NEW YORK—Samuel Beckett takes the audience through a tour of the remnants of one man’s life in Embers. Originally performed in 1959 as a radio play, it recently was recently staged by Pan Pan Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its “Next Wave Festival.”
As night falls on a beach, Henry (Andrew Bennett), an aging and empty man, looks back on the wasteland his life has become. His marriage has long since lost its romance; he’s apparently estranged from his daughter; his career as a writer has gone nowhere; and basically he has never been able to finish anything he’s started.
He’s also never come to terms with how his own father died years earlier. His dad perished either by drowning or suicide. “They never found your body,” Henry notes at one point.
Henry has long wanted his life to change but lacks the drive it to make it happen. Even his half-hearted attempts to reach out to his wife, Ada (Áine Ní Mhuirí), are rebuffed. She tosses in her own thoughts and impressions during Henry’s continual musings.
Just about all Henry can do, it seems, is talk. His ramblings never rise to the level of insights, yet offer a convoluted but fascinating road for the audience to follow as they begin to know him and his situation.
What’s really interesting here are the depths of loss and emptiness Beckett conveys with his dialogue—words which also indicate the inexorable march of time. It’s an idea Beckett explored in many of his works, such as Krapp’s Last Tape. The protagonist is caught on a Mobius Strip of his own making while seemingly unable to alter whatever is still to come.
An integral part of the Pan Pan production was the show’s set. A gigantic three-dimensional skull, wonderfully designed by Andrew Clancy, was placed in the center of the stage. The actors’ faces are visible at times through the skull’s eye sockets.
