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The wisecracks arose even before practice. “Awaiting Bill and Ted”; “Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Escapade”; “Party on, Godot!” How could we avoid quips after Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, that most superb duo from the cherished 1989 slacker film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” revealed intentions to feature in a recreation of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”? The director was to be the British sensation Jamie Lloyd, whose output occasionally lacks sensible reason but never performers—he cast Tom Hiddleston in a theatrical “Betrayal,” Nicole Scherzinger in a gory “Sunset Boulevard.” Excitement grew, yet my personal hopes for a dude-centric “Godot” were minimal. Seems fishy, I chuckled quietly.
However, I then beheld this production’s magnificent, sculpted setting at the Hudson Theatre. In the 1954 writing, Beckett demands that his tragicomedy—two Chaplinesque vagrants await a potential employer (or rescuer?) who fails to materialize—must be staged outdoors. “A rural path. A tree. Nightfall,” the manuscript reads, and Beckett’s licensing firm has been firm about those components appearing as described. Nevertheless, Lloyd’s longtime partner, the garment and stage creator Soutra Gilmour, occupies the Hudson’s stage space with a twenty-four-foot-high passage entry, the round aperture to what resembles a length of immense sewer fashioned in forced perspective. This striking structure diminishes the players, who take cover inside it like rodents in a drain. Its wood pieces appear, under frigid beams, as marble.
Gilmour’s backdrop—simultaneously an allusion to Fascist design, a channel to nothing, and a rude jest—strengthens the presentation in various ways. Lengthy dialogues between the sad Estragon (Reeves) and his more lively colleague, Vladimir (Winter), happen with the derby-wearing pair perched on the stage-side fringe of the drain, which lessens the degree of difficulty for artists whose most recent earnest stage endeavors were at least three decades prior. Winter, whose evident acumen motivates the spectacle, is refined in both frenzy and reflection, but Reeves is a strikingly uneasy figure, as clumsy as a fish out of water anytime he rises. Here the backdrop becomes a humor trigger, a series of bending sides that Reeves can lean against and descend limply. It’s useful that you feel the need to guard the gentle giant. The crowd expresses affection each time Winter embraces him.
“Godot” isn’t usually a spectacle where you express fondness. It’s a liminal vaudeville, a morbid joke for all mortals. (Bored stiff, the partners contemplate self-harm since at least they’ll achieve erections as a result.) “Nothing to be done,” Estragon moans in the show’s opening line, and even casual existentialists will grasp Beckett’s premise.
At the close of the opening segment, when Godot doesn’t arrive, a youngster—I spotted Eric Williams—guarantees Vladimir that Godot “won’t come this evening but surely to-morrow.” The drama then folds itself in half, like a human with a stomachache. (“Nothing happens, twice,” the Irish critic Vivian Mercier remarked, and every reviewer has been compelled to echo him subsequently.) The inflated landowner Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his mistreated servant, Lucky (the exceptional Michael Patrick Thornton), have run into Vladimir and Estragon along the road; during the same-but-distinct second act, the two of them come prancing by once more, though Pozzo has no recollection of their earlier meeting. Estragon, as well, has blanked on the prior day. Only Vladimir is conscious both of their repeated reality and of the notion that, if Godot is at all similar to the God of the Bible, he’ll favor certain people. Vladimir suggests that the pair’s warm connection might not endure another rendition of their déjà vu. “One of the thieves was saved,” he reflects, his thoughts on the Crucifixion. “It’s a reasonable percentage.”
In Beckett’s drama, the cruel blowhard Pozzo chains Lucky with a cord and forces him to tote his baggage until Lucky collapses, but Lloyd declines to employ the necessary props—performers mention bags that are nonexistent; Lucky isn’t beaten, so Lucky doesn’t wince. Lloyd has operated smartly within the constraints of his specific Vladimir and Estragon by infusing the characters’ interdependent rapport with Reeves and Winter’s mutual kindness and true friendship, but, concerning Pozzo and Lucky, his directorial choices undermine the relationship. (Lloyd has Thornton don a Hannibal Lecter-esque face covering, rendering his Lucky more ominous than his supposedly intimidating master.) Thank goodness for Godot, then, that despite all that ludicrousness, Dirden is the most impressive Pozzo I’ve ever witnessed: a side-splitting, scene-stealing melodramatic villain with a dark beard and shades, lazily issuing bored orders in a Southern intonation, standing on his pile of waste prestige like Foghorn Leghorn. Empty authority is, we recognize, the most frightening. This Pozzo is clueless about what’s unfolding—somehow Dirden conveys the sense of his eyes moving wildly about, even behind those opaque lenses—but he unequivocally knows he’s in control.
I felt admiration for the presentation’s physical magnificence and captivated by the players’ unexpected warmth, yet I didn’t find myself profoundly affected by this “Godot” until, oddly, I observed an entirely different spectacle. Several days later, I attended “All Right. Good Night.,” a play by the German assembly Rimini Protokoll, which performed for only three days in September, at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center. In “All Right” ’s screenplay, the writer Helgard Haug interweaves two instances of “ambiguous bereavement”: the as yet unsolved enigma of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished over the Indian Ocean in 2014, and the steady advancement of Haug’s own father’s senility. Relatives of those lost on the plane were unsure when to mourn; neither was she.
There aren’t scenes as such in “All Right”—the heading alludes to the assumed farewell spoken by the pilot of MH370 in his final known communication—instead, the text is displayed onto a scrim, behind which a chamber group performs a two-and-a-half-hour electro-classical composition by Barbara Morgenstern. Occasionally the instrumentalists stand aligned, as if they’re at registration (the sound architect, Peter Breitenbach, includes the drone of the Kuala Lumpur airport); at times they sit on a sandy coast, where projected breakers lap at a simulated shore.
Haug renders it purposely ambiguous when she’s switching between her subjects. “Where are you?” a supertitle reads, which might allude to a sonar echo dispatched by air-traffic management to the absent aircraft, or to the daughter, striving to ascertain how much of her father’s intellect remains. The show is extended because each undertaking is extended. For years, searchers persevere in combing the sea; families inquire daily at an embassy for updates; the deteriorating father persists in demanding deference, even as he declines the care he requires. Compelled to reside in a retirement facility, he begins to believe that he is the supervisor, in what Haug describes as an “astounding mental stratagem” to manage his dependency on others. He’s content there for a period in his fantasy, dispensing gracious congratulations and grudging warnings to “his” staff. I reflected then on the absentminded Pozzo, who has become sightless in “Godot” ’s second portion and needs Vladimir and Estragon’s aid to rise. He, likewise, has discerned that an aura of command is a substantial consolation when you’re reclining.
Indeed, I devoted a significant portion of “All Right” contemplating the Beckett drama, mapping its dismal insight onto the real occurrences of Haug’s writing. It materializes that it’s not merely existential theorizing to assert that life consists of enervating repetition, nor that understanding how a narrative will conclude—the father’s dementia will only intensify, MH370’s debris will wash ashore on various beaches—can circumvent our experiencing it. Three days after I’d grinned at Winter’s Vladimir, I discovered myself abruptly devastated for him, pondering him patiently elucidating to his amnesic comrade that, yes, they had seen that tree previously, that here were his boots, that they couldn’t depart without obtaining the support they required. Aid, naturally, isn’t arriving—not over the Indian Ocean, not in the retirement facility, not on the vagrants’ moonlit path. Yet still, they should linger. Just in the event. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
