Last weekend, Saint Louis Community College’s Meramec campus performed Samuel Beckett’s 1957 tragicomic play “Endgame.” The play itself relies heavily on vague storytelling and absurdist humor, offering a challenging production for actors. With a cast of four people and a one-room set, this play may be simple to produce, but with its often repetitive humor and cryptic dialogue, it’s hard to keep interesting or easy to follow.

For its surreal script, featuring half-alive characters in a bleak post-apocalypse, the team at STLCC managed to infuse the play with life and frivolity—as well as the inescapable dread of the end times.

The action of the play is comedic, though its themes and outcomes are undeniably tragic. At times, the acting didn’t reflect both simultaneously and could be confusing. The play’s runtime at Meramec could have also been shortened, as many gags are drawn out. 

The crux of the play’s comedy rests in its absurdity, and it’s a hard balance to get right. The Meramec theatre took a charming approach, personifying the characters as childish and cartoon-like despite their age ranges from adult to geriatric.

This went a long way to make this production of the play memorable. The characters portrayed by the Meramec students were reminiscent of Muppets in a daytime television show, which accentuated the dry comedy of the play and served well to give the production an atemporal and dream-like quality. At times, though, this portrayal of the characters made some of the more nuanced themes of the script harder to pick up on.

The set, with Lafayette alumna Kaden Grey as its lead painter, was well designed and set a good tone for the play, conveying the grunge and despair of the end times with a dream-like quality.

Hamm, one of two main characters, is a threatening lead. Brandon Ortiz-Avila’s portrayal of the character is to be applauded. Though he was chair-ridden for the duration of the play, he maintained a terrifying presence complete with a consistently tremoring hand. With a booming, tremulous voice and a cruel demeanor, Ortiz-Avila’s powerful portrayal of Hamm reflects the character perfectly.

Clov, played by TJ Shay, is the other lead. Shay maintained a boyish yet mature demeanor, reflecting Clov’s defiance of Hamm. Shay’s movements were very well done and were especially fun to watch. His walk with stiff kneecaps made the idea that Clov “can’t sit down” in the play believable. 

A lot of Clov’s antics and movements throughout the play were very drawn out at times, and definitely could have been cut down on, though Shay’s acting is consistent and entertaining.

Admittedly, Nagg and Nell were the most forgettable part of the production. Brendan Bute and Carrington Davis maintain whimsical personas throughout the show, though the characters are hard to follow without context. The stage makeup STLCC put on made it difficult to tell that the two were intended to be geriatric until later in the play when it was explained. The interplay between these two and Hamm was especially fun to watch, though the play keeps these moments sparse.

The trash cans Nagg and Nell usually live in for Endgame productions were strangely absent for Meramec’s, replaced instead by metal tanks. This hindered the play, as it sacrificed a great element of absurdity which helps the play come alive. With the Muppets-like characters STLCC crafted, two grouchy old people in trash cans would have been very fitting and fun to see.

By and large, Meramec’s production of Endgame was well done and enjoyable, if drawn out and hard to follow at times.

Rebecka Jackson, the director, cites racial and sociopolitical issues as reasons for the choice to put on this production.

“For millions of enslaved people, apocalypse was not an event but a condition, repeated generation after generation,” Jackson wrote in the show’s program. “The world of Endgame is constructed entirely through the banter of unreliable, ostensibly agoraphobic narrators… We are living through an era of radical isolation and the collapse of a shared reality.”

The showings over the weekend were free for the public, per the theatre’s goals of creating enriching experiences.

“The primary function of the Meramec Theatre is education,” writes the show’s program. “The entire process of production is viewed as a unique, valuable, and relevant classroom that serves to increase theatrical knowledge, skills and appreciation in the practitioners as well as our audiences.”

In a similar vein to Endgame, Meramec Theatre plans to put on Nelson Bond’s play “Animal Farm,” adapted from the George Orwell classic of the same name, in April.

Endgame is a nuanced and esoteric play. Though it is simple, it is a very different type of production that requires very purposeful acting and attention to detail. For what it’s worth, Meramec Theatre was able to bring this classic to audiences in a faithful and enthusiastic manner while maintaining most of the original’s layered themes.