Photo Flash: First Look At KRAPP'S LAST TAPE From The Wilbury Group

The Wilbury Theatre Group offers a first look at their limited run of Krapp's Last Tape - Samuel Beckett's lauded one-act play about the effects of time and loneliness, and the longing for past glories. Performances are being presented for limited audiences of 25 people in the 15,000 sq. ft. Main Hall at the WaterFire Arts Center April 9-25, 2021.

Directed by Wilbury Group Artistic Director Josh Short and featuring Tom Roberts in the titular role, Krapp's Last Tape has long been considered the most affectionate portrait of a character that Beckett has ever done: an aging man who lives a lonely and shabby existence in a darkened room. At year's end, on the dawn of his 69th birthday, he takes out a bottle of wine, a banana and his tape recorder, and he listens as his own voice from the past recounts the glories and hopes of his youth.

"Beckett's brilliant, funny, and moving meditation on grief and loneliness resonates today more powerfully than ever before" says director, Josh Short. "To be able to work with Tom and this creative team is an absolute joy, and I know I speak for all of us when I say that we are incredibly grateful for this opportunity to stage it safely for audiences in the the beautiful, and enormous, main hall at the WaterFire Arts Center. I hope that this experience, while socially distanced, provides some much-needed opportunities for connection and empathy that so many of us desperately need right now."

Krapp's Last Tape was written by Samuel Beckett in 1958 for Irish actor Patrick Magee as the monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday. Since then, the play has been lauded as one of Beckett's most moving and darkly humorous works.

About Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett:

A tragedy in one act for a lone actor, a tape recorder, and many, many bananas, Krapp's Last Tape is one of Samuel Beckett's most personal works for the stage-a feat of great precision and tense economy. Featuring discreet details from the writer's own life, this dramatization of the messy truths of memory and time illuminates the predicament we face when we become strangers to our former selves.

In the Wilbury Group production, Tom Roberts plays the titular Krapp, an embittered and dyspeptic man who marks the occasion of his 69th birthday by revisiting his 39-year-old self. Veering from outrage to contemplation, Krapp exhibits the ticks and tocks of a beaten man whose spirit unravels as the tapes unspool in "all that old misery" of lost time.

For tickets or more information, visit thewilburygroup.org/krapps-last-tape.

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