Waiting for Godot
(Photo © Joan Marcus)
Some years ago, I was walking on East 57th Street when I noticed a small commotion only 15 or 20 feet in front of me. A number of pedestrians had surrounded two women of a certain age who were flailing on the ground in their tweeds-and-furs finery. A Samaritan, rushing to assist, asked the ladies what had occurred. One of them, still collapsed, pointed at the other and said, “She fell.”
This incident flashed back to me during the new, 50th anniversary production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. The scene that spurred the memory was the one in which Vladimir (Sam Coppola) and Estragon (Joseph Ragno) are helping the fallen Pozzo (Ed Setrakian) and Lucky (Martin Shakar) but, unable to raise the latter pair to their feet, they themselves crumple. Then the four men remain in a heap for several frustrating minutes. After a time, Pozzo, who’s as blind as King Lear‘s Gloucester, asks what has happened. Vladimir, still supine, replies, “The two of you slipped. And fell.”
Like the well-dressed woman on New York City’s fashion-conscious street, Beckett’s famous tramp — wearing rags that costume designer Ann Hould-Ward may have actually plucked from a dustbin — is too proud to acknowledge that he’s off his pins. He needs to hold on to his dignity or, more accurately, to pretend that his fractured dignity is intact. For me, the overlapping of these scenes — one real, the other imagined by perhaps the greatest playwright of the 20th century — led to an epiphany. Waiting for Godot is often categorized as Theater of the Absurd. That theatrical style is considered a rebellion against realism, but sequences lifted from life need only be slightly skewed to make a Theater of the Absurd playwright’s existential statement.
I was also reminded that for Beckett, who didn’t know that he was writing Theater of the Absurd, this piece is vaudeville turned sideways. The comic-tragedian was known to admire Charlie Chaplin and the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, so it’s little surprise that Vladimir and Estragon are clowns doing routines not far removed from those icons’ famous business. (In France, En Attendant Godot is often played by actors in clown outfits.) Moreover, how different is the Vladimir-Estragon discourse from the Bud Abbott-Lou Costello “Who’s on First?” bit? How different from Oscar and Felix bickering in The Odd Couple? The question is particularly pertinent in the case of the current production since Coppola looks enough like Walter Matthau, the original Oscar Madison, to be his brother. He’s got the same hang-dog mien, which couldn’t be better for the comedy-tragedy blend that Beckett worked into his cascading three- and four-word sentences. Coppola towers over Ragno’s amusingly pinched-faced Estragon, and this sight gag buttresses the myriad sound gags that the author built into the play.
Vladimir and Estragon exhibit the precision of a music-hall team as they badger each other for answers to where they are, what they’re doing there, how long they should wait for the elusive Godot (whoever or whatever that is), and whether they should hang themselves from the tree that’s the sole object on the bleak landscape. (Set designer Kenneth Foy also provides a panoramic wintry sky and ground that looks as if it’s seen snow recently.) The pair behave with the love-and-short-fuse affect common to men friends, male bonding being the important secondary theme of the play. So do Ed Setrakian’s boisterous Pozzo and Martin Shakar’s gaunt, sunken-eyed Lucky. As Beckett has it, these two are literally connected: Pozzo leads Lucky around on a rope. (Don’t ask what the master-slave dynamic symbolizes; Beckett never said.) In the role of the ill-informed lad who brings Godot’s ambiguous tidings, Tanner Rich — as angular as the tree upstage of him — also does well.
Anyone who’s ever seen Waiting for Godot will admit that it’s repetitive and might even benefit from judicious trimming. Yet, when guided by a resourceful director, the devastating sketch passes fleetingly, just as Sir Peter Hall’s hilarious, heart-breaking, and uplifting version did earlier this fall at Bath. In the current production, director Alan Hruska sometimes sets a jaunty pace, but he allows other sequences to go slack. Although Waiting for Godot is about the boredom of everyday living, the play must never bore — or, to paraphrase Beckett, it must never look as if it can’t go on, because it must go on.
