2008 Stratford Shakespeare Festival Studio Shows
Brian Dennehy explores plays of Eugene O'Neill and Samuel Beckett
Aug 4, 2008
Hughie and Krapp's Last Tape at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival offer a rare chance to enjoy and experience one of the finest actors of this generation in an intimate space, as stage and screen veteran Brian Dennehy mesmerizes the audience.
Creating his own Olympics, Dennehy plays two extremely demanding and different roles admitting this two one act bill is - “a real workout.”
As 1940s big-talking gambling man Erie Smith in Eugene’s O’Neill’s Hughie, Dennehy is larger than life boasting of blonde dames and Big Dice. In the monodrama, Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, Dennehy is transformed to a caustic curmudgeon, grappling with the reel to reel reality of one fleeting romantic moment 30 years ago.
Hughie by Eugene O’Neill at The Studio Theatre to Aug 31
In 1999, Brian Dennehy won Best Actor Tony for the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. As he shuffles up the Studio Theatre’s vomitorium, clad in a well-worn, creased cream suit and scuffed white loafers, one gets a sense of what Dennehy might have been like as Willy Loman. In Hughie, Erie Smith, is another man with big dreams and broad New York demeanour similiar to Loman, but a "born lucky" gambler who lives in a seedy hotel - "cell 492."
For 23 years, Erie's been regaling night clerk Hughie with colourful yarns about dice and dolls and his glory gambling days, which is are coming back any day now because Erie figures Hughie is his good luck charm. When Hughie suddenly dies, Erie is convinced he’s “jinxed”, because “Hughie’s checking out is a real KO.” What will he do now without “his only friend?”
As the play progresses, it's easy to see that Erie is washed up, and in serious debt admitting that “gambling is like dope”. The new night clerk Charlie Hughes, whose been a professional night clerk all his life, mulling about in his own depressive fog, tunes in and out to the exaggerated ramblings of Erie Smith. That fog immediately lifts, when Erie mentions his “friend” Big Bankroll gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein. Charlie suddenly envisions a vicarious connection to the rich and famous while Erie sees another mirror to once again make himself feel good about “the racket of life.”
Brian Dennehy's shallow braggart Erie contrasted with marvellous Broadway vet Joe Grifasi as reluctant sounding board Charlie deliver performances like buttah, directed by Dennehy's long time collaborator Robert Falls, (Broadway’s Death of a Salesman, Long Day’s Journey into Night).
This engaging duo illustrate the silent story between O’Neill’s masterful lines, the audience members questioning their own friendships, illusions and dependencies along the way.
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