The Earth is Extinguished (Bunbury Theatre)

Endgame

By Samuel Beckett

Directed by Steve Woodring

Review by Kate Barry

Entire contents are copyright © 2026 Kate Barry. All rights reserved.

Times are hard. Watch the news or look at your phone and it’s hard to look away from the wide array of injustices, disaster and unrest. So why would you want to see a play about suffering and death? Furthermore, why write or direct such a play? Bunbury Theatre takes a stab at Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a dire play with themes of grief and suffering. But, with the emotional girth that comes from the Modernist master, this production does have its fair share of darkly comedic moments as well.

It is very clear what kind of production you are stepping into as soon as you enter the Henry Clay theatre. Seating is only available in the middle section of the audience; lighting is dim as a cello drones in the background. Dark and claustrophobic, Set Designer Tom Tutino’s infrastructure of a bomb shelter consumes the stage with bolts, cement blocks and metallic beams. Tarps hang high and heavy on the sides of the stage, smattered with dull paint. Tiny windows hang high on the set, providing a feeling of imprisonment for the spacious enclosure.

For the sake of transparency, I am not going to write a review under the assumption I knew what was happening during the entire show. Samuel Beckett does not spoon feed plot to his audience. He wrote the play in post-World War two Europe after serving in the French resistance against Hitler and Mussolini. You can make your own conclusions but the play is very bleak. A lesser cast would struggle with handling the dense dialogue, natural silences built into the script and meandering monologues. Luckily, the four person cast provides fully formed performances that allow the audience to grasp onto Beckett’s work and even enjoy it.

If you had to read this play at any point during your time in school, this is the one where the blind guy keeps his dying parents in trash cans. And that’s a very liberal summary at best. J Barrett Cooper brings wit and smug charm to Hamm, a blind man bound to a chair with wheels. His Hamm delivers the repetitive dialogue and Beckett’s signature relentless speeches with inspiring confidence. He elevates the darker undertones in his “One Day” speech. Waiting on Hamm with a twinge of codependency is the relentlessly loyal Clov, played by John Richeson. Dragging step stools around, a consistent limp and pretty impressive prop comedy, Richeson brings a physically comedic performance as well.

As Nagg and Nell, Robert McFarland and Rena Chery Brown present a deep humanity to the rotting corpses. McFarland’s Nagg strives to hold on to his humanness as he chews on a biscuit and requests head scratches. Brown’s Nell taps into a deeper emotional performance as she speaks of longing and lost.

One could look at Endgame and think of it is as a cautionary tale. Survivors bound together, waiting for death as the world outside continues to dissolve. The play does not owe us any type of distraction from what we experience every day in our news feeds. Rather, we come face to face with the aftermath of tragic events, perhaps with a slight chuckle to ourselves.  

Endgame

Bunbury Theatre

January 30-February 15 2026

Henry Clay Theatre

604 S 3rd St, Louisville, KY 40202 https://www.bunburytheatre.org/