Tag: Tony Isbell

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South

Tony Isbell is Krapp. I mean that in the best possible sense.

A question that is seldom asked: What does Samuel Beckett’s mini-masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape have in common with poop porn? Consider the “reaction video,” a digital-era phenomenon that came of age following the release of Two Girls, One Cup, a pornographic short depicting two women enjoying a pint glass full of human chocolate. Here’s a classic reaction video of somebody showing the infamous TG1C clip to their grandmother. As viral content goes, it’s horrible. And a stone cold classic. 
 

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South

So, what’s the point of this strange comparison? For starters, I want to demystify Beckett, whose work is often characterized as being difficult and detached. Also, in both a formal sense, and as a piece of entertainment, Krapp’s Last Tape functions identically to a reaction video. If granny makes you laugh, blush, cringe, or shake your head, you’ll have no trouble at all engaging with Krapp. In both cases the comedy and the pathos are are rooted in the relationship between a candid observer and the content stored on his/her technology. Only instead of watching girls go wild, Beckett’s titular curmudgeon sits at an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and listens, in real time, to a decades old recording of himself reviewing an even older recording of himself. It’s an Escher portrait of a mirror selfie, reducing one man’s entire life to 40-minutes of covert clowning. It is, by turns, hilarious and hateful, and in a masterful performance that lives up to that description, Memphis actor Tony Isbell hits every single note, high and low.

Krapp’s Last Tape hasn’t just aged well, it’s become even more resonant in the age of Instagram and #TBT. Contemporary audiences are primed to sympathize with a solitary man interacting with his device.

Me

Update: I’m in my kitchen writing a review of Krapp’s Last Tape. And I need a shave. Also, even though you can’t see it, there’s an entire bunch of overripe bananas hanging behind my head.

Toward the end of his opening night performance Isbell struggled to detach a spool of tape from Krapp’s antique recorder. That’s all part of the show. But when the spool finally released something seemingly spontaneous and wonderful happened. The actor reeled backwards, hitting a pendent lamp hanging above his head. Planned or not, the result was more effective than any expensive special effect ever could be. The lamp swung like a mad pendulum, casting the protagonist in light and leaving him in darkness over and over again until, at last, all potential energy was spent. Action, reaction, etc. Visual metaphors don’t get much better or more basic than that. 

Krapp’s Last Tape shares the stage with a neatly packed production of Beckett’s rarely-seen micro-drama, Ohio Impromptu. The show’s action consists of a stationary “reader,” (Adam Remsen) reading a book to a similarly stationary “listener,” (Isbell), who remains silent but sometimes knocks to indicate he’d like to hear a passage repeated. Remsen’s interpretation is smart and sympathetic but, through no fault of his own, it’s never all it could be. Beckett wrote for unique voices. Krapp’s Last Tape, for example, was inspired by a radio performance given by British actor Patrick McGee. While Remsen did his job beautifully, Ohio Impromptu cries out — like a strange disembodied mouth — for a special voice that paints vivid pictures in the surrounding blackness. That’s why I’m looking forward to a repeat performance when age and experience have seasoned the soft-spoken actor’s pipes. 

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South (2)

A strange disembodied mouth

My favorite thing about this night of independently produced theater is its origin story. The nutshell: a couple of actors realized they both loved a play that’s easy and inexpensive to stage, so they staged the damn thing. Because, why not? More like that, please.

Big things really do come in small packages. I should probably use that line to connect this closing graph to the poop porn in my opening. But, in spite of having just typed the words, “poop porn in my opening,” I’m not that kind of critic. It’s hard to imagine a more modest production than Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu. It’s equally hard to imagine a more satisfying night in the theater. 

Standing. Clapping. 
Me

Picture, or it didn’t happen!

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Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at First Congo

What started as an obscure joke on Facebook has turned into a rare treat for Memphis theatergoers and fans of actor/director Tony Isbell.

Isbell created a lively Facebook discussion when he posted a status update saying, “I’ve just eaten, I regret to say, three donuts and have only with difficulty refrained from a fourth.” Some commenters liked donuts. Others liked them a lot. But Isbell wasn’t really casting about for snack affirmation. He was dropping a nerdy hint to fans of absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett.

Actor Adam Remsen, who’d been directed by Isbell in productions of Glengarry Glen Ross and Six Degrees of Separation, recognized the allusion and answered, “Oh Krapp.” A conversation started that has resulted in an independently mounted production of Beckett’s mini-masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape.

Tony Isbell as Beckett’s Krapp

“It’s like one man’s entire life in 40 minutes,” says Isbell of a play that finds its elderly title character listening to a tape of his somewhat younger self talking about an even earlier tape of his much younger self. It’s not quite 60 years old and maybe even more relevant thanks to Instagram and Facebook.

“When people think of Beckett, they think of Waiting for Godot,” Isbell says. “They think of abstract characters dealing with huge issues. But this play is the most naturalistic thing he ever wrote. It’s exactly what it is: An old man sitting at his tape recorder listening to old tapes of himself and making a new one. It happens in real time. That’s it.”

Remsen shares directing duties with Isbell and joins him onstage for a production of Ohio Impromptu, another rarely seen Beckett sketch with similarly nostalgic threads.

“I’m not really doing that much directing,” Remsen says. “For me, the best part of the process has been getting to watch Tony Isbell perform Krapp’s Last Tape three or four times a week.”

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Theater Theater Feature

4000 Miles at TheatreWorks

“Gentle” is the word I hear over and over again in reference to 4000 Miles, Amy Herzog’s funny, thorny play about geographical, emotional, temporal, and political distance across generations. Director Tony Isbell dropped the word when we chatted online. It’s popped up repeatedly in conversations with friends who’ve seen the play at TheatreWorks. Even New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it a “gently comic drama” in his review, so there must be something to the idea that it’s a gentle play. But that isn’t how I experienced 4000 Miles. The play I saw was an uncomfortably real snapshot of a generational moment, a sound thrashing of lifestyle-lefties and a similarly-bracing critique of our elders and their astonishing ability to idealize the past. 4000 Miles is a quiet play, mostly. There’s no sustained shouting or violence to speak of, though death looks out from every corner of the room. Genuinely sweet moments are shared between a self-absorbed millennial and his grandmother, an old lefty at the tipping point of senility. But gentle isn’t the first word I’d choose to describe this subtle, one-act reminder that the reward of a long life is outliving everyone who might attend your funeral.

Did I mention that the show is also funny? It is. What it’s not is tightly plotted. Nor is it full of the archetypal characters that tend to populate the classic American family drama. To that end, 4000 Miles — a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist — is a chamber piece, more meditation than assault. But it’s an uneasy meditation, almost never serene.

The play opens with a scruffy, baggage-laden Leo waking Vera, his elderly grandmother in her Greenwich Village apartment at 3 a.m. The last thing she expected was an early-morning visit from her Left Coast grandson, and she doesn’t seem all that happy to see him. Leo has been cycling across the country with a friend, but when that friend died in a horrible accident on the road, he broke off communication with his family in Minneapolis and went off the grid.

Leo’s not intentionally malicious, but the young trustafarian is a natural manipulator: a wounded rugged outdoorsy-type quick to use his personal tragedy if it buys some sympathy or helps get the hot Chinese girl who looks like his adopted sister into bed. He takes up residence with his grandmother on a temporary basis, but makes her promise to not tell the family where he is.

Over the course of the play we watch Leo lose his girlfriend Bec, making one final douchey request to “remember how our bodies were together.” We also witness an attempted hook-up with a rich girl named Amanda who flips out when she discovers she’s in the huge, rent-controlled apartment of a card-carrying Communist. Amanda says she doesn’t think she can have sex in a Communist’s house, allowing that she’s usually kind of slutty. Her drunken anti-Communist rant is one of the show’s best set pieces. Replace the word Communist with any racial descriptor and the monologue would leave audiences slack-jawed. Then again, Amanda is Chinese, and there’s family history.

4000 Miles took its first Off-Broadway bows about three months before the Occupy Wall Street movement moved into Zuccotti Park. I mention that because somehow that real-world occurrence seems more like the ending of Herzog’s play than its actual ending. She uses the outdoorsy Leo and the urban Vera to look at how far the easily-identified tropes of the American left had evolved. Class-conscious collective action had become a lifestyle choice for people who can afford to protest GMOs and oil companies with their purchasing power. There is some suggestion that Leo is growing by the play’s end. It’s not hard to imagine him leaving for his new job out west only to get caught up in the massive street protest brewing in Manhattan. Nor is it hard to imagine him moving on following a fashionable arrest during some clash with the New York police.

Every character in 4000 Miles is a prisoner of perspective, Leo most of all. He’s loveably disheveled, despicably self-centered, and difficult to like. His grandmother, Vera, can be abrasive and muddled, but she clearly has the more sympathetic role, and Karen Mason Riss is spectacular in the part.

Christopher Joel Onken is completely believable as Leo, although his more cloying antics come across as being downright sinister. Carly Crawford is also effective, if a little stilted as Leo’s girlfriend Bec. Then again, if the show has a thankless part, that’s it.

Ron Gordon’s scenic design gives the impression that Vera’s not-so-Manhattan Manhattan residence is infinitely large on the inside. That’s a quibble, not a deal-breaker.