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Theatergoers who have waited for Beckett can see one of his masterpieces this month. Waiting for Godot opens Friday in a Stageworks production.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 13, 2002
Why are the plays of Samuel Beckett so rarely performed?
"People don't take on Beckett too often. I think people are daunted by him," says Anna Brennen, producing director of Stageworks.
"He goes through periods of popularity. It seems like it's cyclical. It's tough to do well," says Ken Mitchell, former artistic director of American Stage.
It is a puzzlement. Beckett is perhaps the most important playwright of the last half-century. Author of acknowledged masterpieces such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His work had a decisive influence on playwrights from Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard in Great Britain to Edward Albee and David Mamet in the United States.
Yet Beckett's work is not often staged. In the Tampa Bay area, not a single play of his has been performed outside of a school production in at least the last decade. Until now.
Waiting for Godot opens Friday in a Stageworks production, directed by Brennen. Mitchell plays Estragon, one of two tramp-clowns waiting for something that never arrives.
Debating the meaning of the play is one of the great intellectual parlor games.
"The play is about finding diversion in life while you're waiting to die, basically," Brennen says. "I think it's about man's search for meaning."
"I think it's about sitting in a doctor's office waiting to go in to the doctor to get well," Mitchell says. "I think it's about waiting for someone to fall in love with you, or waiting for a loved one to pass on so you can move on. How do we wait? How do we validate that we're here? How do we quiet the voices in our head that drive us crazy?"
Beckett's plays are often assumed to be totally bleak and all about death, but Brennen finds plenty of humor in Waiting for Godot.
"The play is full of vaudeville routine, which is why I think it's delicious. Beckett calls it a tragicomedy in two acts because there's a lot of funny stuff. I think many Godot productions are boring because they imitate what's been done before and they don't really see the humor in it. They don't have fun with it the way Beckett intended."
The Stageworks cast also has Brian Shea as Vladimir, Richard Coppinger as Lucky and Jorge Acosta as Pozzo. At one point, Brennen toyed with the idea of having women in the cast, but the playwright's estate doesn't permit deviation from the original.
"You cannot touch the script. Not a word," she says. "And when you do a professional production, you cannot do it with women. We had thought to do a mixed cast, and they would not allow that. There are a lot of terrific women comedians around. But we have to do it with all men. In college productions they will allow it."
A New York production with Steve Martin and Robin Williams sold out a limited run in 1988, but the two stars did so much improvising that it drove purists -- and the Beckett estate -- crazy.
There's a fascinating Florida footnote to the history of Waiting for Godot. The first American production, starring Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, took place in January 1956 at an unlikely venue for avant-garde drama, the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami.
"We tried it out in Miami, which was like trying it out in a truant school," Lahr said in an interview in critic Mel Gussow's book, Conversations With and About Beckett. "The biggest flop in the history of the theater. After the opening, there were 10 people out there."
Waiting for Godot went from Miami to New York, where Ewell was replaced by E.G. Marshall and the play was greeted by more bewilderment. Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times that it was "a mystery wrapped in an enigma."
One key to understanding the play lies in Beckett's Irishness, according to Brennen. Though the playwright lived in Paris and had an ambivalent, if not hostile, relationship with his homeland, he was steeped in Irish culture and language.
"The characters in Godot are recognizable as stock-in-trade guys hanging around a pub talking to each other," she says. "There are things in the play that are just like barroom chitchat. It reeks of the Irish understanding of relationships between men."
PREVIEW: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett opens Friday and runs through June 30 at Hillsborough Community College, 15th Street and Palm Avenue, Ybor City. Shows at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $12 and $15. (813) 258-6757.