"On opening night the show that seemed destined for humorless disaster was Clove Productions’ "Krapp’s Last Tape," the elegant 1958 one-act in which the decrepit Krapp listens with unmitigated disdain to tapes he recorded of himself 30 years earlier. It started 45 minutes late, and performer Michael Martin spent much of that time nervously running—and bungling—his lines in the lobby. But by the time he finally appeared onstage, his mane of gray hair as disheveled as his ill-fitting black trousers and vest, his incongruous white shoes polished to a Sunday-school gleam, he’d mastered this heartbreaking buffoon. Shuffling stiffly to an enormous desk covered with an ancient reel-to-reel tape deck and a dozen battered boxes of tape spools, he lowered himself into a chair with arthritic care, placed his hands neatly before him, and let out a tiny sigh, which left him as limp as a deflated balloon.
"For the play’s 45 minutes Krapp rummages around in the desk, eats a banana (slipping on the peel, of course), fumbles with his tapes, exits to take swigs from his bottle backstage (the audience hears only a dainty pop as he uncorks it), and finally listens to his former self rambling on about seemingly nothing—though it gradually becomes evident that the tape may recount how he blew his one chance at true love.

"Under Beau O’Reilly’s meticulous direction, Martin plays the scene as a very funny grumbling clown routine. Each tiny accomplishment—finding the right tape spool or feeding it into the player—brings a fleeting moment of joy even as the accumulated weight of a squandered life squashes this rail-thin Krapp farther down in his chair. As Martin sits motionless listening to the tape, his expression by turns contemptuous, sly, forlorn, defeated, childlike, and empty, he creates a pitiful and absurd old man, someone who sees that his effort to create a brilliant chronicle of his life has fallen tragicomically flat."