beckett and other playwrights for audiences both incarcerated and not.

This production, at the St. Ambrose Arts Center in West Hollywood, bills itself as being directed by Beckett, who has been dead for nine years. But it was directed by Beckett once, and Cluchey presumably continues on without much change, except that he is now finally Krapp’s own age.

Krapp is near the end of his life, listening to a tape he made on his 39th birthday. The voice on the tape is deliberate and doleful; it sounds like Vincent Price or T.S. Eliot, deeply flushed with a sense of its own importance. In Cluchey’s hands, Krapp is a trifle senile and disgusted with the self-importance of his younger self. He scrunches up his face into an unreadable, wrinkled mass at most of what the younger Krapp thought was important. He fast-forwards whenever an especially heavy pronouncement seems forthcoming.

Cluchey overplays the old geezer bit a touch. But when his Krapp is moved by something on the tape, when he is touched by the description of a long-lost love, the actor relaxes his face and lets his blue eyes open to reveal a buried light that’s burning still. It’s quite a lovely trick. If not sentimental, “Krapp’s Last Tape” makes a move toward sentiment that’s rare in Beckett. There, in Cluchey’s forlorn remembrance of a love past, is the very meaning of a man’s finished life.

* “Krapp’s Last Tape,” St. Ambrose Arts Center, 1261 Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood, tonight and Sept. 5, 10, 18, 8:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 18. $12.50. (310) 572-0154. Running time: 1 hour.