Endgame
Remount
Performances
Sep 19, 2025 -
Oct 11, 2025
Cast & Personnel
Director
Assistant Director
Cast
Scenic Design
Costume Design
Prop Design
Stage Manager
Original 2012 Production
The Play
“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”
The earth is barren. The sea stands still. There is less and less of anything here. In the shelter, blind despot Hamm (who can’t stand up) lords over his weary attendant Clov (who can’t sit down), each dependent on the other. Hamm’s legless parents Nagg and Nell slowly expire in adjacent trash bins, confined there by their son. Day after punishing day, Hamm steers Clov through a series of senseless, circular routines in impotent defiance of a predetermined outcome. With each reminder of the death that awaits him outside, Clov inches nearer to the exit.
Nobody does tragicomedy like Samuel Beckett. A central line from the play, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” practically defines the genre. Director Jason Nodler and Greg Dean (Hamm) revisit their roles from Catastrophic’s 1995 and 2012 productions. Luis Galindo (Clov), Jeff Miller (Nagg), and Julia Oppenheim (Nell) round out the cast.
“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.” – Houston Chronicle
The Playwright
SAMUEL BECKETT was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French.
Beckett's plays became the cornerstone of 20th-century theater beginning with ''Waiting for Godot,'' which was first produced in 1953. As the play's two tramps wait for a salvation that never comes, they exchange vaudeville routines and metaphysical musings - and comedy rises to tragedy.
Before Beckett there was a naturalistic tradition. After him, scores of playwrights were encouraged to experiment with the underlying meaning of their work as well as with an absurdist style. As the Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn wrote: "After 'Godot,' plots could be minimal; exposition, expendable; characters, contradictory; settings, unlocalized, and dialogue, unpredictable. Blatant farce could jostle tragedy."
For his accomplishments in both drama and fiction, the Irish author, who wrote first in English and later in French, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man's relationship with his God… As illustrated by the final words of his novel, "The Unnamable": "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." Or as he later wrote: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
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