By Kevin Nance
Contributing Writer, Photographer

“Krapp’s Last Tape,” Samuel Beckett’s autobiographical one-act play from 1958, is no one’s idea of light entertainment. Bitterly lyrical, full of existential despair offset by glints of dark comedy (including the scatological wordplay in the title character’s name), the play is a portrait of the artist — clearly a stand-in for Beckett himself — haunted by his own past self. The curtain rises on Krapp, an ailing, half-blind old man of 69, preparing to make one of an intermittent series of diaristic tape recordings, when he pauses to listen to an older tape he made three decades earlier. Consciously or not, the blustery younger Krapp gives a poor account of himself. Friendless, alone in a wine house on his birthday, he has missed chance after chance for love, connection and fulfillment. He claims to have no regrets, looking forward, “with the fire in me now,” to great accomplishments in the years to come. To the older Krapp — a lonely alcoholic writer whose most recent book sold 17 copies, “eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas,” his only visitor “a bony old ghost of a whore” — these pronouncements ring depressingly hollow. “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that,” he speaks into the microphone. “Thank God that’s all done with anyway.” 

But is it? There’s always time for regret.

Lexington actor Chip Sebastian, who’s taking on this famous yet rarely performed play this week at Antagonist Productions’ recently opened black box theater, is determined not to make Krapp’s mistake. Long a busy journeyman film actor-director-writer-teacher with a master’s degree in theater from the University of Kentucky, Sebastian, now 53, finds himself craving quality over quantity. That includes “Krapp’s Last Tape,” a masterpiece Sebastian feels a particular affinity for, and which he’s pairing on a double bill with his own “Madeleine, Standing at Four,” a one-act farce receiving its world premiere.

“‘Krapp’s’ has always resonated with me, and perhaps it’s the fear of ending up like Krapp,” he says during a recent break from rehearsal. “As I get older, anything I do, I really, really want to be doing, and ‘Krapp’s’ was something I really, really wanted to do. I don’t need another credit or whatever. There are a lot of shows that go up, and they’re wonderful shows, but I don’t feel super connected to them. Instead, there’s quite a bit of theater I really want to do and bring to Lexington, and it’s stuff like ‘Krapp’s,’ which isn’t highly commercial. I’m not going to retire with a yacht afterward. But it’s something I think is going to be great to witness.”

It may well be, based on a bit of rehearsal I saw. Sebastian is a large bald man (which led to him being typecast as a villain in several independent films and plays) with a striking resemblance to the late Brian Dennehy, who also performed Krapp. (The role has been catnip for generations of famous leading men, including Patrick Magee, for whom it was written, along with Hume Cronyn, John Hurt, the playwright Harold Pinter, Michael Gambon, F. Murray Abraham and Gary Oldman.) But like Dennehy, Sebastian has the soul of a poet, sounded in a rich, musical baritone capable of playing Beckett’s elliptically looping script like a cello. “It’s undeniable,” says Antagonist Productions head Ian Scott. “You hear that voice, you know it’s Chip Sebastian.”

Fortunately, the play offers several opportunities for virtuosic vocal performance. There is, for example, this acrid passage about the aged prostitute who has retained Krapp’s patronage and perhaps even a trace of affection: “Couldn’t do much, but I suppose better than a kick in the crutch,” he says. “The last time wasn’t so bad. How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I’d been saving up for her all my life.”

Elsewhere, the young Krapp falls, almost against his will, into a reverie about a romantic encounter with a young woman in a small boat, which Sebastian calls “perhaps the closest he came to having a real relationship”:

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. 

(Pause.) 

Past midnight. Never knew—

“He has many regrets,” Sebastian muses of the character. “He made a lot of mistakes, a lot of wrong turns. There was a lot of folly in in his life, and he created a lot of misery, like all of us.”

Sebastian is also emotionally limber and surprisingly light on his feet, an effect echoed by his longtime role as a ballroom dance teacher and performer at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio of Lexington. (Since the pandemic disruptions, he now teaches ballroom part-time but has become a prodigious gig worker, doing massage therapy, recording audiobooks in his home studio and teaching both acting and martial arts, including Kempo as well as Tai Chi for seniors in local retirement homes. “Hand of God,” his documentary film about Bill Durbin, his martial arts teacher of 32 years, is scheduled to premiere this fall as part of the Twelve Lions Film Festival at the Kentucky Theatre.) It’s Sebastian’s capacity for vulnerability, not his hulking presence, that leaves the most lasting impression; he was born, it would seem, to play Lennie Small in a stage production of “Of Mice and Men.” We can only hope.

“He’s this big, imposing guy, and at first I was a little bit intimidated, but he’s the sweetest teddy bear you’ve ever seen,” says actress Erin Mentzer, who co-starred with Sebastian in Susan Jackson’s “A Razing in Missouri,” about a couple whose home was destroyed by a tornado, as part of Studio Players’ Ten-Minute Play Festival in 2023. “He’s a great actor and great colleague. I had some big, emotional moments in the play, and every time backstage he’d give me a bear hug, which was always nice.”