Awaiting Death at the Theatre

For those of you who may have lingering questions about life or death, New York City was the place to be this December. Two plays, one about Freud and one about Samuel Beckett, were running off Broadway to sold-out houses. They function as sister pieces grappling with the same theme. Both brought a younger man at the beginning of his career face to face with an older man at the end of his career to discuss how best to find joy in life.

Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

Starring John Hurt at the BAM Harvey Theater, Krapp’s Last Tape centers on a man’s 70th birthday. His annual birthday ritual is to be alone, listen to tapes he previously made, and then add to them his angry comments. Krapp seeks one tape in particular to listen to on this day: Box 5, Spool 3. This tape contains his description of a beautiful summer day on a lake with his girlfriend at the time. He listens intently as he hears himself, at age 39, describing her beauty, looking into her eyes and gazing at her breasts in awe. The play juxtaposes this bliss of young love with the man’s current tragedy of aging. Here, Beckett is grappling with the tragedy that is life and presenting himself and the audience with some compensation. This play was written about nine years after Waiting for Godot, and one can see that Beckett has now given up waiting in hope and faces the more troubling question of death itself.

Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain

Freud’s Last Session, starring Martin Raynor as Freud, premiered at the New Life Stages in New York City. This play also takes place in a single room, Freud’s study in London, which was meticulously duplicated for the stage based upon photos. Here we see Freud at age 83, dying of mouth cancer and living in constant pain. As he awaits the arrival of his physician, he is visited by a

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young Irish literature professor, C.S. Lewis (played by Mark Dold). The young Lewis is all hope and enthusiasm, as he is at the beginning of his career. His optimism starkly contrasts Freud, who suffers silently in pain. Their conversation focuses on the meaning or purpose of a God and is set in the historical context of Hitler’s conquests in Europe. The playwright and the author, Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, is struggling with the very issue that Beckett tries to face in Krapp’s Last Tape: how does one find comfort and solace in a world that will inevitably bring tragedy, pain and death?

Conclusions on the Questions of Sex and God

Both plays suggest that man’s joy lies in his sexuality. Beckett has his sexual memories while Freud finds solace in sexual sublimations such as tea and cigars. Further, the fact that it was the cigar that kills him shows just how important man’s sublimated pleasures are.

St. Germain and Nicholi suggest that God is a good enough belief system that can provide people with comfort. In the play, however, Freud will have none of it. Instead, he suggests that in youth, we all have our sexual conquests to keep us warm, and in later life, we are all forced into sublimations (that might include cigars and some classical music) to keep sexuality alive. Those who have seen Beckett’s Waiting for Godot understand that for Beckett, waiting for God is a long and futile affair, as the title suggests. Whether in the lives of Samuel Beckett, C.S. Lewis, or Sigmund Freud, there is plenty of loss and suffering, and it is therefore a worthwhile quest to find compensations all along the way. Both plays depict great luminaries of mankind, Freud and Beckett, in order to reflect on how to find hope in the face of despair. They both conclude that life is tolerable if one has love’s embrace to keep warm and safe, and neither of these two thinkers include God in their formula.

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