Two actors from either coast bring two of Samuel Beckett’s one-act plays to the same stage.

Samuel Beckett back in Carmel? Sounds absurd, yet here we are.

Within an hour, audiences can see two one-act plays by the father of the theater of the absurd: Krapp’s Last Tape (1957) and Rockaby (1983), both written for a single actor. It’s a co-production of Justine Stock of The New Canon Theatre Co. and Dennis Leroy Kangalee of the Kangalee Arts Ensemble, the latter based in New York.

Stock and Kangalee have known each other since the 1990s. Once they talked online about his take on Krapp’s Last Tape and Stock encouraged Kangalee to come and show it in California. He said yes, but only if she would do a Samuel Beckett one-act play as an accompaniment. “She was terrified,” Kangalee says with laughter. Beckett is not something audience members can exactly understand; you have to just feel it.

Beckett was an Irish-French playwright and fiction writer. He was also a secretary to another Irish genius, James Joyce, from whom he took the concept of the stream of consciousness to replace what we call a plot – applicable not only to novels but also to plays.

There’s no traditional plot in Beckett’s works which can intimidate actors, Kangalee explains. People see him as gloomy and nihilistic, thereby often missing his sense of humor.

“It’s gallowish humor – the humor shared by Irish people, Black people or Jewish people,” Kangalee says. For him, Beckett is “better than Shakespeare. He says what Shakespeare needs five pages for in five lines.”

The theater of the absurd, according to critic Martin Esslin, was represented by post-war playwrights like Beckett. The two plays are like yin and yang, according to Kangalee. “In one play we are an old man and his diaries, in the other a woman in a rocking chair reacting to a voice,” he says. “Aesthetically, both plays wrestle with the idea of the human voice dueting with a recorded voice. Beckett was curious, if not obsessed, with technology itself.”

Krapp’s experience listening to his own voice years later is the one we all will share, thanks to photos saved on social media. We all will be aging with our young self in front of our eyes.

KRAPP’S LAST TAPE and ROCKABY are performed at 7pm Thursday-Saturday, Jan. 23-25, and 2pm Sunday, Jan. 26 at Carl Cherry Center, 4th and Guadalupe, Carmel, 624-7491, carlcherrycenter.org. 7pm Sunday, Jan. 26 at Henry Miller Library, 48603 Highway 1, Big Sur, 667-2574, henrymiller.org. $35. tinyurl.com/25nsc2v4.