In the past few years Samuel Beckett has been rediscovered in Portland. Toward the end of last year Corrib Theatre produced Beckett’s most famous piece, Waiting for Godot (see ArtsWatch’s review here), and a year and a half ago, Northwest Classical showcased one of Portland’s finest, Diane Kondrat, in an acclaimed production of Happy Days.

Now, the brand new year commences with the equally exciting prospect of another of Portland’s most gifted thespians, Bruce Burkhartsmeier, performing Jan. 4-19 in one of the Irish playwright’s most acclaimed plays, Krapp’s Last Tape, at 21ten Theatre.   

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect marriage of artist and text. Burkhartsmeier has built his reputation over the years with riveting performances in numerous plays, including (but not limited to) A Skull of Connemara, The Price, and Killer Joe. Meanwhile, perhaps more than any other writer of the 20^th century, Beckett utilized a bottomless palette of mystery, poetry, regret, loss and unanswerable questions with breathtaking aplomb and precision. His most esteemed plays, Godot, Happy Days, and Endgame, share a quality of seeming to go on forever, to have endless layers of meaning, continuing to reverberate even after the curtain falls. 

Krapp’s Last Tape was first produced in 1958 and immediately took its place among Beckett’s other best work. In the words of critic Michael Billington, “Krapp’s Last Tape … appeals to our own sense of mortality, waste and failure while taking on the lineaments … of the actor who is lucky enough to play it.” 

Bruce Burkhartsmeier is that actor, but luck had nothing to do with it. 

Burkhartsmeier was born near Chicago but grew up primarily in Sacramento having moved there with his family when he was seven. He went to Chico State University as an English major, then fell in love with music, an affair that lasts to this day. Burkhartsmeier spent several years making his living as a DJ. “Back when we could play pretty much whatever we wanted to,” he says. “It was great fun. Best job I ever had. I didn’t get paid much, but it was a lot cheaper to live.”

(The actual physical tape that Burkhartsmeier uses in the show is tape that he used as a disc jockey back in those days.)

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Burkhartsmeier had an epiphany in the late 1970s when he saw the film The Deer Hunter. “I was so taken with Christopher Walken and DeNiro and John Savage and all those guys,” he says. “I thought that might be a fun career change. I looked them up and it said they were all trained in New York. So, I moved in 1979 to New York City ,and that’s where I got my acting training.”

But not just any acting training. Burkhartsmeier worked with teachers including William Hickey (Prizzi’s Honor), briefly with the brilliant Geraldine Page, Earl Hyman (The Cosby Show), and eventually and most significantly, with the great actor and acting teacher, Uta Hagen, whose book, Respect for Acting, was a seminal theater training text in the last quarter of the 20^th century. He studied under her for five years. “She was a great teacher,” says Burkhartsmeier. “I worked at her HB Studio (an acting school in New York, founded by Hagen’s husband, Herbert Berghof).”

And it shows. Burkhartsmeier’s work is characterized by the emotional availability, truthfulness and command of technique that Hagen espouses. 

But though he did some work with the Penguin Repertory Company in Upstate New York, Burkhartsmeier found himself frustrated by the lack of opportunity in New York, which led him to head back out west to work with Dennis Bigelow, of the new Oregon Shakespeare Festival Portland (now Portland Center Stage). “I got in that first season,” remembers Burkhartsmeier, “and worked under [Bigelow’s] tutelage and Pat Patton.” Since then, interspersed with forays to, for instance, Berkeley Rep, the Odyssey Theatre in L.A. and the Meadowbrook Theatre in Detroit, Burkhartsmeier has built a sterling career in Portland working with Third Rail, Portland Repertory and Artists Repertory Theatre, among others. 

In 1990, Burkhartsmeier met the love of his life, multifaceted theatre artist Sue Mach, in a production of Born Yesterday. Mach was a large reason why Burkhartsmeier chose to make his life in Portland. “When we took Sight Unseen down to Los Angeles to Odyssey Theatre Ensemble,” says Burkhartsmeier, “I had some agents come and one wanted to represent me. Los Angeles is very intimidating. It’s all show business all the time. It would’ve taken a lot of sacrifice, being away from somebody that I love for a period of time, at least before we relocated. And if we did relocate, did Sue want to go to Los Angeles? I didn’t think so. I just thought ‘I think I’d rather go back to Portland and be with Sue and have a life up there.’ That was a pivotal decision.”

Years later they had a daughter, Nora (who, as Nora Meier, now has a burgeoning musical career), and that was when Burkhartsmeier decided he needed more reliable income. He became an English teacher at Westview High School, which led, eventually, to a bit of a break from professional theater. “I was trying to balance being a teacher during the day and rehearse and do shows at night and it just got to be harder and harder to do, especially with the school situation, because it’s a pretty demanding job being a teacher. Then I retired [from teaching] four years ago just in time for COVID to hit,” he says, laughing.

Four years later, Burkhartsmeier is working himself back into the rhythm of an actor’s life. Last year he performed in Old Love New Love at Clackamas Rep, and did Two Pints at Third Rail with old friend and colleague Michael O’Connell and Third Rail founder Scott Yarbrough directing. 

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A friend of Burkhartsmeier and Mach is Portland theater luminary Victoria Parker-Pohl, a student of Beckett’s work who, years ago, had won a Leslie O. Fulton grant to research Beckett and other writers in Ireland. “My wife said, ‘You guys should do Krapp’s Last Tape‘,” Burhartsmeier recalls. 

Parker-Pohl, an award-winning artist herself, was the perfect partner for Burkhartsmeier. They already had a rapport both as friends and fellow Portland theater hotshots. They’re of a similar age, and were both determined to show that older people can still be vital makers in the scene. She had a ton of Beckett experience and knowledge; he had relatively little. They even came from the same acting tree. She had studied under another Portland theater giant, Jack Featheringill — who had studied with Uta Hagen. So the project was on.  

Burkhartsmeier asked for and got money from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and Portland theater angel Ronni LaCroute. A longtime union member, He had to work some mechanisms to be able to comfortably do the piece, and then there was the whole question of finding a space to rehearse and perform. Space, as any person working in the theater industry knows, is at a premium. They found one, but Parker-Pohl and Burkhartsmeier devised a creative process to minimize space rental time. “Victoria and I had been meeting intermittently, once a week or so, for a few months,” says Burkhartsmeier. “We thought because it’s expensive to rent a space to rehearse and to do performances, that we could do a lot of the legwork and the table work before we ever go into actual rehearsal.” 

Once they got into rehearsal, there was the behemoth of the work itself. Burkhartsmeier, no stranger to delving into dark places, found that working for three hours on a one-man show was its own brand of demanding. “When you’re doing a one-man show,” he says, “three hours is about all you can take.”

Then there were the themes the play is dealing with. “It’s a play about regret. It’s a play about someone who made a choice to let his career dictate his life and not relationships with other people. And so, he cuts himself off. He looks back on these old versions of himself and sees where those mistakes were made. It’s about mortality.”

The entirety of Krapp’s Last Tape is an old man, Krapp, listening to tapes that a younger version of himself made 30 and 40 years earlier, reflecting on his life at the time. “The real challenge of the play is about listening and reacting to the tape,” Burkhartsmeier says. “He made a tape when he was 39. He’s 69 in the play. He’s listening to a 30-year-old version of himself. I’ve never experienced anything like that. I’ve never done a one-man show before, so this is new to me; but to do it in this way, where your scene partner is a tape recorder is a unique thing.”

Finding that scene partner was a challenge in itself. “I think one of the reasons people don’t produce this play very much is, people can’t find the equipment,” says Burkhartsmeier. “I bought four that were vintage, 1960s Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorders, and none of them work. Even worse, there are no people to repair them. There are like two people in the country that even look at themI just bought one on Reverb. Some guy up in Vancouver, B.C., is going to send me one down and that’s going to be the tape recorder we use. I think it’s going to be ’70s vintage as opposed to ’60s, but at least it will work.”

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Krapp, in the play, has made hard choices in his life, choices that he now sees in a different light. He chose a path that has, perhaps, cost him everything. But who can know at the moment? Burkhartsmeier has affinity for Krapp, if only because he feels he could’ve followed a similar path, but chose not to: “I could’ve seen myself at one time doing this. ‘I don’t want to get bogged down. Don’t drag me down. I gotta be free, become a big film star and stuff like that.’ And you know, that would have been a mistake. Make your choices based on people and not about your career. The best thing about life is having a family, having those relationships with people.” 

Krapp’s Last Tape is a malleable, fluid play, taking the shape of the actor performing it. “Each individual actor,” says Burkhartsmeier, “when they bring their own life to it, their own sense of history, their own sense of the past, it comes out a little differently than everybody else’s.”

Portland is fortunate to have an actor of Burkhartsmeier’s prodigious ability bringing Krapp’s Last Tape to life. If you appreciate the art form, you should check it out.  

Krapp’s Last Tape

• Where: Deep End Theatre at 21ten Theatre, 2110 S.E. 10th Ave., Portland
• When: 10 performances Jan. 4-19
• Ticket and time information: Here