‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ Preview: A One-Man Odyssey Through Memory and Regret

For college students, the question of how to live a good life feels like it hinges on the present moment — each decision about concentrations, careers, and romantic partners seems to determine the very course of one’s future. An upcoming student production, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” hopes to illuminate these anxieties from a retrospective point of view. Directed by Gunnar C. Sizemore ’27 and running at the Loeb Experimental Theater from Oct. 3 to Oct. 6, the play is a powerfully existential meditation on an unfulfilled life approaching its end.

“Krapp’s Last Tape” is a 1958 one-act, one-character play penned by celebrated Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who is known for his tragicomic and absurdist dramas. In it, the titular Krapp (Jack T. Flynn ’26) records a tape recounting life events each year on his birthday. On his 69th birthday, the embittered Krapp confronts his failure to secure lasting happiness as he listens to a tape made 30 years prior.

“It touched on what I think are very Irish themes,” Flynn said. “About death, and loneliness, and depression, and the self, and what to make of yourself — how to reconcile with what you’ve done and what you haven’t done and what you want to do.”

Though “Krapp’s Last Tape” is a fairly short show with little action and lots of soliloquizing, it shouldn’t be mistaken as monotonous — its rich visual storytelling promises to engage the imagination.

“Just watch and let yourself be taken into it,” stage manager Kyler C. Hoogendoorn-Ecker ’27 said.

Beckett’s Krapp is a complex character that keeps the creative team reinterpreting his motivations with every rehearsal. Described as “very near-sighted (but unspectacled)” by Beckett, Krapp’s willful blindness and darkly comic eccentricity pose a challenge for any college-age actor — not to mention the pressures of solo acting.

“The actor has to inhabit a character which is very foreign to most of us here, and yet also has affinities that we understand and things that we recognize in ourselves,” Hoogendoorn-Ecker said.

Sizemore, who first encountered the play during research for a playwriting project in high school, described Beckett’s prose as “covert Shakespeare”: Even without formal poetic structure, the script carries a sense of musicality.

“Beckett just packs so much into everything,” Flynn said. “There’s no word in that play that could have been taken out.”

As director, Sizemore’s philosophy is to cut through Beckett’s enigmatic writing to honor his intentions as closely as possible. With Sizemore planning to concentrate in Comparative Literature and Flynn studying English, the pair constantly take advantage of their literary experience to decipher and discuss the text.

“I almost feel that the easy way to approach the show is to put your own spin on it,” Sizemore said. “But trying to figure out exactly what Beckett is going for requires a lot of time, emotional vulnerability, [and] energy.”

Even as Sizemore and Flynn pore over literary allusions and scholarly rabbit holes, they don’t want their audience to have to do the same. The text’s difficulty should not confine it to the academic sphere. Instead, Sizemore believes in art as a medium for emotion and connection.

“There’s an essence of humanity that we’re trying to capture and communicate, even if you don’t understand any of the words or any of the happenings in the show,” Sizemore said.

As such, audiences heading to “Krapp’s Last Tape” shouldn’t view Beckett’s language as a barrier. A flexible mind and simple attention are all one needs. Through the unraveling of Krapp’s life, the production speaks to what feels like the immense consequentiality of our decision-making — and even in its portrait of isolation and regret, it hopes to bring solace.

“Krapp’s Last Tape” runs at the Loeb Experimental Theater from Oct. 3 to Oct. 6.

—Staff writer Isabelle A. Lu can be reached at isabelle.lu@thecrimson.com.