Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
The wisecracks began even before practices. “Hoping for Bill and Ted”; “Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Journey”; “Party On, Godot!” How could we resist jesting when Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, that most excellent pair from the renowned 1989 comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” revealed intentions to feature in a staging of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”? The director was to be the British sensation Jamie Lloyd, whose efforts occasionally lack rational sense but always boast famous faces—he cast Tom Hiddleston in a theatrical “Betrayal,” Nicole Scherzinger in a graphic “Sunset Boulevard.” Excitement grew, yet my own hopes for a dude-centric “Godot” were minimal. Sounds phony, I chuckled inwardly.
But then I witnessed this show’s stunning, crafted set at the Hudson Theatre. In the 1954 work, Beckett stipulates that his tragicomedy—two Chaplin-esque vagrants await a potential employer (or rescuer?) who doesn’t appear—should be staged outdoors. “A country road. A tree. Evening,” the text states, and Beckett’s rights holders have been rigorous about those elements being present as depicted. Yet Lloyd’s longtime cohort, the costume and set creator Soutra Gilmour, covers the Hudson’s stage with a twenty-four-foot-tall tunnel entrance, the round aperture to what seems like a section of immense drain fashioned in forced perspective. This grand shape belittles the actors, who take cover within it like mice in a channel. Its plywood sides appear, under stark illumination, akin to marble.
Gilmour’s set—at once a nod to Fascist construction, a path to nowhere, and a toilet gag—reinforces the show in several manners. Lengthy exchanges between the somber Estragon (Reeves) and his more spirited partner, Vladimir (Winter), happen with the bowler-topped duo perched on the stage-edge of the drain, which eases the difficulty for performers whose most recent genuine stage performances occurred at least three decades prior. Winter, whose evident intellect propels the production, is adept in both madness and reflection, but Reeves is a strikingly uneasy figure, as clumsy as a fish on dry land whenever he rises. Here the set turns into a comedy machine, a series of curved surfaces against which Reeves can lean and slump downward effortlessly. It’s helpful that one finds oneself wanting to shield the large klutz. The crowd reacts sweetly each time Winter embraces him.
“Godot” is not generally a performance where one reacts sweetly. It’s a purgatorial skit, a morbid joke for all mortals. (Bored senseless, the companions consider hanging themselves because at least they’ll get erections as a result.) “Nothing to be done,” Estragon complains in the play’s opening sentence, and even casual existentialists will recognize Beckett’s premise.
Toward the close of the initial act, when Godot neglects to show up, a youth—I observed Eric Williams—guarantees Vladimir that Godot “won’t come this evening but surely to-morrow.” The play then folds onto itself, like a person in abdominal distress. (“Nothing happens, twice,” the Irish critic Vivian Mercier declared, and every critic has been cursed to repeat him subsequently.) The pretentious landlord Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his abused servant, Lucky (the exceptional Michael Patrick Thornton), have met Vladimir and Estragon along the road; during the similar-but-different second act, the pair of them come prancing past again, though Pozzo has no recollection of their former encounter. Estragon, also, has blanked the preceding day. Only Vladimir is conscious both of their repeating reality and of the notion that, if Godot is any bit like the God of the Bible, he’ll play favorites. Vladimir implies that the pair’s sweet bond may not endure another repetition of their Groundhog Day. “One of the thieves was saved,” he reflects, his thoughts on the Crucifixion. “It’s a reasonable percentage.”
In Beckett’s play, the cruel windbag Pozzo chains Lucky with a rope and compels him to bear his baggage until Lucky collapses, but Lloyd declines to employ the needed props—actors mention bags that are absent; Lucky isn’t beaten, so Lucky doesn’t recoil. Lloyd has functioned cleverly inside the constraints of his specific Vladimir and Estragon by coloring the characters’ codependent interaction with Reeves and Winter’s mutual affection and sincere friendship, but, in the instance of Pozzo and Lucky, his directorial choices undermine the connection. (Lloyd has Thornton don a Hannibal Lecter-esque bite protector, rendering his Lucky more daunting than his supposedly frightful master.) Thank Godot, then, that despite all that folly, Dirden is the supreme Pozzo I’ve yet witnessed: a comical, scene-stealing melodrama villain sporting a black beard and sunglasses, issuing bored commands in a Southern drawl, standing on his dung-heap dignity like Foghorn Leghorn. Empty power is, we understand, the most terrifying. This Pozzo has no inkling what’s occurring—somehow Dirden conveys the feeling of his eyes darting wildly around, even behind those tinted lenses—but he surely knows he’s in command.
I was taken with the production’s visual scale and fascinated by the actors’ unexpected warmth, but I didn’t feel deeply impacted by this “Godot” until, strangely, I saw another show entirely. A couple of days later, I went to “All Right. Good Night.,” a play by the German group Rimini Protokoll, which ran for a mere three days in September, at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center. In “All Right” ’s script, the author Helgard Haug interweaves two instances of “unclear loss”: the still unsolved enigma of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished over the Indian Ocean in 2014, and the steady progression of Haug’s own father’s dementia. Kin of those lost on the plane weren’t sure when to mourn; neither was she.
There aren’t scenes as such in “All Right”—the title alludes to the presumed farewell given by the pilot of MH370 in his last known communication—rather, the text is projected onto a scrim, behind which a chamber ensemble performs a two-and-a-half-hour electro-classical piece by Barbara Morgenstern. Sometimes the musicians stand in line, as if they’re at check-in (the sound designer, Peter Breitenbach, inserts the drone of the Kuala Lumpur airport); sometimes they sit on a sandy beach, where projected swells lap on a virtual shore.
Haug makes it intentionally ambiguous when she’s changing between her subjects. “Where are you?” a supertitle reads, which might apply to a sonar signal issued by air-traffic control to the missing airplane, or to the daughter, trying to discern how much of her father’s mind remains. The show is long because each process is long. For years, searchers persist in scouring the ocean; families inquire daily at an embassy for updates; the fading father keeps demanding respect, even as he refuses the care he requires. Forced to reside in a nursing residence, he comes to believe that he is the overseer, in what Haug describes as an “incredible mental strategy” to handle his reliance on others. He’s content there for a period in his delusion, bestowing gracious commendations and hesitant reprimands to “his” staff. I considered then the oblivious Pozzo, who has become blind in “Godot” ’s second act and needs Vladimir and Estragon’s support to stand. He, also, has determined that an attitude of command is a great comfort when one is lying supine.
Actually, I spent much of “All Right” thinking about the Beckett play, mapping its somber wisdom onto the real events of Haug’s text. It arises that it’s not merely existential rambling to express that life entails exhausting repetition, nor that understanding how a story will conclude—the father’s dementia will only intensify, MH370’s wreckage will wash up on various coasts—can preempt our experiencing it. Three days after I’d smiled at Winter’s Vladimir, I found myself suddenly devastated for him, thinking of him patiently explaining to his amnesiac friend that, yes, they had noticed that tree before, that here were his boots, that they couldn’t depart without receiving the assistance they needed. Assistance, naturally, isn’t arriving—not over the Indian Ocean, not in the nursing home, not on the tramps’ moonlit path. But still, they should tarry. Just in case. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
