VLADIMIR: To every man his little cross.  Till he dies. And is forgotten.
            -Waiting for Godot

    The American director Alan Schneider first met the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in 1955, after
    being hired to direct the United States premiere of ''Waiting for Godot'' in Miami. Schneider had
    come to Beckett's Paris apartment bursting with preproduction questions, especially regarding the
    identity of the title character. To Schneider's initial query, ''Who is Godot?,'' the laconic playwright
    famously replied, ''If I knew, I would have said so in the play.''

    Henceforth, Schneider was to devote most of his career to realizing Beckett's stated intentions in his
    plays. But despite his fidelity to every letter of Beckett's text, and despite the participation of such
    popular clowns as Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, the Miami production of ''Waiting for Godot'' was a
    resounding flop. Baffled by the metaphysical reverberations of a work that had been billed as ''the
    laugh riot of two continents,'' a third of the audience left at intermission. Others lined up at the box
    office not to purchase tickets but to ask for refunds.
            -from Robert Brustein's NY Times review of The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider

To read Waiting for Godot is to bitterly envy those lucky folks who actually had the privilege of walking out and demanding their money back.  In a more just world they would have hunted down the playwright and horsewhipped him.

Here is the play in its entirety:  Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a tree for two days, expecting the imminent appearance of Godot.  Instead they are visited by a master and slave, Pozzo and Lucky, and a boy who brings them a message that Godot will soon be there. The curtain falls.  The crowd hisses.

That's it.  Godot is obviously supposed to be God (though Beckett relentless fought against others finding meaning in the work) and the play presumably demonstrates the futility of human existence: waiting around for the God who never shows.  Of course, this message is nothing new.  In fact, it is central to the story of Christ.  When he was being crucified, Jesus wailed: "Oh Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?"  It is in this moment that God/Christ came to understand man's despair and Christ then admonished: "Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do."  So 2000 years ago, it was said better in a far superior drama; why sit through this piece of crap?

One delightful irony that I found is that Beckett was adamant that production of this play--which is supposed to show the folly of existence, the impossibility of communication, etc.--follow the strict guidelines that he envisioned:

    In his autobiography, the American director Alan Schneider recalled his attendance with Samuel
    Beckett at the first run of Waiting for Godot in London in 1955. Whenever a line was
    misinterpreted or an extra piece of stage business was added, Beckett would clutch Schneider's arm
    and exclaim, in a clearly audible stage whisper, "It's ahl wrahng! He's doing it ahl wrahng!"1 That
    loud whisper still sounds in the ears of those who stage Beckett's plays now.  No other dead
    dramatist remains such a daunting admonitory presence for his directors and performers. Where
    most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical
    event. He specified, not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots,
    and these specifications are preserved in the remarkable series of notebooks whose publication by
    Faber and Faber is now completed with S.E. Gontarski's exemplary edition of Beckett's ledgers for
    productions of his short late plays.

    Where most plays invite the active participation of actors, directors, and designers in determining
    the meaning of the work, Beckett's work demands that the meaning remains indeterminate. Where
    theater artists think of themselves as interpreters, any interpretation of a Beckett play is necessarily a
    reduction. With these plays, creative intervention seems like crass interference. The director is
    haunted by the playwright's stern ghost, frowning, clutching his arm, whispering at every deviation,
    "It's ahl wrahng!"
        -from Game Without End by Fintan O'Toole (NY Review of Books)

I mean that's just beautiful.  Life is pointless, but it's my way or the highway.  You've gotta love it.  These poor existentialists have such a hard time keeping their story straight, you can sometimes almost feel sorry for them.

I took a Humanities class in High School and absolutely loathed it (some of you may recall my discussion of Ragtime which a teacher suggested I read for the class--see Review).  This was one of the things we read and even as a callow youth of 15 or 16, I was flabbergasted at what a crock it was.  Now that I'm older, crustier and, hopefully, wiser, I have even less patience with idiocy and this play is truly idiotic.

Dorothy C. Judd writes:
Dear Orrin,

It was with GREAT interest that I read your review of Waiting for Godot. I can only hope and dream that somehow your Humanities teachers, and especially Nan Hoffman, have somehow accessed your site and are reading your  reviews.

Do you remember asking me, "Who is Godot?"  And my not too confident answer,  "I think he is supposed to be God?" On your humanities test, the question was, "Who is Godot?  and how do you know?" You wrote, "Godot is God, and I know because my mother told me."  You got an A because the teacher thought it was terrific that you discussed the play with your mother!!!!!

Love,
Mom

Orrin notes:

Hell, we discussed the fact I was failing Chemistry & I still got a D in that class

(Reviewed:04-Apr-00)

Grade: (F) Orrin C. Judd

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