Jonathan Lethem's Poster for Krapp's Last Tape

Jonathan Lethem ‘86 is not known for his work as theater publicist. But when Lethem was still a student at Bennington–a period he has memorialized in his novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003) , and elsewhere–he was tasked with drawing the poster for a production of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Krapp’s Last Tape. The play was directed by his classmate Michael Haddad and performed by Richard Kronfeld ‘85. 

“Rich was one of my best friends at Bennington,” Lethem told me when Literary Bennington spoke to the writer recently over Zoom. “I lived with him in the Booth apartment. Rich was a theater major, and he drew me into that sort of college life in VAPA. He even got me to go on stage a couple of times.”

As the documentation for the poster in the College archive shows, Kronfeld’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape ran for four performances in the spring of 1984, between March 16th and March 19th. The production was staged in what is colloquially referred to as the “catacombs” of VAPA, the basement floor of the arts building, where Lethem, in addition to promoting the play, also assisted in escorting attendees to the location. The play, Lethem recalls, was Kronfeld’s senior thesis project; it was a solo performance, playing for groups as small as 4 or 5 people. 

The poster surfaced as part of the ongoing project by Dean of Libraries Oceana Wilson and Crossett Library staff to create a comprehensive and searchable digital archive of Bennington’s history and culture. (Literary Bennington originally grew out of this work as a Tumblr in 2016.) Once Oceana alerted us, Literary Bennington reached out to Lethem and I got the chance to speak with him about the history of the poster, its design, and the iconography he employed. 

“Our way of blowing off steam,” Lethem explained, “was driving to the mall and playing arcade video games. We were really into playing them at the Burger King in town too–I’ll tell you a story about the Burger King in town later–these were the first generation pinball style video games. We loved Pac Man and Frogger. But also some video games that are completely forgotten: there was a game at Burger King called Time Pilot that I was totally obsessed with. Q*bert, who I drew in the poster, was in the game. I was making video game paintings in my VAPA class, putting Pac Man heads on humans. So I was really into drawing posters at the time, and Rich needed a poster for Krapp’s Last Tape, and I offered to do it. It was full of all these in-jokes from our friendship.”  

As Lethem describes, there are plentiful video game references hidden throughout the poster: characters like Mr. T and Rich Uncle Pennybags, the mascot of the Monopoly game board . 

And Lethem’s story about the Burger King in town? It will have to wait for another post. 

Here are the other documents found with the poster than have joined this 80s time capsule:

-Maxfield Goldman ‘25