* Phase 2Source work

It has been a growing conviction for me that, as theatre artists, we cannot

understand or connect to what a play "means."We can however find a correlation

between why the playwright wrote the play, and why we are performing it. It seems

to me that this is the foundation on which a production must be constructed.

I wanted to create a process for ENDGAME that would allow us to stay in

touch with our reasons for presenting the piece, without imposing anything on the

play. I knew that this would be difficult. The play reaches so deeply into the darkest

murk of our lives, that to actually talk about what the play is dealing with is close to

impossible. I believed strongly that the essence of the play was unutterable.

Attempts to nail anything down could only limit our own vision of the play.

Jay, Rachel and I began meeting, somewhat regularly about a year before the

production would be mounted. We talked. Usually about what was going on in the

news: Mad Cow disease, various incidents of terrorism, air crashes etc. For the first

several months the play was rarely if ever mentioned, but there was no doubt that

we were indeed working on ENDGAME. There was no intention of bringing these

sorts of news events into the production. Rather by connecting the work on the

production to our view of the world, reading the newspaper became research.

Living became rehearsal on some level. Nothing in our lives and in the world we

saw would be irrelevant.

Because of ENDGAME's elusive nature, it was not prudent or possible to

focus on specific aspects of our lives or society in this source work. Whereas in

many productions a theme of some sort could be defined, there was a conscious

effort on our part to stay away from any definition of relevance. We had to keep it

completely open to preserve the essential elusive nature of the play.

This sort of oblique source work, which lasted up until the spring of 1996,