Estragon: "The best thing would be to kill me, like the other."
Vladimir: "What other? (Pause) What other?"
Estragon: "Like billions of others."
I was talking with playwright James Keller not long ago, who casually said that the two great—or was it most influential?—plays of last century were Pirandello's 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' and Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' the first a sensation in Paris before World War II by an established Italian dramatist and fiction writer, and the second coming in with the War's aftermath, seemingly out of nowhere, a surprise hit in Paris, then elsewhere around the globe, by an obscure Irish expat poet, novelist and translator, written in French.
'Six Characters' isn't produced so much anymore (Paris' Théâtre de la Ville staged it—and very well—on tour here a few years ago for Cal Performances), though its influence still makes itself felt in elegant, mostly indirect ways. But 'Godot' (as well as its shy genius Beckett) has proven itself a keeper in theaters any and everywhere, as well as being taught in classrooms—and becoming a catchphrase, waiting pointlessly for someone or something that never shows ...
'Godot's' notoriously difficult to put on, despite a simple premise and set-up just as simple: two tramps wait in a barren landscape, graced only by a bare tree (which has put out leaves in the second of two acts) for the ever-absent Mr. Godot, who they seem to expect help from, but are given the message he won't be there today—apparently ad infinitum. Meanwhile, while waiting for their presumptive benefactor, they witness a kind of profane epiphany: the strange appearance, in this no particular place, of a roaming master with a whip and his exhausted manservant.
Most productions, even some that basically stick to the letter, inevitably gild the lily somehow, or (maybe more a fault of the past) try to discover some symbolism as key to it all—or chalk it all up to Existentialism—when it's like a theatrical poem, to be acted out literally and taken in whole by the audience—a recital. Somewhere along the line (and it's happened with Chekhov, too, and other modern playwrights), the realization set in that 'Godot' has much humor—Gogo & Didi (Estragon and Vladimir's nicknames for each other, all they're addressed by onstage) are old troupers, vaudevillians right out of Music Hall with their sad andeager jokes and occasional slapstick—and inevitably it's staged as a sketch or kind of stylized, heavy situation comedy, with no situation at all.
I don't know if I've ever seen a purely satisfying staging of it, just more or less interesting and enjoyable renditions. This new version, though, a collaboration between Oakland's Ubuntu Theater Project and Berkeley's Inferno Theatre, seems to be the closest yet, more and more interesting as it unfolds—and more and more enjoyable.
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