Image from Andrei Belgrader’s 2008 Brooklyn production of Endgame.
Stanley Cavell writes:
Who are these people? Where are they, and how did they get there? What can illuminate their mood of bewilderment as well as their mood of appalling comprehension? What is the source of their ugly power over one another, and of their impotence? What gives their conversation its sound, at once of madness and of plainness?
…the ground of the play’s quality is the ordinariness of its events. It is true that what we are given to see are two old people sticking half up out of trash cans, and an extraordinarily garbed blind paraplegic who imposes bizarre demands on the only person who can carry them out, the only inhabitant of that world who has remaining to him the power of motion. But take a step back from the bizarrerie and they are simply a family. Not just any family perhaps, but then every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — gets into its own way in its own way.
