Krapp 39 really should be unbearable. Who's up for an 80 minute solo show about some frustrated actor dude's pre-midlife crisis, written and performed by that very same soi-disant artiste? But Michael Laurence's play, which won the award for Outstanding Solo Show at the 2008 Fringe Festival, is a work of brave and vulnerable beauty that succeeds despite its seemingly off-putting subject matter. That Laurence somehow coaxes the audience to care about and even identify with a floundering New York theater actor speaks volumes about his warmth and charm—which is doubly impressive considering he usually gets cast as the homeless drifter.
The one-act takes its title and inspiration from Beckett's solo play Krapp's Last Tape, which concerns a man, alone on his 69th birthday, listening to an audiotape he recorded when he was 39. The themes are isolation, squalor, bitterness, lust, to which Laurence adds insecurity, anxiety, and, refreshingly, flashes of hope. Alone on stage in front of a desk cluttered with personal artifacts from his life, Laurence's objective is to create a time capsule for some thirty years in the future, when he imagines himself as either a triumphant star appearing at London's Royal Court, or washed up in a shabby Florida hotel while performing King Lear for retirees.
Maybe that sounds bleak, but it's not; the well-paced production at Soho Playhouse is speckled with self-deprecating humor and thoughtful considerations on time and aging. Laurence has a distinctly off-kilter presence—Crispin Glover by way of Charlie Kaufman—and his manic reminiscences of his dissolute experiences in the Giuliani-era downtown theater scene are surprisingly transporting. Using simulcast video, raw journal entries, old letters, cringe-worthy confessions, and recorded phone conversations, he assembles a delicate collage of hyper-aware frustration that's very personal, yet somehow, almost miraculously, not annoying.
