clockwise from top left: Tarik Trotter, Wallace Shawn, John Leguizamo and Ethan Hawkeĭespite the rather excellent performances and Beckett’s always intriguing dialogue, something is missing - something vital.
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Shawn’s reactions as the mostly mute Lucky is a masterclass in how to listen and react as an actor. When Leguizamo inches his eyes toward the camera, you can almost smell his breath. The bright side to the pre-recorded virtual offering are the close-up shots, which offer something intimate rarely found in any production: a thrilling connection with individual performances. Ethan Hawke and John LeguizamoĪnd yet, one can easily interpret that these folks are waiting for the current epidemic to end, as they are all literally in modern-day isolation (Elliot cleverly adds masks and techno-glitches such as screen freezes). While the setting has changed, Elliot still seems somewhat hampered to add much that is iconoclastic or shocking thus, while I was enjoying the performances, at just over three hours running time the delivery needed more energy, urgency, humor, and chemistry between players - the latter of which is impossible to get as they aren’t in the same room. What little we do see of designer Derek McLane‘s dusky interior appears as a Western lean-to in a time of economic depression. And even though The New Group received permission from the notoriously strict Beckett estate, using all dialogue intact, the infamous tree is not for us to see - it’s in the characters’ view, not ours. Here, director Scott Elliot, given the very limited circumstances of Zoom theater (which will probably remain after COVID is a thing of the past, Godot help us), eschews the traditional or classical production of Waiting for Godot. One gets the impression that one day for Vladimir and Estragon is much like any other day. As if to underscore the absurdity, the tedium, and the inanity of it all, both acts are nearly identical. They’re occasionally interrupted, first by Pozzo ( Tarik Trotter) and Lucky ( Wallace Shawn), then by an unnamed boy ( Drake Bradshaw). There’s basically two men, Vladimir ( Ethan Hawke) and Estragon ( John Leguizamo), waiting by the side of the road under a barren tree for someone named Godot. clockwise from top left: Tarik Trotter, Wallace Shawn, John Leguizamo, Ethan Hawke.
In a sense, they’re all valid ways of reading Waiting for Godot. There are religious, political, psychological, and sociological interpretations, allegorical and autobiographical interpretations, even homoerotic interpretations. It carries a multiplicity of meanings that accumulate like the rings on a tree or sand in an hourglass. Deep down, however, it’s about everything. On the surface, it’s about nothing at all. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not an easy play to write about, let alone produce, act, or even watch.
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