The fire next time, perhaps.

The iconic parched-earth landscape of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” which is receiving an illuminating revival by the reliably ambitious Classical Theatre of Harlem, has given way to water. Lots of water.

With the curtain drawn before the performance, all that is visible in the foreground is a stage-spanning, comfortably cool (I checked when nobody was looking), approximately waist-deep (I didn’t check that) swimming pool. The water shimmers off the curtain, lit enticingly by Aaron Black. It’s a deeply calming sight, and for perhaps the first time ever, the purgatorial limbo that Vladimir (Wendell Pierce) and Estragon (J. Kyle Manzay) are about to face doesn’t seem so bleak.

Not so fast: The sounds of lapping waves take on a decidedly different quality the minute the curtains part. Except for a bare tree and a stray telephone line, Troy Hourie’s masterful set is devoted almost entirely to a two-tiered tar roof, caved in at places and pitched forward at a precarious angle. Didi and Gogo, as they’re colloquially known, are not on a beach or a lakefront. They are in their home – or, in an image instantly familiar from last year’s Hurricane Katrina news footage, on their home. And as we saw last year, help is not necessarily imminent.

As with so many radical reconceptions of a classic, director Christopher McElroen’s take – the only major Beckett production scheduled in New York for the playwright’s centennial – provides its share of insights as well as the occasional thematic clunker. Didi, the more philosophical of the pair, laments near the end that “habit is a great deadener,” and by the same token, a well considered breaking of habit can bring things to life. Here and throughout, the text sits so comfortably with the cast’s colloquial delivery that I was convinced the play – which I’ve read and seen at least a half dozen times, including as recently as this winter – had been rewritten here and there.

The title character has rarely seemed so absent, so unreachable, as when Gogo forlornly scrawls “GODOT!” in block letters on the roof with chalk, looking for help from above. And Mr. McElroen’s staging incorporates the set in any number of clever ways: Didi and Gogo occasionally toss themselves or each other into the drink out of boredom, and a sequence in which one is startled out of a nap works even better on a slanted roof. With the increase in specificity comes the occasional retreat from logic – if the two are trapped on the roof, how are they separating for their nighttime rests? – but one typically doesn’t look to Beckett for ironclad naturalism.

With the notable exception of this provocative visual conceit, Mr. McElroen’s invocations of race are minimal: a tiny snippet of hip-hop dancing, a shuck-and-jive shading to the scene in which Gogo ministers to the dandyish visitor Pozzo (Chris McKinney, the lone disappointment among the cast). Less welcome is Mr. McElroen’s often distracting, joke-heavy staging, particularly in Act II. Five “fist/foot/knee to the crotch” jokes in one act?

The pairing of the rotund Mr. Pierce and the wiry Mr. Manzay brings to mind the comic duo Laurel and Hardy, whom Beckett reportedly adored. The two provide the necessary blend of vaudevillian vigor and abject despondency, and while Mr. Manzay relies too heavily on an impressive but distracting array of vocal and physical gambits, the two are wholly plausible as fellow travelers to nowhere.

Mr. Pierce offers an object lesson in using his robust physicality to engage the text: His Gogo, while hardly under played, brings a lived-in comfort to each of his repetitive, ritualistic actions. From the constant, wary inspection of his hat to the way he protectively wraps his arms around himself, this is a Gogo whose physical attributes were once a great help but now merely make him a bigger target.

And Billy Eugene Jones is a wonder as Pozzo’s largely silent servant, the inaccurately named Lucky, who is forced to dance a desultory jig before launching into one of Beckett’s most virtuosic monologues, a fragmented “burlesque sermon.” Unfortunately, Mr. McElroen overplays the other three actors’ stage business throughout this speech; words as beguilingly inscrutable as these, delivered as skillfully as Mr. Jones does here, will hold the stage without the sideline shenanigans.

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity,” Pozzo declaims in one of his typically purple interjections. These tears have all but engulfed the traditionally blighted vista of “Waiting for Godot,” and the production could benefit from a stylistic wringing-out from time to time. But audiences have learned by now that Classical Theatre of Harlem can be counted on to take chances. And while it certainly makes its share of mistakes, they’re the right kinds of mistakes – the ones that come from wrestling a text to the ground and leading it into non-intuitive but frequently revelatory directions.

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The Theatre Library Association hands out awards every year for books about theater as well as film and broadcasting. The winners in the former category are often biographies of major figures, and this year’s awards, which were handed out on Friday at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, were no exception. Joining Edward Albee, Stephen Sondheim, and Tennessee Williams as recent subjects was … Charlotte Charke.

Who? As we learn from the bouncy subtitle of Kathryn Shevelow’s “Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress’s Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London’s Wild and Wicked Theatrical World,” she was a woman who played men on stage. She also cross-dressed in real life, and her stormy family history, longtime relationship with another woman, and literary significance (Charke’s autobiography is among the first written by a woman) have earned her a footnote in theater history that may get a bit longer thanks to Shevelow’s efforts. The TLA awards often point me toward my summer reading for that year, and I’m looking forward to getting to know Charlotte very soon.

“Waiting for Godot” until June 25 (645 St. Nicholas Avenue, near 141st Street, 212-868-4444).