Theatre in Review: Waiting for Godot (Theatre for a New Audience)

	Jeff Bieh, Michael Shannon, Ajay Naidu, Paul Sparks. Photo: Gerry Goodstein

Sometimes you're at a play that seems as familiar as an old shoe when a line leaps out, causing you to see it through new eyes. This happened to me the other night at TFANA, where Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks are mining fresh insights out of Samuel Beckett's bleak existential comedy. Digging beneath the surface of the script's vaudevillian routines, the actors strike a vein of profound unease. Waiting for Godot originally shocked audiences with its portrait of two tramps marooned in an empty landscape where nothing happens; honoring Beckett's vision --"There's no lack of void," one of them cracks -- Shannon and Sparks create characters terrified by the nagging thought that maybe, just maybe, they don't exist. A play wildly mis-advertised in its 1956 Broadway tryout as "The Laugh Sensation of Two Continents" just about lives up to that slogan here, thanks to peerless star performances and inventive direction, but the laughter comes with the hint of a death rattle.

As Estragon, Shannon is first seen hunched over in a defensive crouch, worn down by lack of food, lack of sleep, and lack of hope. With his jacket and pants hanging off him and a porkpie hat resting uneasily on his crown, he has the dazed look of a punch-drunk boxer. Most actors make a full comic routine out of Estragon trying to take off his offending boot; Shannon turns it into an epic struggle as if peeling off a layer of skin. He also calls up hilarity from Estragon's state of utter futility. Surveying his desolate environment, he comments mildly, "Charming spot. Inspiring prospects," like a tourist checking out the local sights. When Pozzo, the slave-driving interloper who keeps passing through, has the unsettling realization, "I don't seem able to depart," Shannon barely raises a shoulder and says, "Such is life," delivering the line with the bland assurance of someone who knows that, since the dawn of time, the fix has been in. Anxiously pressed by his companion to remember a comment made earlier that day -- in Godot, memory is a sieve -- he disavows all responsibility, announcing, "I'm not a historian." When it comes to bodily matters -- hoping for a carrot to assuage his hunger and getting a lousy turnip; grabbing a chicken bone off the ground and gnawing it like a desperate canine -- he can work up quite a fury but, most of the time, despair is so baked into his bones it almost seems like serenity.

In contrast, Sparks' Vladimir is a ball of undirected energy, a pixie with Yosemite Sam hair and a wardrobe of filthy rags (the superb costumes are by Susan Hilferty), who communicates with grand rhetorical flourishes that, once delivered, hang in the air, waiting for a response that never comes. He is a glass-half-full guy, whether producing dubious edibles from the depths of his greasy pockets, "exercising" by waving his arms like a stick-figure puppet, or pacing up and down Riccardo Hern ández two-lane highway set in search of a purpose, any purpose. Indeed, he is an apostle of positive thinking, urging Estragon to be happy (the latter responds with a rictus-like grin) and, staring at a sad-looking tree, announcing, with a bow, "Yesterday evening it was all black and bare. And now it's covered with leaves." (In fact, it has sprouted exactly two, neither of which looks robust.) But, like Shannon, Sparks invests Vladimir with a distinctively black wit. When Estragon, having been kicked in the shins, cries out, "I'll never walk again," Vladimir reassures him, "I'll carry you," adding after a beat, "If necessary." The actor's reading of that conditional phrase is the very essence of Beckett, as is his handling of Vladimir's assessment of Christ's crucifixion: "One of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage."

There's much more to like about Arin Arbus' production, which delivers the basic contours of Beckett's play while filling in intriguing new details. Ajay Naidu is the most authoritative Pozzo I've ever seen, entering with his servant, Lucky, attached to a rope that spans the TFANA auditorium, cracking his whip with alarming skill, and giving an arrestingly bitter reading of a passage that, in many ways, sums up the play: "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." Young Toussaint Francois Battiste is fine as the boy -- or boys, one can never be sure -- who repeatedly appears with the news that Godot will not be arriving today but is sure to come tomorrow.

But it was Jeff Biehl's Lucky -- Pozzo's unhappy, seemingly mute servant -- who made me look at Godot anew. In addition to being a beast of burden, Lucky can do party tricks; commanded to think and recite, he launches into a lengthy speech that is Beckett's last word on critical twaddle, a hailstorm of subordinate clauses that never arrive at anything like meaning. (It's almost as if the playwright had already envisioned the academic industry that would spring up around his works and was taking premature revenge.) Biehl delivers the speech in a mounting frenzy as if possessed by his nonsensical words, but one phrase that goes flying by is "since the death of Bishop Berkeley."

Second-guessing Beckett is a dangerous game, but Bishop George Berkeley was an 18th-century Irish philosopher, whose concept of "immaterialism" didn't accept the existence of material substance, instead asserting that objects only existed because they are perceived. This idea, I think, reveals the disquiet at the play's heart. Sparks' Vladimir is terrified by silence, anxious to keep the conversation with Vladimir going at all costs. ("Come on, Gogo," he says, coaxingly, "return the ball, can't you, once in a way?") Estragon complains, "You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too." "Then why do you come crawling back?" wonders Vladimir. When Pozzo, now blinded, returns with Lucky, having no memory of his previous encounter with the men, or when the boy insists that he has never seen them before, you can feel their mounting fear. If nobody acknowledges your existence, might you be a phantom, a figment of someone's imagination? Might you not vanish into the surrounding nothingness? It's little wonder that Estragon and Vladimir feel helplessly yoked together; only in each other's eyes can they be certain, more or less, of their reality.

Shannon and Sparks also bring a renewed appreciation of the mortality that haunts the play. In a despondent moment, Estragon says, "The best thing would be to kill me like the other." "What other?" asks Vladimir. "Like billions of others," replies Estragon. It's a statement that reverberates, uncomfortably. A few minutes later, Vladimir, looking around the empty stage, asks, "Where are all these corpses from?", seeing, in his mind's eye, "A charnel house!" In passages like these, one suddenly remembers that Waiting for Godot was written in the wake of a Europe ravaged by war and the Holocaust by a playwright who belonged to the French Resistance.

Arbus continues to impress as a director who is at home with all sorts of canonical works, enlivening them without resorting to staging tricks or out-of-left-field reinterpretations. She also gets the best out of her collaborators; in addition to those designers already mentioned, Christopher Akerlind floods the stage with stark sunlight looks that can, in a second, snap into a deep blue nighttime wash. Sound designer Palmer Hefferan provides some appropriate ambient noises, including cicadas, in the preset.

Most of all, Arbus gives us a Godot in which humor and the sheer terror of non-existence go hand in hand. If, as T.S. Eliot wrote, John Webster "saw the skull beneath the skin," Beckett sniffed out the decaying flesh that is our common fate. (Or, as Tennessee Williams called it, "The long parade to the graveyard.") As perhaps only an Irish writer could do, however, Beckett treated this dilemma as a huge cosmic joke. It's not for nothing that the play climaxes in a suicide attempt followed by a dropped pants gag. In the playwright's view, that's how it is on "this bitch of an earth." You have to laugh, or else. --David Barbour