André Gregory Returns to Beckett's Endgame at NYFF 2026

André Gregory, Larry Pine and Gerry Bamman — now in their 80s and 90s — have returned to Samuel Beckett's Endgame, the play they first staged in their 20s, in Cindy Kleine's documentary One More Time, which screened at the 2026 New York Film Festival.

Gregory founded the Manhattan Project, the theater company behind four productions of Endgame starring Pine and Bamman. The one-act play opens with the blind Hamm declaring, "It's time it ended and yet I hesitate to—to end," confined to a chair while bickering with his servant Clov in a house tucked away from a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Kleine, Gregory's longtime partner and collaborator, directs the film as a personal document. It looks back at three accomplished actors and reckons, in the present, with their shared mortality.

What is the history behind the reunion?

Gregory began as an avant-garde theater director in the eclectic arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Writing in the New York Times, critic Clive Barnes called the Manhattan Project's 1973 production of Endgame "one of the best things in the American theater." Gregory's strong opinions on American theater were famously elaborated in Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre.

Much of this context is absent from One More Time. The film makes no mention of Pine's kaleidoscopic credits, from TV soaps to film auteurs, nor of Bamman's screen work — many viewers will know him best for calling Macaulay Culkin a little jerk in Home Alone. The retrospective passages focus on stage collaborations, while footage of the trio's youthful days bookends the reunion.

How does the film handle the production itself?

The three convene at Pine's home, which serves as both venue and rehearsal space. The years have saddled Bamman with mobility issues and Pine with Alzheimer's. Pine brings in a beaten-up edition of Endgame that he estimates is a half-century old, but at one point he frustratingly struggles to recite a line passed along moments before.

Gregory's interstitial commentary is satisfying. He considers Endgame the most difficult play ever written. His deal with the Beckett estate permits excerpts that show the play's essence — but as performed in the filmed rehearsals, that essence is difficult to identify. Beckett's text is overwhelmed by the curious project itself, partly through fragmented composition and partly through casual presentation. Alternating, awkwardly edited close-ups silo the two actors and break any notion of shared space. The challenge succeeds most when it uses Endgame's significance and themes as a coda to the trio's decades-long partnership.

Filmed in 2025, the production maps the play's apocalyptic setting onto Los Angeles' Eaton Fires and the beginning of Donald Trump's second presidential term. Like Clov and Hamm, the three confine themselves to Pine's home as the world burns around them. Gregory plainly states: "we don't leave the house into a world that has 40 years in it."

The end-is-near motif lands more acutely for this elderly company than in any of their previous attempts. Their multiple renditions of the piece form an ouroboros, reflected in Beckett's line: "the end is in the beginning and yet you go on."

One More Time works like a band reunion where the members convene to play through a beloved work one last time. It is a deserved celebration of their shared years of work — but viewers who already know Gregory's Manhattan Project legacy will get the fitting tribute and curtain call. The uninitiated may have a tough time connecting. As the film itself suggests: it's important to know the band, or at least the record.