“Beckett Briefs” at Irish Rep (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Samuel Beckett was fascinated by the efforts of people—however futile—to establish their humanity and place in a baffling modern world. His work, in the style that Martin Esslin would eventually dub “theatre of the absurd”, refused to take anything that we think we know about this world as a given. Instead, he left his characters to make sense of themselves and their existences in unfamiliar and unstable environments. If Beckett has one master theme, it is the tension of people trying to find footing in a world that refuses to offer them solid ground.

Theaters that take up the challenge of producing Beckett often do so by sticking to the big names of Waiting for Godot or Endgame, but Irish Repertory Theatre, in a production it calls Beckett Briefs, offers the rare opportunity to see three of Beckett’s shortest, most peculiar plays: Not I, Play, and Krapp’s Last Tape, with the last featuring F. Murray Abraham as Krapp.

Not I features only a single mouth (Sarah Street), elevated high above the stage and segregated by curtain and shadow from the rest of its body. Play is three heads (Roger Dominic Casey, Kate Forbes, and Street again) monologuing about a fraught love triangle from three funeral urns, somewhere in some purgatorial state. Krapp’s Last Tape shows us one tired and aging man (Abraham) looking back on a life that had moments of high romance and poetry but has resolved to very, very little.

In the triptych that Irish Rep has crafted, the theater asks audiences to wrestle with and perhaps find their place in Beckett’s uncertain world. The show is subtitled “From the Cradle to the Grave,” evoking a challenging life’s journey through unwieldy terrain. In their union, these plays destabilize life’s typical journey as they destabilize theater’s typical form. They challenge audiences to rethink their relationship to and expectations for an evolving modern world.

Ciarán O’Reilly directs all three plays with confidence. These worlds seem peculiar to us, but O’Reilly and his three casts seem perfectly at home in these spaces. Street is a particular standout doing double duty as the solo performer in Not I and one third of the cast in Play. In both plays, she embraces with enthusiasm Beckett’s playfulness with words and language, and she delivers a torrent of lines across both plays, finding just the right moments to accentuate a word or phrase to capture the line’s full power.

The big draw here is, of course, Abraham in Krapp’s Last Tape.  It should be no surprise to see an institution like Abraham play Krapp: this little but powerful role has attracted giants of stage and screen like Brian Dennehy, Gary Oldman, and even Harold Pinter. Krapp is Beckett’s King Lear, and older actors often jump at the opportunity to perform him. Abraham’s Krapp is wonderful and witheringly heartbreaking. His fleeting moments of delight in a snack or the fun of sounding out a word evoke childlike clowning, while his most wrenching moments of existential dread are visceral and engrossing. Especially in the small space of Irish Rep, this is a Krapp’s Last Tape that successfully evokes the play’s compassion for its protagonist.

In Beckett Briefs, O’Reilly and team do excellent work to offer an inviting production of challenging work that celebrates many of Beckett’s most central and lasting themes.