134 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

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1 134 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Waiting for Godot, directed by Anthony Page, at Studio 54, New York. Cast: Nathan Lane as Estragon, Bill Irwin as Vladimir, John Goodman as Pozzo, John Glover as Lucky, and Cameron Clifford and Matthew Schechter as the Boy, Roundabout Theatre Company, Studio 54, Broadway, New York, NY, USA 30 April 12 July Just minutes before showtime, a stand-by line forms in the lobby of Studio 54, a theatre between 8 th Avenue and Broadway that shares the block with David Letterman. Tonight s performance is sold out. I already have a ticket and so proceed past limbo and enter the theatre. It s huge. Many of the playgoers have taken their seats, some in orchestra, some in mezzanine. For about $120, I get to sit in the sixth row. This road is not free to all. I am unsure how many of the wait-listed make it in; some no doubt return to the heat of the July 5 th evening. Before exiting the lobby, they at least get to read about the Tony-nominated production. Two giant-sized articles are on display, along with a poster of critical snippets from Newsday and Variety. Maybe the acclaim will bring them back tomorrow. Surely they will get in then. As I wait for the curtain to go up, I notice there s a curtain, a very big curtain coming down from the proscenium arch. I also notice some of the rocky terrain that juts out from beneath it. Soon, a man begins to tug at his boot. Another talks to him. Another and another arrive to talk some more. Curtain. Intermission. Curtain up. Back to it. If you re reading this, you know very well what does and does not happen. So let me instead spend time discussing why the Roundabout Theatre Company s Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot both succeeds and fails. The director, Anthony Page, clearly has a fine understanding of the piece and how to play it. He designs a show that sells out, that cannot accommodate the masses. Mistakes are few. He does not mess much with pauses. Silence is rather absent. I have seen productions of the play in which time seems not to move. But this, unlike the goings-on inside Hamm s shelter, is not slow work. Act II flies by. I am not one for dragging it out. Producer: Bring Godot to Broadway. Page: Done. Some very big names grace the marquis. In dingy suits and bowlers, Nathan Lane (Estragon) and Beckett-veteran Bill Irwin (Vladimir) work well together. They have excellent comic timing

2 Production Reviews 135 and elicit laughs. Irwin starts out a bit rough, but he wins me over. He emerges as the best of the group. John Goodman plays Pozzo and is larger than most I ve seen. Completely bald under his bowler, he wears a brown suit and tie, pants tucked into boots. He works hard, especially when he flails around on the ground intermittently in the second act (when he comes out for the curtain call, he appears winded and in need of a stool). John Glover s Lucky is the most disturbing. His stage left entrance in Act I is quick and awkward, as it should be. He struggles across the country road with Pozzo s items and disappears into the wings stage right as his master makes his entrance. When he re-appears, he stands before the audience drooling and bleeding, from his nose, I believe. Rope burns around the neck. I am nervous, a little scared, in awe. Matthew Schechter as the Boy is adequate (I say adequate because I don t know that the role could ever allow an actor to be anything beyond that; there are no small roles, except for the Boy in Godot). The set is appropriately a barren road encompassed by high uneven boulders lining the back of the stage. Another big rock, stage left, provides a kind of barrier out from which Vladimir, Lucky, and Pozzo all make their entrances. The low mound is downstage left, and the tree stands just stage right of center stage, extending nearly if not completely into the flies. It appears realistic with a few branches, one of which breaks off when Gogo grabs it. Some grass surrounds its base. Maybe that tree is the cause of this production s woe. Or rather, it serves as a symptom of the disease. Like the crowd, like the theatre, like the stage, like the curtain, the tree is too big. This Godot is too big. I would prefer a much smaller venue, a sparse crowd, less notoriety. How about a stage ten feet by ten feet by ten feet? Yes, nice dimensions, nice proportions. No set, or at least not one with semi-realistic rock formations that cover the entire acting space. Perhaps a single rock. I would hire Barnett Newman s ghost to draw me a tree, or just use his zip from Mitternacht Blau. Already a worn idea. In 2000, I saw a production of the play in San Diego, CA, in which the tree was painted onto a canvas near the back wall of the set. 1 So the sun shines. Following the performance, I spend some time thinking about the relevance of Godot. Something wrong. What is it? I wonder

3 136 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES if the play belongs on Broadway. Or even in Where does it belong? In 1953? In the Théâtre de Babylone? Where is Beckett s place among Shrek the Musical, Mamma Mia!, and 9 to 5? Has the world s acceptance of Godot proven its irrelevance? Has the play arrived? Has it been weighed in the balances, found worthy, and, in turn, wanting? Is Beckett s fiction, as other scholars contend, the base of his reputation as a writer? In his informative study, Waiting for Godot: Plays in Production, David Bradby offers a useful history of the play s productions on both the East and West Coasts. According to Bradby, the original 1956 Broadway production was a commercial venture that depended on pleasing crowds and appeasing actors (Bradby, 2001, 90 96). It was nevertheless successful, not a triumph but a respectable result, especially after the débâcle of the Coconut Grove (Bradby, 2001, 96). Yet Herbert Blau s experimental group in San Francisco, CA, was much more interested in the avant-garde nature of the work. Bradby comments that Blau s production: was done on the opposite side of the continent, and in the opposite spirit: the spirit of the Beat poets and of the experimental avant-garde. The Actors Workshop of San Francisco had been founded in 1952 by Herbert Blau and Jules Irving with the precise aim of challenging New York s dominance. (Bradby, 2001, 96) Bradby s remarks help me pinpoint why this Godot fails. In light of his chronicle, I see that I need a much darker Godot, one where the audience would mutter to one another, occasionally walk out noisily, or even get into arguments with one another in mid-performance (Bradby, 2001, 54). Godot is a kind of truth, and I fear that its promulgation will be the end of it, will be its watering down. I d rather it not receive any Tony nominations. As Beckett s wife Suzanne responded to news of her husband s Nobel Prize, Quelle catastrophe! In Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon muses on the need to keep Truth from those who will most likely lead to its destruction: [Truth] is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power [...] She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and

4 Production Reviews 137 Cranks of evr y Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. (Pynchon, 1996, 350) Page s production provides too much exposure. I feel the need to toss a coat and bowler over the play and smuggle it out of the building. But who would assist me? Maybe Blau knows a guy or two. On the way out, we could stop to purchase any number of souvenirs, from mugs, to t-shirts, to posters, to Paul Lawley s recent book, Waiting for Godot : Character Studies. The Roundabout Theatre Company is a non-profit organisation, which at one time had the right idea. The company got its start in 1965 by Gene Feist and his wife Elizabeth Owens. According to Roundabout s website: Feist wanted to do classic plays by authors like Ibsen and Shaw and thought that a subscription series at an affordable price would be of interest to New Yorkers. Roundabout s first production of Strindberg s The Father was presented in a 150-seat theatre of the basement of a supermarket in Chelsea. ( Short History, 2006, par. 1) The going rate for their first productions was $5 for three shows. Time passes. Roundabout just needs to move the piece to a pocket theatre in Paris and dig up those wire coat hangers and brown wrapping tissue Roger Blin and Sergio Gerstein used to make the original tree (Bradby, 2001, 55). Otherwise, Page accomplishes what Blin prescribes for the play the correct balance : [E]ssentially, the work we did during the rehearsal period, Blin remarks, was to find the correct balance between laughter and emotion, not tipping over into farce, nor into weepiness (Blin quoted in Bradby, 2001, 58). Right balance, but wrong address. I should consider the possibility that any production of Godot will necessarily be a failure, that I ve simply seen the play too many times, that its novelty is long gone, that no production will ever capture what I want it to be. Once on a tour bus in Dublin, I had a conversation with the driver about navigating through the heavy

5 138 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES traffic and pedestrians of city streets. I guess you get used to it, I said to him. He replied, You get used to everything. I ll probably even get used to looking at the production poster that now hangs on my wall. Paul Shields DOI: /E X NOTES 1. See my review A Pail for Weariness: Waiting for Godot at the Lyceum Space, The Journal of Beckett Studies 9.1 (1999): WORKS CITED A Short History of Roundabout Theatre Company: A Bright Idea, Web, 15 September 2006, 4 December 2009, http//: org/history1.htm Bradby, David (2001), Waiting for Godot: Plays in Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pynchon, Thomas (1996), Mason & Dixon, NewYork:HenryHoltand Company Inc.