USED: Krapp's Last Tape

By Samuel Beckett

Published by Grove Press, 1960

140 pages, paperback

"This collection brings together five of Samuel Beckett's dramatic pieces written since Waiting For Godot. It includes one short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. Krapp's Last Tape, the only stage play included here, became the sensation of the off-Broadway season when it was produced early in 1960. It evolves shattering drama out of the monologue of a man who, after 30 years, plays back the autobiographical tape he had recorded on his 39th birthday. Jerry Tallmer calls it "almost certainly the most amazing piece of 'incidental' writing of the decade. In one and the same pungent breath it is a comment on time past, passing, and to come; on the tinny mechanization of the age and the yet unquenchable wellsprings of the heart; on the anal desiccation and sterilization of all feelings or response in modern man, and his nevertheless immutable thrust toward love."