TIME FRAME

A new production of Samuel Beckett's "Endgame."

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

Samuel Beckett's play "Endgame," up at the Irish Repertory Theatre, under the direction of Ciarán O'Reilly, begins with a wordless spectacle. A man moves around the stage, drawing curtains back to reveal not the windows that the audience expects but one brick wall after another. There are two excruciatingly small openings in the brick, like portholes on a ship, which take a while and a ladder-to pry open. It's the kind of sight gag that can express the whole symbolic structure of a show: "Endgame" is a series of thwarting thwarted connections, thwarted meanings, clipped-off attempts to tell a story. Every time you think a vista of clarity might be on the horizon, you slam into a new wall that obfuscates the view.

The curtain drawer's name is Clov (Bill Irwin), and, like many of the characters strewn dismally through Beckett's œuvre, he has a physical disability. His legs are bowed and unsteady, and he's in obvious, constant pain. In order to open the small windows, he has to drag a ladder onstage. He's expert at managing obstacles: he throws his legs over the top of the ladder with a workman's precision. Irwin executes Clov's motions with an almost surreal rhythm, full of pauses and habitual tics, squeezing something like style out of a daily challenge. Clov has obviously been here-wherever this dim, cluttered, gloomy, perhaps postapocalyptic room is for a long time. His repetitions have made him highly skilled, in his way, at his low tasks.