F. Murray Abraham in Krapp's Last Tape Photo by Carol Rosegg

It's unusual to enter Irish Rep and see absolutely nothing onstage. The utter blackness up there is a setup for the curtain raiser, the 1972 Not I. Beckett at his most obscure and verbally disjointed, it's a monologue rendered by Mouth (Sarah Street), a heavily lipsticked orifice lingering at the top of the stage and fiercely spotlit by lighting designer Michael Gottlieb. Sounding like an audiobook played at 2.0, Mouth natters breathlessly on what are, evidently, four separate life events; good luck distinguishing them. Something terrible happened to her–or was it her, as she keeps protesting, "Not I!"–but we don't know what; it may have been rape, though Beckett denied that. Her life was loveless and inconsequential, she's either near death or already there, and what she says presumably isn't meant entirely to make sense. Kudos to Street for sheer breath control and lung power (she's assisted by Ryan Rumery's sound design), not to mention her memorization skills. But to non-Beckett-philes it will sound like gibberish, and it's amusing to speculate on whether director Ciarán O'Reilly had any advice on how to interpret passages like "staring into space ... mouth half open as usual ... till it was back in her hand ... the bag back in her hand ... then pay and go ... not as much as goodbye ... how she survived!" How does anybody act that?

Street turns up again in Play, from 1963. There's a little more to look at: three disembodied heads spouting out of urns. At least Play has a throughline, of sorts: the recounting, and re-recounting, of an affair. Man (Roger Dominic Casey), in the middle, was married to Woman 1 (Kate Forbes), to his left, but dallied with Woman 2 (Street), to his right–past tense because, as in Not I, maybe these three are in hell, or purgatory. There are parallels to Beckett's intimacy with Barbara Bray, a BBC script editor, while married to, or about to marry, his longtime partner Suzanne Déchevaux Dumesnil, and Play may have been written as an act of contrition. There's also a fourth character: the spotlight, which travels from head to head as each one talks. Whoever's wielding it has amazing timing, for again, O'Reilly is directing for speed.

Each of the trio has a different accounting of the affair, and as the details pile up, we're left to ponder the subjectivity of reality and the messiness of relationships. All well and good, and the actors bring a lot of expressiveness to their prattle, with Casey in particular, who has a marvelous voice, presenting as sympathetic a portrait of a philanderer as possible. How we're supposed to feel about these three, though, is a mystery, and when great swatches of the text are repeated, it's to no purpose I can detect. Nor is the frequent overlapping dialogue, which is uniformly and probably intentionally impossible to understand. Another Beckett guessing game, then, and a prelude to ...

Krapp's Last Tape, the best-known of the Briefs, and featuring, at last, a real set, by Charlie Corcoran. A shabby office with sloppy files hanging off the shelves, and tapes spilling out of boxes on a desk, it's the stomping ground of Krapp (F. Murray Abraham), looking like hell and off in a world of his own. Krapp, who's 69 (and that's a lot older when Beckett wrote this in 1958 than it would be today), is listening to a tape of his 39-year-old self. It's "a late evening in the future," which might explain what Krapp was doing taping himself 30 and 40 years prior (there are also references to a Krapp tape from his late twenties, which we don't hear). He comments on the tape and eventually starts to record another, and that's the play. He's derisive of his former self, a more idealistic fellow than the Krapp he turned into.

The old tape is a medley of his mother's death, a dog with a ball, an assignation with a woman in a flat-bottomed boat, and resolutions to drink less–which apparently didn't happen, for the present-day Krapp frequently repairs to the offstage liquor cabinet. The new tape isn't about much: his contempt for his younger self, disappointment over the sales of his last book, a trip to the park, another to Vespers. Abraham's body language is eloquent, the stooped form shuffling into darkness, and his old tape really does sound like a much younger self. It's a master acting class, but about what? An unhappy old man, again with Beckettian autobiographical elements, mocking who he was and who he's become.

Sorry to heap scorn on a writer I've always found frustrating and puzzling, though Irish Rep is generous to program the evening in the order it does, incomprehensible to semi-comprehensible to F. Murray Abraham. Beckett does have his many admirers, and if you're a fan, by all means, you should trek to West 22nd Street.