I liked the designer Qween Jean’s past-midnight cowboy look for Hawke and Mets cap and tank top pandemic ensemble for Leguizamo. It’s not that you need to be literal with “Waiting for Godot” it’s anything but a naturalistic drama. Vladimir and Estragon check out of the Zoom call for much of the harangue, encouraging us to think we might do so as well. And though Shawn, delivering Lucky’s impossible speech - nine minutes of gibberish - is able to make convincing emotional sense of the moment, the production as a whole doesn’t support his efforts. (He has lovely moments, though.) Trotter, who under the name Black Thought was a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, uses his terrific stage voice to capture Pozzo’s first-act bluster without resorting to flailing, but has a harder time with the humbled version of the character who returns in Act II.Īt least Drake Bradshaw, in the small role of Godot’s young herald, is sweetly effective in both his appearances. That problem encourages a certain degree of overacting, especially from Hawke, as if he were trying to make himself visible from a distance. (Estragon was first played on Broadway by the great vaudevillian and erstwhile Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.) The undercard, Pozzo and Lucky, are no comic slouches either together, the four wanderers, with their long-honed routines and jags of passive-aggressive mayhem, outnumber and upstage the Three Stooges. The thumbprints of Buster Keaton, and especially Laurel and Hardy, are all over its main characters, the broken-down migrant workers Vladimir and Estragon. Its portrait of life as a charnel house may be half the story but in this case, it’s the only half.Īfter all, Beckett called “Godot” a tragicomedy, presumably with emphasis on the second part of the word because the first part speaks for itself. Decades of high school lit seminars, let alone the gradual opening of the playgoing class’s eyes to the world’s inequities and terrors, have transformed it from an enigmatic museum piece into an existential tchotchke.īut there is more to “Waiting for Godot,” which the New Group has just released as a lugubrious film starring Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo, than its status as a modern classic suggests. Now, though some of the references have become more obscure with time, it’s hard to imagine anyone not fathoming the play’s gist. When actors with access to its author, Samuel Beckett, demanded explanations from him, he usually professed himself helpless to answer. Early audiences were baffled by “Waiting for Godot.” Even Peter Hall, who in 1955 directed the first English language production, claimed not to understand it.
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