Beckett’s Maddening Universe
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The painted twilight sky hovers over an empty horizon at the edge of the world.The arid landscape offers just one meager, spindly tree. A thin, fretful tramp wearing a filthy bowler hat and a ragged suit shuffles around; his feet hurt. He is bickering with his stout companion. Perhaps they would be better off separately. Yet he can’t bear to leave his only friend in a maddening universe that traps him, night after night, back at this tree, waiting for a visitor who never comes.
The scenario is from Samuel Beckett’s 1953 tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” Cast from elements as pure as fire, “Godot” is a hard play to lift from the page: It has a tendency to hit the stage with a series of ill-timed thuds.First-time theater director Alan Hruska has wisely called in a quartet of seasoned actors for this off-Broadway production.The result is a mild “Godot” pitched to the center: rarely gripping, but largely inoffensive.
The production’s chief virtue is its ability to generate authentic warmth between the play’s two iconic leads: Vladimir (Sam Coppola) and Estragon (Joseph Ragno).The pairing profits from the actors’ shared old New York quality; they might be two childhood pals whose dads worked together at the music hall. On occasion, the two men find the per fect contrapuntal rhythms for the characters’ back-and-forth repartee.
But there are plenty of in-between times, when the speech rhythms falter and the play coasts on the actors’ considerable rapport. At times the absurdity is played with a tinge of senility – a reasonable choice, given the play’s obsession with confused memory, but nonetheless a prosaic one.
Mr. Hruska keeps the play’s vaudeville bits free of the kind of attentiongrabbing gimmicks that have clouded some recent stagings, and Messrs. Coppola and Ragno manage the stage business well enough. But when the greedy Pozzo (Ed Setrakian) shows up with the shivering Lucky (the convincing Martin Shakar) on a leash, the energy dissipates.This Vladimir-Estragon pair clearly works best as a two-man team.
Yet virtually all productions of “Godot” have flaws, and the fact that Vladimir and Estragon are most vivid when alone onstage actually serves the play. For it is piercingly clear that the friends’ intimacy is the one comfort on this bleak heath where strangers terrify and even God is callous.
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