Beckett in a perpetual winter of discontent

Samuel Beckett for a summer night, anyone?

We’re not talking about his familiar and relatively popular “Waiting for Godot.” We’re talking about three of his more severe works: “That Time,” “Play” and “Krapp’s Last Tape,” at the Gem Theater in Garden Grove.

It would be difficult to find an evening of theater that’s less like “Much Ado About Nothing,” the crowd-pleasing comedy being staged next door in the city’s alfresco amphitheater.

While the ending of “Much Ado” offers a double wedding and a sense of community that has been strengthened through adversity, “The Beckett Project II” is about being alone, with only memories. The experience of the Beckett pieces is probably better if the audience is smaller -- which is fortunate, because attendance Sunday was sparse, and about half the theatergoers left before the evening ended.

Their exodus reflected the challenging nature of the material, not the production quality.

The program begins at its most minimal: the 16-minute “That Time,” in which the only visual image is that of the head of the white-haired Listener (David Allen Jones). Most of his body is invisible and apparently immobilized, but his face reacts to the turns of thought that go through his brain -- memories that we hear him rapidly processing and then repeating, seemingly ad infinitum, on the recorded soundtrack. It’s a grim evocation of a mind that can find no rest.

Jones is joined by K.B. Dulude and Lisa Enochs in “Play,” in which three people are similarly trapped in their thoughts, if not their passions, as they recall their love triangle with a rapid-fire but emotionally blank delivery.

“Play” is normally presented with the three characters side by side in large urns, but one of the urns broke Friday. For the weekend, the actors wore black robes, but they retained most of the caked grime on their faces that is supposed to indicate a feeling of being almost buried alive. The urns are scheduled to return next weekend.

Jones ends the production with “Krapp’s Last Tape,” in which an elderly man goes through his daily ritual of banana eating and then listens to audiotapes he made of himself when he was 39. At 50 minutes, “Krapp’s Last Tape” is longer than the others combined, and spoken at a much slower pace.

It violates the principle that brevity is the soul of minimalism. But Jones delivers a carefully crafted, fine-grained performance, as he and his colleagues also do in the shorter pieces, under Kevin Cochran’s direction.

After one more weekend in Garden Grove, the production moves to Burbank for two weeks.

*

‘The Beckett Project II’

Where: Gem Theater, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays

Ends: July 24

Price: $21.50 to $25.50

Contact: (714) 741-9555

Running time: 2 hours

Also

Where: GTC Burbank, 1111-B W. Olive Ave., Burbank

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, July 30 through Aug. 14

Ends: Aug. 14

Price: $19 to $21.50

Contact: (818) 238-9998