This afternoon my husband and I went out in the insane heat to see Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at DC's Warehouse Theater, a gritty venue north of Gallery Place/Chinatown. This play may not quite be the kind of contemporary play that the City Paper's critics would like to see more of, but I thought that it was well worth reviewing for the EN 202 blog. Moreover, Waiting for Godot has been an extremely influential play, even from its first performances.Did you know that Waiting for Godot was originally in French? Its author, Samuel Beckett, was born in Ireland, but he chose to write in French (after WWII) because that language enabled him to "write 'without style.'" (At the time, he was living in Paris.) Beckett then translated his play into English, his first language.
The premise of Waiting for Godot is this: two men Vladimir or "Didi" and Estragon or "Gogo" are waiting in a field by a tree because Godot, a man who has agreed to help them out, has said that he would be coming there. It's not clear where the men are or when the play takes place. At one point, Vladimir and Estragon talk about picking grapes somewhere in France and being together for fifty years. However, this is not a realistic play. In fact, critic Normand Berlin notes that Beckett refused to answer famed theater actor Ralph Richardson's questions about the characters in his play. For Berlin himself, the absence of specificity or backstory was exciting, and he views the two characters as archetypes.
Along the way, Vladimir and Estragon chat to kill time. At times, they discuss very mundane matters, and Estragon grumbles about his ill-fitting boots. Then he turns around and suggests to his companion that they hang themselves on the tree. They do not because they have no rope with them. They also motivate themselves to wait for Godot and, at one point, mistake Pozzo, a wealthy man with a slave named Lucky, for him. One of Godot's servants then arrives, informing the two men that his master will not be coming. After a brief intermission, the play begins again, and it is the next day--or is it? First Vladimir and then Estragon return to the stage. Vladimir is cheerful, trying to remember a song about a dog; the other man straggles in, without shoes and with scrapes and bruises from a fight. The two men reconcile and talk about going off separately. Again Pozzo comes on stage. This time he is blind, his slave is mute, and both helplessly fall down onto the ground. They need Vladimir and Estragon's help to get up. Again Godot's servant comes on stage. He does not recognize Vladimir or Estragon even though Vladimir begs him to. The servant leaves, followed by the two men.
The actors at the Scena Theater (Chris Davenport and Dan Brick) look relatively young as you may gather from the picture above. Here are some pictures of other pairs. James Laurenson and Alan Dobie portray a more elderly pair.
Charles Spencer's review is also well worth reading as he discusses the difficulties of staging Godot in the 2000s, more than fifty years after the play's exhilarating debut:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/11/btgodot11.xml
The Classical Theater of Harlem traveled to New Orleans to perform Waiting for Godot. Mother Jones' Nick Baumann has written about their open-air performance:http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2007/11/waiting-for-godot-in-new-orleans.html
Colleges like Wichita State University in Kansas and Montreal's McGill University have staged this play as well. The photo below from Wichita State shows Lucky and Pozzo as well as Vladimir and Estragon. Lucky is the young woman with the bags.
The picture below is from McGill's performance:
For more information about this production, see this link: http://media.www.mcgilltribune.com/media/storage/paper234/news/2004/02/10/AE/Two-Guys.And.A.Tree-603040.shtmlThe picture below is from a 1984 bilingual production (Hebrew and Arabic) staged in Haifa, Israel
I will close with a link to Normand Berlin's article that truly puts Beckett and Godot in context:http://www.samuel-beckett.net/BerlinTraffic.html
