Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot is now established as a classic contemporary drama, even called “the most significant drama in English in the 20th century.” Yet it was decades after its first appearance before leading critics stopped declaring it “totally incomprehensible” and yet simultaneously “obscene,” “subversive,” and “an attack on our basic values.” One inexplicably self-assured woman famously described the two-act play as one where “nothing happens, twice.” And yet it offended her without doing anything.
Near the end of the 1950s, just after its first significant American production, when an unadulterated English translation was still almost impossible to come by, my friend Melvin J. Friedman, a brilliant young Comparative Literature teacher at the University of Maryland, got a group of us together to read aloud a translation he had typed up. He invited any interested faculty and students to the reading, and quite a sizable group -- mostly English Department professors and graduate students, but also quite a few professors from other disciplines – gathered to hear the much-talked-about play. We’d heard that it was written in French by an Irish disciple of James Joyce, and it was upsetting folks all over, in several languages. Almost all of us really liked it: we thought it absolutely mesmerizing and actually rather beautiful, witty, and poetic. We couldn’t wait to see it performed. Now, a major production with famous actors has performed it on Broadway virtually every single decade since. One with Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup, and Shuler Hensley plays Broadway’s Cort Theatre this fall. So much for its “obscurity”! No play by Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams has been revived so often on Broadway.
Stratford’s new production is handsomely designed by Teresa Przybylski and lit by Kimberly Purtell with an amusingly mechanical-looking moon that seems to wake up and move into place to suddenly announce nighttime. Its precarious-looking, long platform-stage, onto which the characters step from the almost invisible wings and seem to exit from with caution, represents the bleak “here” where almost all the visible action occurs. The town representing the outside world that we hear about but never see is just off that platform. And at its far end is the scrawniest, most artificial-looking tree in existence. As if to be deliberately maddening, that tree will sprout a handful of large, artificial-looking leaves overnight in Act II, like metallic Christmas decorations on a flagpole.
Vladimir (Tom Rooney) and Estragon (Stephen Ouimette) meet here in this space after spending the night before separately. We find that they seem doomed to meet here daily and depart each night. They find verbal and physical games to “pass the time” as they wait – as they are required to wait – for an undefined entity named “Godot.” But if Godot ever comes, they will be “saved.”
As a break in the routine, Pozzo and Lucky enter onto that platform, carrying all their possessions. Large, bossy Pozzo (Brian Denehy) is the master with a whip; his withered, old servant on a long leash, staggering under the furniture and bags he carries is Lucky (Randy Hughson). (Remember that joke advertisement about a lost dog with three legs, blind in right eye, missing left ear, tail broken, and recently castrated, who answers to the name “Lucky”?) Pozzo has Lucky ”entertain” Vladimir and Estragon, but without much success; the slave is clearly running down. Eventually, Lucky “thinks“ for them: his ‘think’ is a tongue-twisting verbal parody of a learned lecture clotted with academic clichés, that increases in volume and speed until the others hold their ears in agony and finally manage to subdue Lucky, who collapses on the ground. After much struggle, they load Lucky up with his bags and packages and get a running start so that he and his master can exit as they entered. But Pozzo also seems to be weakening, and he keeps losing possessions – which are the manifestation of his leadership. [I’d like to see Pozzo played to look like Donald Trump.]
A little boy comes to announce that Mr. Godot won’t be coming tonight but surely will tomorrow. And Vladimir and Estragon cannot move.
Act II, of course, repeats the first act’s elements, but it tinctures them with meaningful developments. The leaves are now on the tree. Pozzo and Lucky return with Pozzo blind and really at a loss to locate his personal possessions, and Lucky now dumb and slyly rebellious. Vladimir and Estragon now seem more touchingly interdependent and also helpless. They attempt to hang themselves, but the rope breaks, and since it was Estragon’s belt, his pants fall down. They do achieve self-knowledge: they know that Vladimir’s breath stinks and Estragon’s feet stink. Basic clown-techniques become cosmic statements. But we end as we began: nothing is truly changed or accomplished; they are doomed to such endless repetition. And they are not only required but seem to be defined by having to hopelessly wait for Godot.
In the Theatre of the Absurd, the plot summary is the meaning. But this play is too rich and essential for that statement to be more than a hint of its suggestions.
Brian Dennehy is remarkably potent and harrowing as Pozzo – a comic figure, but not a comfy one. Randy Hughson’s delivery of Lucky’s “Think” is virtuosic enough to stop the show and gain applause, but he does not animate Lucky enough to make him more than a cypher. I think he or his director (or both) may have worked too hard to avoid making Lucky a caricature. Tom Rooney is an unusually humane and empathetic Vladimir; I miss the intellectual intensity of other Vladimirs in his version. And Stephen Ouimette is so expressive, gaunt and haunted as Estragon, even in his most dazzling physical comedy, that he somehow keeps us laughing while unmistakably creating a tragic character.
Director Jennifer Tarver has solid command of the play, though her first-act pacing could be more energetic and less studied. This is an excellent Waiting for Godot, and therefore a pleasure certainly worth traveling to see, but not a culmination.
