Godot Will Not Come Today – Nina daVinci

Joseph Ragno and Sam Coppola in Waiting for Godot. Directed by Alan Hruska. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Samuel Beckett’s masterwork, Waiting for Godot, is easier to parody than to describe and devilish to enact. It’s about loneliness and abandonment, about time and memory, in the famous wisecrack, it’s about "nothing happening twice." More respectfully, Godot is an utterly spellbinding and sad poem of our human dilemma, as moving now as when it first played, in French, in 1953. Is it dated? Only if art no longer matters.

The current production by the Actors Studio exceeds expectations. On a sterile plain, bare except for a dead tree stump, two ordinary middle-aged tramps talk, neither initiating nor concluding an idea. Time and place, the coordinates of life and drama, have been suspended, where and when remain unfathomable. There is nowhere to go and "nothing to be done," it’s the third line in the play. The chief characters, the ragged tramps Vladimir and Estragon, have been abandoned to inexpressible bleakness. They appear to be remnants of a once-knowable world, remains from some catastrophe, perhaps the physical refutation after Lear’s entire axiom: "Nothing can come of nothing." This is quintessential Beckett territory, eloquently expressed for the anniversary of its 50th production as directed by Alan Hruska.

The tramps are almost cheerful and these actors, Sam Coppola and Joseph Ragno, play the contradiction with astonishing skill. They do not quite believe themselves to be at the end of a known world, they have a vagrant memory of one Godot, who might rescue them. So they wait for this Mr. Godot, who does not come, but who sends his boy to say he will come tomorrow. And so they hope, knowing nonetheless that "hope deferred maketh the something sick," Vladimir stumbles over heart in recalling "maketh the sick heart," very much Beckett’s theme. From time to time Estragon cries out in anguish, "I’m leaving, I must go." Yet he remains rooted to his place. They need each other, for the sake of their humanity. Vladimir at opening of Act Two, in what seems to be a fit of anxiety, sings an incomprehensible song about a dog and dogs until Estragon arrives on the scene. "I missed you," Vladimir says, "and at the same time I was happy." Emotion is not predicated on event.

Some critics have suggested that Godot is an Irish-ism for God, in which case, an absent god. The absurd universe that Beckett invented with this play may be reminiscent of the morality play awaiting Christ. Either way does not change the power of the play’s existentialism, its there-ness, equally plausible since Godot is nothing if not symbolic. Estragons, also called Gogo and Vladimir, also called Didi, find themselves on that barren heath in a sort of perpetual twilight–perhaps a pre-Christian setting that also evokes the mood of King Lear. Passing across the scene, a tyrannical master, Pozzo (Ed Setrakian), whips his slave, Lucky (Martin Shakar). This action may express a metaphorical degeneration of Lear and fool into their most violent forms. Then again, the play might be the underside of King Lear, in the sense that the later "Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead" expresses the underside of Hamlet. In each case, the heroic Shakespearean work suffers a diminution of character, of point of view, of language in the act of representing the anti-heroes of our times.

Beckett’s tramps do not chat, declaim or speechify–they’re not even listening to each other. No action may proceed from their failed conversation since it is talk without the back and forth, give and take that may accumulate a meaning; the very event that Gogo desperately cries out for: "Can’t you carry your end, once in a while," after supplying both sides himself. Here we remain suspended in a condition of longing for completion, for the response that may confer humanity. Frost had a line for it: "man wants back not copy speech but original response."

The actors are perfect; a somewhat overused word in criticism but none other applies. The so-called magic of performance actually happens to keep the audience spellbound. Coppola and Ragno are middle-aged men, like the characters, grey haired, slow moving, projecting the sense of belonging absolutely to Beckett’s bleak landscape. They simply speak, unemphatically, as if retiring from theatricality, allowing the lines to serve Beckett’s poem. It may be the abstract of our time, in Hamlet’s sense of theater as the abstract of his times, but there is nothing abstract about these breathtaking performances. Every word is felt; sadness beneath the comic lines is audible; meaning is new. Their survey of that lone tree, for example, quite ugly in fact, elicits a deadpan response that might otherwise be shocking. "Let’s hang ourselves," Vladimizar says, as if testing words that have been heard but not learned. Or as if they are discovering themselves and their limits in a language unpacked of its learned responses.

Experience remains firmly anti-intellectual. Even the hat trick, the Tramps’ inspection and exchange of worn bowlers, a bit of theatrical business supposed to have inspired a turn by the Marx Brothers. Even that rests on Beckett’s "No" to cerebral conceits: a physical head wears a physical hat. But nearly any line proves the point. Estragon feels hungry and savors his carrot. Pozzo whipping Lucky makes authority mean brutality. Vladimir greets Estragon after his brief absence with the tenderest concern, embracing him: "Did they beat you?" omitting any question of whom, where, when, since abuse is universal. And the act of thinking, perhaps our most persistent bias about our humanity captured in Estragon’s order, "Think pig," turns out to be as physical an event as dancing.

There remain many small puzzles in the play, regardless of how familiar the action. With Olympian disregard, the actors rightly sail past troubles, most of them with metaphysical overtones beyond even superior enactment. For example, the text never spells out why Estragon panics when Vladimir asks where he spent the night. Or, how time may be suspended, yet night fall. "Was there a yesterday?" Estragon replies, caught off guard against something ominous. Memory, never reliable, may be dangerous. Estragon expects to be victimized. Yet both suffer their "accursed" self-consciousness, really at the core of the play. "Dead voices," more than poetry, persist beyond the grave to harry the living.

Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon: They have to talk about it.

Still, all of the play’s desolation may be summoned up by that sole, bare tree in Act One. Then a branch bursts into leaf between the acts, as if to illustrate the paradox half-spoken early on: "Do not exult, one was damned; do not despair, one was saved." The sense of contradiction extends into the play’s form, a tragicomedy, in Beckett’s words, for our time, too mad for tragedy, too ludicrous for comedy. Contemporary theater originated in the absurd.