The Catastrophic Theatre proudly presents
Samuel Beckett’s
ENDGAME
“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”
The 30th anniversary production stars
Greg Dean, Luis Galindo, Jeff Miller, and Julia Oppenheim.
Directed by Jason Nodler
September 19 – October 11 at MATCH
An apocalypse has engulfed the world outside. A single interior stands shelter to the blind tyrant Hamm, his weary attendant Clov, and Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell.
Hamm is paralyzed from the waist down; he can’t stand up. Clov suffers from crippling pains in his legs; he can’t sit down. Consigned to garbage bins filled with sand, Nagg and Nell have no legs at all. Each suffers and each persists, epitomizing the famous Beckett line: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
As in the chess metaphor from which the play derives its title, Hamm and Clov carry out a series of repetitive routines, day after punishing day, senselessly moving pieces around the board of a game whose outcome is predetermined.
Beckett’s plays, uncompromising in their reflection of the human condition, are often mistaken for being fundamentally dark or depressing–important plays perhaps but not ones in which a person might find fulfillment. Beckett wasn’t the first major playwright whose characters questioned the purpose of life though, nor was he the first to deal in existential despair. Shakespeare got there first in Hamlet and Macbeth, respectively. Pure tragedies, attracting bevies of families who watch them under the sun over picnics on a hill. If Hamlet or Macbeth can be fulfilling, and they certainly are, Beckett can be an amusement park that feels your pain.
Endgame and Godot contain tragic elements for certain–the human condition does too–but they’re tragicomedies and nobody does tragicomedy like Samuel Beckett.
Each of the characters that populate Beckett’s best-known plays is afflicted with some malady or another, each is in distress, but none has given up; in their ways, pressing through the worst of circumstances, they are each paragons of hope. Godot’s Pozzo delivers one of the most difficult speeches imaginable then shouts “On!” and presses blindly forward. Beckett’s plays are not light fare. They are heavy, they are serious, but they are often as funny as the silent film comics the absurdist master adored, ones like Buster Keaton, for whom he wrote a film.
And one could hardly identify a better slogan for the tragicomic genre than the line Beckett once said was Endgame’s most important: ”Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”
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Godot was Beckett’s most famous play but his next play, Endgame, was his favorite and the one he considered most consequential. We agree.
We present the play for the third time on the 30th anniversary of the first–a production that was itself maximally consequential to Catastrophic and its direct forerunner Infernal Bridegroom Productions, which features an ensemble of artists who have worked at the same theatre together for as many as 33 years, an exceedingly rare thing in American Theatre today.
It’s difficult to imagine the theatre existing today but for 1995’s Endgame.
It was the first time that Catastrophic co-founders Jason Nodler (director) and Tamarie Cooper (Nell) collaborated with founding company members Greg Dean (Hamm) and Jim Parsons (Clov), who remains involved with Catastrophic as an advisory board member and donor.
The 1995 production was also the first IBP play reviewed by The Houston Chronicle, under the headline “Endgame ends up as Beckett at its best.”
And it began a 25-year-long run for IBP/Catastrophic as the only local producer of the Nobel Prize-winner’s work.
That finally changed in 2020 when we and other similarly fortunate Houston audiences were treated to an extraordinary festival of short plays by Beckett, presented by our friends at Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre Company and featuring direction by Mildred’s Umbrella artistic director Jennifer Decker along with Catastrophic’s Jeff Miller and Greg Dean.
IBP’s inaugural play was written by Nodler but Endgame, the second play he ever directed, has always been the play dearest to his heart. Dean feels similarly. Parsons, now a worldwide icon who continues to serve on Catastrophic’s advisory board, also calls it his favorite and considers that early production one of the most transformative experiences in a career filled with them.
Having done the same in Catastrophic’s 2024 Godot, Dean (Hamm) and Nodler (director) are collaborating on Endgame for the third time. Founding company member Charlie Scott, who played Estragon for the third time in Catastrophic’s recent Godot, serves as assistant director and dramaturg. That production also featured founding company members Kyle Sturdivant (Pozzo) and Troy Schulze (Lucky), returning to their roles from the 2013 production.
Nodler says, “At Catastrophic we don’t remount plays because they’ve been successful in the past; we revisit them because they’ve become entirely new things to us. Greg and I talk about this all the time. A few months ago he texted me a short line with the word ‘WHOA’ beneath it. Only two weeks before, I had read the same line and thought, how did I miss that? And of course it wasn’t meaningful to us for the same reasons. But only weeks before it did whatever it did to him I thought ‘This is how I’ve actually felt my entire life.’ It’s the most meaningful line in the play to me now. In 2012, you could have given me 50 guesses and I wouldn’t have gotten it in 100. They’re the same scripts but they’re not the same plays. That’s what this is. You can’t step in these rivers twice–not because you’ve changed the rivers, but because you’ve changed.”
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In its review of our 2012 production, The Houston Chronicle said “Catastrophic Theatre’s stark, unflinching production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame demonstrates exactly why this company and its artistic director Jason Nodler are so important to the city’s cultural life… no other group in town is doing such work this consistently, nor with the commitment and skill that distinguish every moment of Endgame”
In its review of the same production, The Houston Press called Catastrophic a “theater company of raging imagination and utter theatricality,” continuing by saying “with this production Catastrophic cements its position as Houston’s leading advocate of the experimental.”
Two constants have remained throughout: as they did in 1995 and 2012, quintessential Beckett actor Greg Dean plays Hamm and Jason Nodler directs.
A powerhouse trio completes the cast: Luis Galindo as Clov, Jeff Miller as Nagg, and Julia Oppenheim as Nell.
Endgame features a star design and production team: scenic design by Afsaneh Aayani, costumes by Macy Lyne, lighting by Hudson Davis, properties by Lauren Davis, and scenic construction by Matt Fries and Moon Papas with assistant direction and dramaturgy by Charlie Scott, stage management by Sarah Moessner, and production management by Tamarie Cooper.