The lights go up, and an old balding man so close to the audience that you can almost reach out and touch him is hunched over a wooden desk, a large antique reel-to-reel tape recorder sitting on the desktop in a wooden box. For several minutes we hear no words from this shambling old man; only a series of grunts and groans and wheezes, a perpetual clearing of the throat. As if he were unaccustomed to speaking to anyone other than, on occasion, himself. As if language were some quaint vestige of a time best forgotten.

Except that he hasn’t forgotten, of course. The man, known as Krapp, both despises the younger man he used to be and the life he used to live, and is trapped inside a desire to examine them over and over — perhaps to feel them again, if only to mock them, and thus himself, for a life he believes he has frittered away.

Krapp stands up in this intimate space, bent and worn, and shuffles roughly through the desk’s drawers, looking for … what? He finds a banana, smiles, peels it, fondles it, sticks it in his mouth and strokes it suggestively, then turns it sideways and begins to nibble on it, side to side and back again, as if it were corn on the cob. In Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Krapp’s Last Tape, the enjoyment of the banana (and, a little later, another one) is one of the few moments in which Krapp reveals a satisfaction-verging-on-pleasure in the entire not-quite-hourlong adventure.

And yet pleasure, in both Beckett’s sour mash of a play and in Bruce Burkhartsmeier’s solo performance for Deep End Theatre at Southeast Portland’s 40-odd-seat 21ten Theatre, is what the audience can’t help but feel. Curdled and dystopian it may be, but in both the spare number of words and the broken-down physicality of Burkhartsmeier’s movement through cloistered time and space the realization never disappears that this is a remarkable piece of theater, a nightmare of failure and loss enlivened by carefully controlled wit. Burkhartsmeier, directed by Victoria Parker-Pohl with intense precision and an acute sense for the almost-dance of Krapp’s journey through the shards of his life, always commands our attention, in a good and ghastly way.

Eventually a rattle of worn boxes finds its way to the desktop, each holding marked tapes from a life of self-recording, if perhaps not self-reflection. Krapp rifles through them in thrall to the pleasure-pain principle, looking for a specific tape from 30 years ago, when he was 39: Ah, here it is: Box Three, Tape Five.

From this point on Burhartsmeier shuffles back and forth between his current self and his former self, listening to and commenting mostly caustically on this stranger who is himself 30 and roughly 40 years ago. The tape recorder whirs and screeches as it moves backward and forward and back again, homing in on vivid moments that can only be revisited in retrospect. Burkhartsmeier is the show’s solo performer, and yet in an intriguing way he is one of a cast of three, responding to the shadows of his earlier existence. On tape his voice is livelier, more youthful, free of the grunts and groans, more embracing of the world it finds itself immersed in, if also hinting at the near-recluse he was destined to become.

What do these meticulously recorded and filed tapes reveal? Moments stand out, sometimes revelatory, often painfully: his father’s sliding away into the void; young Krapp tossing a rubber ball to a dog (a suggestion of a hidden playfulness at one point in his life); memories of a choir singing (did he ever sing himself? he wonders, and concludes, no); love attempted and existing fleetingly and somehow lost; the ins and outs and wonders of long-ago sex. The elusiveness of companionship; the deceptive wholeness and mostly emptiness of being simply one’s self.

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Beckett wrote Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958, when he was 52 years old, a few years after his great success with Waiting for Godot: He was old enough to look back on his younger years as somehow alien and his future as something likely to be lonely and decrepit. Sixty-nine, the age he chose for Krapp, seems too young to be this bitter and broken-down, although sometimes life turns out that way.

“Perhaps my best years are gone,” Krapp finally says. “… But I wouldn’t want them back. No. I wouldn’t want them back.” In Krapp’s tone is both a finality and a question, and a suspicion that perhaps he’s still wavering, still unsure. Is this, then, truly the end? The existential question hangs, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable.

Krapp’s Last Tape

• Where: 21ten Theatre, 2110 S.E. 10th Ave., Portland
• When: Opened Jan. 4; remaining performances 7:30 pm. Jan. 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, and 2 p.m. Jan. 12 and 19
• Ticket information: Here

Also see

• Bobby Bermea: Bruce meets Beckett, ArtsWatch columnist Bermea’s interview with Bruce Burkhartsmeier about how he approached performing Krapp’s Last Tape.
• The long stretch of comedy, from “Litttle Shop of Horrors” to “Waiting for Godot.” Bob Hicks’s December 2024 review of Corrib Theatre’s production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, along with Triangle Productions!’ musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors.