performance

Still “Waiting for Godot”

By Gary Tischler

June 2008

Photo: Dan Brick and Chris Davenport in Waiting for Godot. Photo: Ian C. Armstrong

“Waiting for Godot” is a play about two tramps waiting every day for someone named Godot. He never comes.

But of course, he always returns. Or rather, the play is never far from the back of a director’s mind somewhere, a fluttering memory of a theater-goer and the thick lore of the theater itself and as a kind of underground popular culture reference. (See all the space devoted to it on “Wikipedia”).

I remember reading a sign once in a men’s room right above a urinal: “I’ll be back”. It was signed “Godot”, not  The Terminator.

“Godot,” you would think, must have been done many times by a company like Scena Theater, which, under Artistic Director Robert McNamara has made the work of Samuel Beckett, the great Irish playwright, something of a specialty. Beckett has never been far from McNamara’s mind and he once managed to track him in down in Paris and interview him.

Strangely enough, “Godot” has never been performed by Scena or at The Warehouse Theater, which seems just the right size and atmosphere for the play. “It was overdue,” McNamara said.  Overdue, but just in time, you might say.

“Waiting for Godot,” aside from upcoming Fringe Festival offerings, will be the last theater event in the Warehouse, which for years has been home to wandering, slightly unmoored and very unusual theater companies. Owners Molly and Paul Ruppert, faced with every steeper property tax bill because of the surrounding downtown development, will be closing shop this summer.  Vladimir and Estragon, as has always been the case, will still be waiting.

McNamara and Scena have approached “Godot,” which, while written about by critics and cultural mavens in endless fashion, resists interpretation. Bert Lahr, forever famous for having played the Cowardly Lion in  “The Wizard of Oz”, famously commented after playing Vladimir in an early production of “Godot” that “I never understood the son of a bitch.” He wasn’t the only one. Even on the Internet, the debate over Godot goes on endlessly, and still he doesn’t come, he doesn’t explain, but he sure bothers people.

Scena and McNamara have chosen to stage this “Godot” in the classic manner, which is to say, sticking close to the text, to avoid blowing up the play, and hew pretty much to expectations. I’ve seen productions with women playing all the parts (at Source Theater years ago), and with an African American cast (at Studio), but neither casting choices seemed to dive into the opportunities presented by those choices.

Beckett never described the two men who wait so precariously for someone named Godot. Clearly though, they are desperate, down and out, without friends or home, with only each other, barely hanging on in a bleak landscape. Estragon has sore feet, gets beaten up every night by strangers in a ditch, and is slow and down to earth. Vladimir is the more cerebral of the two, always eager to talk, to think, to voice thoughts, to contemplate out loud.  Both were bowler hats, which are the signals of both the merchant class and vaudevillians.

There is a thin tree on stage, from which the two sometimes think about hanging themselves. And there are Potzo and Lucky, who enter their lives in both acts, Potzo the apparent master and owner of a silent slave on a rope. Potzo is cruel, indignant, flowery in language going to market to sell the cadaverous, aged and burdened Lucky. When the two encounter him again, he is blind and full of fury, raging against, not Godot, but God.

Twice a boy shows up, a different boy, to tell the two men that Godot, alas will not be coming. And so they think about moving, leaving. But they won’t, can’t.

The effect, if not decipherable or clearly understood, is somehow devastating. In Beckett’s language, repetitive, poetic in a boisterous, musical and cruel way, contains a world, strands of memory not easily gathered in, flickering of desire, a glorious inertia. It has in all the dancing, the verbiage, the hesitation, the stubborn will of humans to persist, to grab that next breath as if it contained all the secrets we long to know. “Nothing to be done,” Vladimir says early on not for the last time. Long stripped of the tools and the will to act, they have, not the audacity, but the habit of hope.

McNamara has come up with a fine cast. Sand and blarney voiced Dan Brick makes a pliable, putty-in-rags Estragon while Chris Davenport makes a sharp-voiced, careful, almost pointy Vladimir. He looks like someone born to tap dance, but has been reduced to a ragged slide.   Richard Pelzman’s Pozzo is haughty, puffed up, a man to the mannerism born, as if manners and habits were like life itself.  Christopher  Mrosowski’s Lucky is a ghost just barely alive, sleeping his sufferings.

I can’t say the production is full of surprises except perhaps for the most important one: it works, it seems right and true, and that’s the power of it. 

“Waiting for Godot” continues at the Warehouse Theater through June 29)