WAITING FOR GODOT
(2025, Broadway)
by Samuel Beckett
Directed by Jamie Lloyd
Starring Kenau Reeves and Alex Winter
Hudson Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
I can’t speak for any critic but myself on this, but I find, in my 71st year on earth and my approximately 53rd year of avocational theatre critic-ing, there are a number of classic plays I have a hard time bringing myself to see yet again. It almost doesn’t matter how well they’re done, it’s the repetition of text, the inevitable comparison to memories of better interpretations from my younger years (there always are, and they’re not romanticized) and something almost ritualistic about marking the signature moments as they’re about to come up.
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett has of course become one of those—more recently than one might imagine—simply by nature of being abstractly existential and plotless and literally a study of inertia, making it completely dependent upon the director’s concept and the performers.
So I’m surprised and happy to report that even I found something worth celebrating in the current Broadway revival, and it’s this: If your primary reason for attending is the reunion of Bill and Ted film stars Kenau Reeves and Alex Winter, as Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) respectively, they are actually the kind of expert clowns Beckett seems to have desired. They have the chemistry of long-standing friends and the timing of an iconic comedy team. Of particular note is the dexterity of that timing, often rhythmically rapid-fire and they send it without even the slightest evidence of the preparatory truth: that it must have been drilled and rehearsed to within an inch of its existence. And theirs.
They seem to be in command of their physical comedy too, but this is harder to gauge, because director Jamie Lloyd has decided to stage it within a vast tunnel (resembling nothing so much as the central set piece in Irwin Allen’s mid-60s science fiction series The Time Tunnel), rather than the vast, empty expanse for two small men to be overwhelmed by, particularized by Beckett. The tunnel jams actors together when they’re not engaged in stances that accommodate the curvature, and also restricts the range of physical comedy. An open space has open possibility. A tunnel can only accommodate slip-and-slide bits. Mr. Lloyd may have wanted this to symbolize the hopeless repetition of Didi and Gogo’s existence, but the text does that work handily; it needs no get it? get it? illustration. This also compromises the petit tyrant grandeur of Branden Dirden’s otherwise perfectly fine Pozzo.
Another “revolutionary” touch happens when Pozzo commands his silent, beleaguered servant Lucky (Michael Patrick Thornton) to “think.” Traditionally, when this breaks Lucky’s silence, the speech is an ever more rapid cascade of ruminative, philosophical-academic madness; it can never make literal sense, which is part of what makes it a tour de force; the other part being how the actor molds its sounds and repeated motifs. Lloyd chooses to isolate Lucky in a spotlight and have him deliver the speech in measured phrases, with assiduous clarity. As if hearing the madness slowly…what. Makers it more mad? Less mad? It’s another illustrative violation of the author’s intent, and seems, like the tunnel, to exist simply because no one’s ever done it that way before. And/or because he desires to give the piece a kind of deconstructive linearity. Such would be perfectly suited to literary criticism, but as a performance piece, the play actively resists it. (Go to YouTube and see the Public Television version starring Zero Mostel, and Burgess Meredith—plus Kurt Kasznar [the US original Pozzo] and Alvin Epstein [the US original Lucky]; listen to Epstein’s build from roil to boil and inability to turn off the nightmare of his perception, punctuated by his repeated desperate screeching of Not so fast!, a rhetorical phrase that might mean “Don’t judge too quickly,” but here means, How do I make this stop???)
Ironically, Mr. Lloyd also contradicts his own approach by having the actors pantomime props (the carrot, the radish, the suitcases., the chicken bones), which has the potential to be confusing to any who don’t know the play.
For all that, Lloyd is technically a more-than-competent veteran director, so his vision is at least a vision…and he has the wisdom to let his stars’ unique chemistry and interplay set the general pace (Lucky’s speech aside). And with Waiting for Godot, which can easily get trapped in the other extreme, that can often, put to judicious use, be a good thing.