Interview: Michael Patrick Thornton on Getting “Lucky” in Waiting for Godot

Michael Patrick Thornton is one of the great stage actors of his generation, though New York audiences are only just beginning to catch up.

A pillar of Chicago’s theater community, Thornton co-founded the Gift Theatre and has long been a fixture at venues like Steppenwolf, Lookingglass, and Second City. Two spinal strokes in his mid-20s left him paralyzed—but they also sharpened his resolve to master his craft in all mediums. He went on to win a Jeff Award for acting, became the first stage performer to act while wearing a robotic exoskeleton (as Richard III); directed premieres by David Rabe and Will Eno; assisted Anna D. Shapiro on the Broadway production of August: Osage County; and played Audra McDonald’s lover on Private Practice.

Thornton made his Broadway debut as Lennox in Sam Gold’s Macbeth, then delivered a heartbreaking performance as Dr. Rank in Jamie Lloyd’s acclaimed revival of A Doll’s House. Now, he reunites with Lloyd to play Lucky in the director’s new Broadway staging of Waiting for Godot, opposite Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, and Brandon Dirden as his Pozzo. For Thornton, it’s an unexpectedly personal role, born out of his father’s death earlier this year.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Waiting for Godot is your second show with Jamie Lloyd. Did he come to you directly for this?
I went to Jamie directly. We lost my dad in January, and he had dementia towards the end. For whatever reason, as I was gathering up the strength to go visit him, either in the hospital or the assisted care facility that he was in, I found myself turning to Beckett and finding comfort in some of Beckett’s one-liners. I’d dip into Godot and started doing Lucky’s speech at home before heading out for the day. It was a little shield that allowed me to get through the day.

Anyway, I shared all this with Jamie, and literally, the night that my family was sitting around my dining room table planning my dad’s funeral service, I got the call that I got the part.

That’s a nice little looking out from above—if you subscribe to that sort of thing.
I think my dad may have tipped the ball.

One of the remarkable things I found about your delivery of Lucky’s monologue is that you speak it so deliberately that it almost seems to make sense.
The most challenging and fun thing you can do with absurdist text is to treat it as if it’s not absurdist. A lot of times, that speech becomes a parlor trick of volume and tempo. I was more interested in trying to connect to the audience in a way where, even if they don’t understand exactly what’s being said, that they get the underlying emotion.

It was a process of trying a bunch of different things and quite honestly, failing. That monologue beat the shit out of me. Most days, I left rehearsal feeling lost. And sometimes, that’s what needs to happen for something to break open.

What do you mean?
Sometimes, great writing beats you into a place where you shrug and throw your hands up, and a different kind of instinct takes over. That’s when it really started getting exciting. Now, every millisecond feels free and out of control in a great way. The moment you close your eyes and feel the breeze on your skin, you get that feeling of terror. There’s no easy slipstream back into the text if you get lost. It’s closed doors everywhere you look. You simultaneously need to keep your eye on the ball while also enjoying the fact that you’re dribbling. I just failed, and I failed, and I failed, and then I stopped trying to make it something I wanted it to be, and let it be the wild and wonderful thing it needed to be.

Your Lucky enters wearing a scary-looking mask. Where did that come from and how does it represent the Pozzo and Lucky dynamic in this production?
That was a later addition in the process. Going into tech, we all felt that we had the comedy. We certainly had the friendship, born out of decades and decades of actual friendship between Keanu and Alex. I suspect that we all felt, on a gut level, that it was missing a sense of violence. If those pistons aren’t firing, you don’t have it in the play. We were trying all sorts of things, and the mask was a penultimate day of tech addition.

I had to reverse engineer and change some things about my performance, but what I love about it is that it’s a muzzle. To me, that means that Lucky’s speaking and his mind are so powerful that Pozzo literally needs to shut him up. In one simple piece of architecture, it creates a world of malevolence.

But we weren’t interested in a simple version where one was dominant, and one was submissive. The first image tells you all you need to know: Pozzo wheels Lucky on in such a way that we avoid rolling over the boot that’s been thrown, and I have my hand out protecting him from these two strangers. I think we both had a gut instinct that they were each other’s caretakers and would do anything for each other.

I want to talk about representation; as a wheelchair-user, your visibility means a lot, especially in an industry that is as notoriously behind the time as Broadway.
Disabled people are the largest minority in the world who are the least represented on stage and screen, and that’s completely fucked up. We’ve left behind a couple of generations of incredible artists because they looked to Broadway or to their TV or to movie screens and didn’t see anybody who looked like themselves. That is changing.

What I love about Jamie is that I never feel like I’m in the room because I’m disabled. Whatever unique ways that I move through the world are only exciting aesthetic trampolines to find solutions for, as opposed to problems that needs to be solved.

What can the New York theater scene learn from Chicago?
I wish that New York had more non-equity theaters. I think that would be a boon for the ecosystem. I mean, I know so many incredible actors who’ve come out here and simply did not get the opportunities. One thing that I would argue is that Chicago has so many non-equity theaters and ensembles, that whether you’re coming straight out of college or changing careers, you’re just going to work right away. You’re going to get on stage experience.

Chicago, while of course it’s a huge city, still has a small-town vibe in terms of the theater community. We all know each other, and work leads to work. It’s a much easier on-road than you get in New York and LA.

Obviously, I live in New York, and tourism is slowly bouncing back, but the theater industry itself is not what it was pre-Covid. How does it look in Chicago at this point, almost six-years after the shut down? And how is your company, the Gift, faring?
My estimation is more than a little removed, but what I’m hearing is that people are dusting themselves off and getting the subscribers back and are still being bold with programming. But we had an absolute reaping in Chicago. We lost not only individual theater artists who were bright luminaries, but a lot of companies. Everyone is trying to figure out the model going forward. Is it a co-op model where we partner with each other? Is the subscriber model not the firewall that it once was for an organization’s bottom line?

At the Gift, we have two incredible people, Brittany Burch and Jennifer Glasse, who took over when I retired, and they’ve dealt with more curveballs in five years than I did in 20. If they can usher us through what they already have, we’re going to be fine. We’re small and nimble enough. We’ve never been over half-a-million dollars annually. It’s the companies that are above that level. Once you get to the million-dollar range in Chicago, you just get more and more vulnerable. So, I worry about it.

But at the end of the day, the Chicago theater community—as much as we will call each other out and pick some fights once in a while, we will always have each other’s back and band together.