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Invitation to Santa Ynez Valley Studio Artists Tour 2009 - click here
NO MORE WAITING FOR GODOT -- IT'S BACK!
"Waiting for Godot" is set for Broadway once again (April
30, 2009). The play originally appeared on Broadway in 1956 with Bert
Lahr and E. G. Marshall and had a 60 performance run. There was an off-Broadway
production in 1988 with Steve Martin and Robin Williams. But over the
years this play has usually been staged in small theaters suited more
for exploring the art of drama.
So why do I make so much over this revival? Because of the profound
effect the play had on theater … and on me. After first reading
the play, back in the early 1960's, I sensed a new world of theatrical
and creative possibilities opening for us. I had majored in philosophy,
a field overgrown with ideas often tangled in the dullest prose. But
Godot presented ideas in dramatic form with brevity, succinctness and
emotional impact.
I had seen good stage productions such as "South Pacific"
(with the Broadway cast) and loved the spectacle of theater, the pageantry,
the colors, a few ideas about racial relationships and then there were
characters creating belief right there before my eyes. But plays like
that gave you everything. They overwhelmed you with emotion. Trouble
was, they left nothing to the imagination.
Godot with its empty stage, excepting a bare tree as the only piece
of scenery, seemed limitless. The symbolism in that tree alone has given
rise to much scholarly conjecture with its resemblance to a cross, a
gallows, and perhaps the tree of knowledge gone bare. The beauty of
the empty stage is that it allows the mind to fill in the blanks. That's
before the actors come on and mark time like adults on a playground.
Watching the play you feel some kind of force or energy and yet the
characters go nowhere. Of course the name and the action suggest our
wait for the return of the Savior (although Beckett claimed that 'Godot'
was only the name of a bicycle racer).
And so, filled with fascination for this new art, I started writing
plays. The two plays listed on another page of this website are the
result of that moment of awakening. I never read another work by Becket
that I thought much of, but he sure nailed it with Godot. Somewhere
I read that "Waiting for Godot" was voted (by whom?) the most
influential play of the 20th century. It gets my vote.
Now we will wait and see how it plays with the audience of today.