Theater: Hughie/Krapp’s Last Tape

Goodman Theatre

Chicago

(312) 443-3800

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The lost art of the double bill is revived with this evocative pairing of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, said Steven Oxman in Variety. The juxtaposition of these disparate one-acts “intriguingly pits O’Neill’s verbosity and American colloquialisms against Beckett’s spare lyricism.” But the raison d’être for the evening is Brian Dennehy, who over the years has displayed “an uncanny knack for making an Everyman of characters without compromising their unique qualities.” Dennehy brings his full-force characterizations to both O’Neill’s Erie Smith, a loud-talking gambler who yaks the ear off of the night clerk at a fleabag Manhattan hotel, and Beckett’s Krapp, a curmudgeonly writer who on his 69th birthday listens to a series of tapes he recorded 30 years earlier.

Dennehy is “right at home as the small-time gambler and big-time loser at the center of Hughie,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Sporting a dirty white suit and a fedora, he mesmerizingly spins tall yarn upon tall yarn about his past to the old night clerk (Joe Grifasi). Anything to avoid climbing the stairs to the cell of a room he rents. Strong as Dennehy is as Erie, though, he’s revelatory as Krapp. From the moment the lights rise on the actor, he holds the audience captive, delivering Krapp’s “blackly comic” musings to perfection. O’Neill, Beckett, and Dennehy together turn out to be a “fine and fitful bunch of bedfellows.”