Samuel Beckett’s characters are always alone. Even when two or three are on stage they are alone together. Time ticks along year after year and the first thing to go is the mind and the memory.
Cutting Ball’s Krapp’s Last Tape portrays a tragic man at the end of his rope. He has nothing to do and nothing whatsoever on his mind. He has achieved the Zen state of mental emptiness but without the exciting flash of enlightenment.
Krapp does keep a journal, a sort of crude approximation of a memory, and every ten years he makes a tape of whatever is on his mind at that time. The tape and the journal are his only spiritual nourishment as he nears the end of his life. He turns to the tape in a last effort to recall his youth, to remember.
For an actor, Krapp is a difficult role to play because it is mostly silence and listening. His conversation with the tape player is typically becketian. One character can only listen and the other can only talk. There can be no meeting of the minds.
Paul Gerrior plays Krapp with strength and dignity, comedy and depression, anger, peevishness, admiration, disgust, regret, puzzlement, forgetfulness, intelligence, indolence and above all an unabated and irredeemable loneliness. There is no salvation but only the brief moment of existence, a mind strapped to the back of a dying animal, the inglorious reaching futilely for glory, the starving artist playing for pennies, and the jaded audience, insatiable, expectant and permitted at last to laugh.
Krapp can put in a blank tape and attempt to communicate with his future self but he has even less to say and no expectation 
that he will be around in ten years to hear it. The clock is running down. He will never finish his song of woe. Past, present and future selves represent the ultimate fragmentation of the individual, the disintegrating being, the dividual. Not only does the tape fail to connect Krapp with reality, it is one more thing in between the man and his world.
As the taped voice of the youthful Krapp, David Sinaiko reads his part with an uplifting, almost poetic voice with complete sentences and paragraphs in sharp contrast to the elder Krapp’s thrashing and fragmented speech.
The ambitious and talented Rob Melrose directed. The lighting was elegantly simple.
I thank Cutting Ball for the opportunity to see Beckett played with such brilliant sensitivity coupled with humor and pathos.
Keep your eye on Cutting Ball’s 2009-2010 season. They are company-in-residence at the Exit on Taylor in San Francisco.
Krapp’s Last Tape plays at the Exit on Taylor until June 21st.
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