The End (Beckett)
In Samuel Beckett’s The End, an old man is evicted from the institution which has been providing him shelter. He is handed a coat, a pair of boots, a little pocket change, and tossed out alone into the world. Room by room, kindness by kindness, the world slowly takes it all back. Filthy, verminous, and terminally adrift, he is a man most of us would cross the street to avoid.
CHICAGO DRAMATISTS
(798 N Aberdeen Ave.)
The End (Beckett)
I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part... —Samuel Beckett
In Samuel Beckett’s The End, an old man is evicted from the institution which has been providing him shelter. He is handed a coat, a pair of boots, a little pocket change, and tossed out alone into the world. Room by room, kindness by kindness, the world slowly takes it all back. Filthy, verminous, and terminally adrift, he is a man most of us would cross the street to avoid.
As he stumbles down his road to nowhere, we are taken into the imaginative mind of this outsider, and are exposed to his grim but hilarious universe of bodily decay and dysfunction. But, in the end, out of a life stripped to nothing, what emerges is a transcendent voice of startling clarity and grace.
This rare staging of Nobel-prize-winning author Beckett's post-war novella, written just two years before Waiting for Godot, is performed by Charles Pike, directed by Julio Maria Martino, and produced by David Hauptschein.
Charles Pike, a New Mexico-based actor/writer with a career of over 40 years in theater and film, is a true veteran of the Rhinoceros Festival, as he performed the very first year of its existence. In recent years, Pike soloed three of David Hauptschein's pieces from The Frank Monologues at Rhino Fest (Welts, The Swim Club, and The Bunkhouse). For Rhino Fest, he also performed in Hauptschein’s short play CAST. Pike had a starring role in the feature film Country of Hotels, written by Hauptschein, and directed by Julio Maria Martino. Other theater works featuring Pike include Chicago productions of Hauptschein’s There’s a Worm in My Toilet (2026), Frank Monologues (Spoken Word Café, 2024 and 2025), and numerous plays at the Prop Thtr.
Julio Maria Martino is a London-based theatre and film director. He has directed more than ten plays by Chicago playwright David Hauptschein, including London premieres of The Playactor (Time Out Critics' Choice), An Alchemy of Flesh, and In Memory of Edgar Lutzen. He has also directed Charles Pike in four of Hauptschein's Frank Monologues, three of them at Rhino Fest in Chicago, in 2019, 2020 and 2025.
Martino’s debut feature film, Country of Hotels, written by Hauptschein and featuring Charles Pike, was released in 2023 by Terror Films. It won awards at festivals in the U.K. and the U.S., and was acquired for preservation by the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive.
Martino has directed Steven Berkoff's play Kvetch throughout Europe, in Manchester, Edinburgh, Vienna, Milan and London. His production of Terry Hughes' Life's a Gatecrash won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Currently Martino is working with Hauptschein to develop a new feature film, TRANCE!, based on Hauptschein’s award-winning play Trance, which Martino also directed in London.
Sat 10/24 at 7:00pm
Sun 10/25 at 5:00pm