Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Dixie Sheridan ©2025  

The self-reflexive, looking-back-at-one’s-experiences show is dangerously close to being played out as a meta-genre in the modern theater. From [title of show] to ReWrite to various one-person opuses we’ve seen in the past few years, it seems everyone has a story to tell about their process. So it’s with great surprise that Michael Laurence’s soaring solo effort Krapp, 39, turns out to be so fresh and innovative. An award-winner and much buzzed about entry at the New York International Fringe Festival this past summer, here’s a terrific example of a show that, happily, does not live up to its title.

 Laurence, a journeyman type who has been seen recently in projects like the revival of Lee Blessing’s hostage drama Two Rooms and the 2007 Broadway mounting of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio (he played Stu, the laconic producer), first appears to us like some kind of mad scientist, bespectacled with fright-wig hair nursing a banana he eventually places in his jacket pocket. Using Samuel Beckett’s contemplative one-act Krapp’s Last Tape as a sort of last-ditch effort to make sense of his life on the eve of his 39th birthday (which he intends to also perform thirty years into the future, a la Beckett’s creation), Laurence fashions a multimedia presentation that mirrors the events of the Beckett play and, journal style, weaves and overlaps crucial points in his life to better understand his past, present and future. The play uses a strategically employed camera and tripod system (with a TV screen pointing toward the audience to clue us in to the many artifacts of his life that illustrate points mentioned in his monologues and taped phone calls), and the effect enhances the proceedings rather than muddies them, creating the feeling that life is never as private as one might like.

Dixie Sheridan ©2025  

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn of Laurence’s close bond with his mother (whom he recently lost), his personal struggles as a hard-to-pin-down actor, his childhood as an impressionable choir boy, his attempts to learn an Irish brogue (in prep for an audition of Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore) and most amusingly, his relation to his headstrong wife who has a penchant for non-subtle hints about bettering oneself. And then there’s the pesky matter of getting the Beckett estate to allow uses of Krapp’s Last Tape in the show we’re watching. Also, with the aid of Sonia Baidya’s superb lighting design, objects from Laurence’s life (photos, books, knick-knacks, an oddly apparent bottle of Valtrex) are captured via camera to illustrate each successive story.

What could have been another whiny mid-life crisis play becomes something much more bracing, simply because Laurence and his astute director, George Demas, aren’t afraid to mine the material for its bittersweet truth-telling. Though the stories are often funny, they are laced with sadness and regret, much like a Spalding Gray monologue, and Laurence more often that not captures the late performer’s delicate balance of the sublime and the ridiculous, a truly high compliment in every regard.