Preview: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at Catastrophic Theatre

Hamm is blind, paralyzed, and can’t stand. Despite this, he’s the one who sets the rules in his living quarters in a post apocalyptic world. Clov, who cannot sit down because of crippl9ing pains in his legs, is his ever present attendant and a very tired one.

Completing the household are Nagg and Nell, Hamm’s parents who have no legs at all and live in garbage bins filled with sand. They lost them in a tandem bicycling accident.

It’s all part of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame which Catastrophic Theatre co-Artistic Director Jason Nodler will be directing for the third time when it opens this weekend at the MATCH. And no, Nodler insists, Beckett’s plays (Waiting for Godot, Happy Days) are not about despair, but hope.

“Even in Waiting for Godot,  Didi and Gogo show up every day on this road as for what they’re waiting for, we know this is a mystery. But they continue to return in spite of any distress they might experience. That’s also true of the characters in Endgame,” Nodler says.

“His plays are not particularly dour. They’re certainly often considered to be about despair and they really aren’t. None of Beckett’s characters are without hope or they wouldn’t continue.”

“They’re not tragedies but tragic comedies. Clov is probably ready for his servitude to Hamm to be over with, but “just because someone is ready for something to end, that’s not despair when it doesn’t,” Nodler says.

“Hamm and Clov talk about how they’re handling the ending. What will come at the end. Clov is suffering quite a lot and has a sort of romanticism about the ending because he’s performed the same routine everyday at the orders of Hamm and he seems ready for things to end. That’s not despairing because he keeps doing it. He doesn’t leave. At the end of the play there’s an open question about this.

“The difference with Hamm is he’s ready for things to end, but not quite yet.”

Nodler compares what happens in Endgame to a game of chess. “You have a certain number of pieces left on the board and you’re essentially moving them around and you’re avoiding the end of the game. You’re putting it off. And that’s what I think we do quite a lot in life.”

At this point, Nodler catches himself, saying: “And now I’m talking about the play like it’s a very very serious thing.”

Actually, Beckett was a big fan of silent movie comedians, Nodler says. “There was no one that Beckett loved better than the silent film comics like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keeton.”

Beckett wrote Endgame over several years and there are radically different drafts, Nodler says. He believes it is a wonderful start for anyone who hasn’t seen a Beckett play, calling it the funniest one he did. “There are laughs all over the place.”

Catastrophic Theatre attracts a lot of what Nodler calls “non-traditional theater audiences,” many of whom find things to like about it that they may not have embraced in other more realistic theaters. Nodler is not against Houston’s more traditional theaters, in fact, he celebrates them, sees and respects their work. But part of the reason they have the pay-what-you-can philosophy is to attract people who might otherwise never go to the theater and discover it has something that speaks to them, just as he found when he was 13 years old.

Performances are scheduled for September 19 through October 11 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. at the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or matchouston.org. Pay what you can.