Waiting for Godot is, as the saying goes, a play in which nothing happens, twice. Two men, old acquaintances, spend a day waiting for someone named Godot – a man? God? Absolution? Nothing? – who never arrives. Instead, they encounter a strange, imperious man and his enslaved companion, then a boy who assures: tomorrow, Godot will come. The next day the same, almost.
Samuel Beckett’s modernist masterpiece, one of the most influential and widely performed plays in the English language, disorients the viewer by disassembling theater down to its essentials: performance and interpretation, which even the most seasoned Godot veterans are still debating. The play’s nonsensical ramblings, existentialist themes and lack of clear meaning have absorbed the absurd realities of places ravaged by prolonged, costly waiting – war-torn Sarajevo, post-Katrina New Orleans, or US prisons – as well as Broadway, subject to increasingly ludicrous demands of celebrity, money and buzz to survive.
The latest starry revivals in a remarkably starry year on Broadway pairs Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter – AKA Bill & Ted, the excellent slacker duo of cinema – with Jamie Lloyd, the rare director to achieve layperson name recognition for his ascetic takes on the canon. Among them: Romeo & Juliet in deconstructed monochrome, The Seagull before a wood-chipped wall, A Doll’s House without a house, Sunset Boulevard dissected via grayscale camera and, most recently, an acclaimed take on Evita that turned the balcony scene into a free outdoor concert. Waiting for Godot, already a stripped-down text, presents an especially provocative challenge for Lloyd, who tends to strip shows of period markers, staging, color and props in favor of tour-de-force performances and imagination.
One does not have to wait long to see Lloyd’s conceit for the notoriously impenetrable play; the curtain rises at the Hudson Theatre to reveal the two shabbily dressed men – Reeves as Estragon (“Gogo”) and Winter as Vladimir (“Didi”) – perched on the substantial lip of what looks like a spotless marble tube, a gleaming funnel of attention into the backstage abyss. (Scenic and costume design by Soutra Gilmour.) What is seemingly the world’s most pristine drainage pipe, which contains all of the waiting for Godot, alternately mesmerized and repulsed me for the show’s two hours; staring at it too long could make one dizzy or, in moments of lighting designer Jon Clark’s intense LEDs, burn your eyes – perhaps the point, if not always an enjoyable one. To be transfixed by either a single shape or an optical illusion – who’s to say? – and barraged by highly stylized nonsense does feel absurd.
Lloyd’s take on Beckett is an especially disorienting, purgatorial one – at one point, Gogo and Didi approach a literal blinding light at the end of the tunnel, only to turn back. But it is more coolly strange than spiritually disquieting, seeming to strain for provocation without need. The introduction of the mysterious Pozzo (Brandon J Dirden) and the enslaved Lucky (Michael Patrick Thornton) throw a wrench into the duo’s day and into the show’s polished limbo. Dirden, who is Black, plays Pozzo with more than a dash of Calvin Candie, Leonardo DiCaprio’s unforgettably sadistic and dandyish plantation owner from Django Unchained. Thornton, who is white and uses a wheelchair, appears without Lucky’s standard rope or Pozzo’s whip – the production forgoes almost all props – but bound with a gimp mask. The racial inversion of the invoked history of US enslavement suggests the arbitrariness of human cruelty. But though Thornton turns Lucky’s famously impermeable monologue – an erudite-seeming rambling on the command to “think!” – into a spellbinding swirl, there’s a ghoulish, overdone quality to their intrusions that tip the show into uncomfortable sensory overwhelm.
Luckily, there’s Bill & Ted to save the day. The reunion of Winter and Reeves provides a shiny, pleasing lacquer of nostalgia over the proceedings, their comedic chemistry still unmatched and irreproducible. The two longtime friends lend lines such as “together again at last …” a jolt of delight, with a couple extra-textual treats to boot. (Within the echoey void designed by Ben and Max Ringham, you can almost hear a faint “dude …”) It’s Bill & Ted gone philosophical, Winter the crotchety, cerebral stick in the mud and Reeves the stilted follower; watching them together, allowed to indulge in the play’s opportunities for slapstick, bandying about the tube with occasional chest bumps, you might find yourself believing in something.
That, or when Winter, the more expressive of the two actors, delivers the play’s final monologue, a treatise on life’s meaning and meaninglessness whose words wash over but whose import sticks. Face alit in faux moonlight, features tightened in consternation, framed by the tube to who knows where, Winter seems to be glimpsing the void in this absurd world. I glimpsed it, too, at least for a minute – and then it is back to that enjoyable, frustrating, confounding nothing.
