DC theater is having a Samuel Beckett Trifecta. Over at Washington Stage Guild, the half-buried Winnie chatters on merrily in Happy Days. Meanwhile, over at STC’s Klein, Bill Irwin clowns around eloquently in his solo roadshow, On Beckett. Now comes Scena Theatre with a Krapp’s Last Tape so steeped in Beckettian gravitas and affecting acting that it feels like the great Irish playwright has picked the District for an authorial afterlife visit.
In the dimly lit black box upstairs at the DC Arts Center, Scena founder and artistic director Robert McNamara holds forth as the reclusive 69-year-old Krapp, replaying, and replying to, the voice of his 39-year-old self on an old-school spool-to-spool tape recorder. “Holds forth” is not exactly right, for McNamara appears to have entered so personally into the memory of this fictional man that when his trembling eyes stare into ours, it’s like peering into a sorrow that seems soul-deep.
Beckett was close to 52 in 1958 when he wrote the one-man Krapp’s Last Tape, so the playwright was imagining a character 17 years older who is remembering a character 13 years younger. For 45-odd minutes, the voice of the young Krapp (McNamara’s, prerecorded) is interspersed with the older Krapp’s mutterings and bitter outbursts in the present.
The grizzled Krapp shuffles and dodders about, solipsistically enacting Beckett’s famously exacting stage directions, peeling and eating a banana, and tottering off stage to get props and pop a cork for a drink. As he listens to the recording, stopping and restarting it, his mouth twists, he lets out loud laughs, and his facial and vocal reactions form a nuanced narrative of their own.
The passage of time is much on Krapp’s mind, and how he looks back on it becomes the throughline of the story: “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness,” he says, “But I wouldn’t want them back.”
So also does Krapp reminisce about specific women in his life. One in particular he recalls with relish, a young woman he attempted intimacy with in a drifting boat (“My face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side”). Alas, it was a passion he let pass. There are random references to other women as well, one he lived with briefly at 29 but dismissed from his life, and another he recalls seeing fleetingly in a railway station, like an eroticized image retrieved with no connection. He seems to have chosen to live without love. The only woman in his life at present he describes as a “bony old ghost of a whore,” and their interactions he calls “grotesque.” So not quite an incel but close.
The show’s spare set, credited to Michael Stepowany, is but an old-style desk with drawers, lit simply in Carl Gudenius’ design. Krapp’s rumpled costume, designed by Alisa Mandel, accentuates his social withdrawal. And sound designer Laura Schlachtmeyer deftly handles the audio playback.
But back to the unmissable resonance of McNamara’s phenomenal performance. Credited with the production’s direction is Gabriele Jakobi, the internationally acclaimed theater director who was also McNamara’s wife. She died in 2023 following a stroke in 2015, and one cannot but sense in McNamara’s indelible performance an adoring tribute to her.
McNamara stays in character for the curtain call. It’s as if he has gone to a personal place that both he and we want to keep present.
Running Time: 45 minutes, no intermission.
Krapp’s Last Tape plays through March 1, 2026, presented by Scena Theatre at the DC Arts Center in Adams Morgan, 2438 18th St NW, Washington, DC. Performances are 7:30 PM on Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 PM on Sundays. Tickets ($33.85, including fee) are available on Eventbrite here.
Krapp’s Last Tape
By Samuel Beckett
Starring Robert McNamara
Directed by Gabriele Jakobi
Assistant Director: Anne Nottage
Stage Manager: Kelsey Jenkins
Set Design: Michael Stepowany
Lighting Design: Carl Gudenius
Costume Design: Alisa Mandel
Sound Design: Laura Schlachtmeyer
Dramaturg: Christopher Griffin
Production Associate: Christopher Henley
