Review: Do Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter Make Waiting for Godot an Excellent Adventure?

The couple next to me were clearly on a date: dressed well, in love, and perfectly comfortable making out in public. Ten minutes into the show, she was checking her email; by the time Act 2 started, they had vanished. They obviously spent a lot of money—center orchestra, row G, seats cost $670.88—and had taken the time to put on fancy clothes, get to the theater, and thumb through their programs. They just weren’t curious enough to see if Didi and Gogo would ever manage to escape from Samuel Beckett’s existential hellscape known as Waiting for Godot.

Of course, they probably weren’t there because they were interested in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann. Almost everyone in the Hudson Theatre came to see Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in the flesh. The Bill and Ted stars hatched this production themselves—it was Reeves who first floated the idea to Winter—and invited the hottest director around, Jamie Lloyd, to join them on an excellent adventure.

Beckett’s desolate country road has been reimagined by scenic designer Soutra Gilmour as a plywood cornucopia that’s part stump, part tunnel, part skatepark full pipe. In this curved, echoing playground (the sound design, provided by Ben and Max Ringham, is customarily fantastic), Vladimir (Winter) and Estragon (Reeves) slide up and down the walls, chomp on root vegetables, and debate whether hanging themselves might be more productive than waiting around for Godot, their mysterious savior. The arrival of despotic landowner Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his long-suffering, wheelchair-using servant Lucky (Michael Patrick Thornton) briefly shakes up the routine, but, of course, Godot never arrives. Twice.

They don’t have Michael Shannon’s anger or Bill Irwin’s facility with language or the sheer gravitas of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, but those who stayed didn’t care; they’re there for the nostalgic feels that come with seeing Reeves and Winter in the flesh. Lloyd hands it to us on a silver platter, complete with chest bumps and synchronized air guitar: Bill and Ted are alive and well and switching bowler hats. There’s a whiff of superficial vanity about it; the difference is that, unlike George Clooney and Denzel Washington and Robert Downey Jr., whose Broadway turns last season felt like hard labor, Reeves and Winter are clearly enjoying themselves as they gleefully confuse the ever-loving shit out of their fans.

As Beckett’s hapless hobos, their chemistry isn’t manufactured; it’s the shorthand that comes with a friendship that’s been running for decades. Reeves, gaunt in Gilmour’s appropriately ill-fitting blue suit, does better with the comedy, particularly the verbal parrying. Winter is most at home in the sadness: when Jon Clark’s unforgiving lighting catches him just so, his face hollows out, like he’s realizing for the first (and millionth) time that life is pointless. Neither one of them is reinventing the wheel, and neither is Lloyd. Despite the absence of a tree—or maybe they’re inside the tree?—it’s a relatively straightforward Waiting for Godot that’s performed at an impressive clip and mostly lands the important beats without the slash and burn that’s become Lloyd’s trademark.

Unsurprisingly, the more interesting performances are provided by Dirden and Thornton, two career theater vets who are always a pleasure to watch. Dirden, so truthful an actor he even manages to convince us that his imaginary chicken dinner has flavor, is an absolute maniac as Pozzo, a countrified blowhard with the menace of Judge Doom who slowly realizes that he’s stuck in a Beckett play. Thornton, who starts off in a Bane mask and ends up resembling Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan, isn’t a traditional Lucky, the doddering pack mule who’s about to fall over. In fact, he’s the smartest one onstage, winking at us as if to say, “Aren’t these people fools?” He delivers Lucky’s big gibberish monologue so slowly and methodically that it almost makes sense.

This being my fifth Waiting for Godot, I knew what I was getting into when the lights came down. The couple next to me, however, seemed to take the curtain line literally.

Well, shall we go?
Yes, let’s.

And off they went because Godot wasn’t about to show up for them anyway, and they knew it. Cue air guitar.