No way around this: Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” at the Mark Taper Forum is a must-see. The starring roles are performed by Beckett veterans Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern. Mandell, who is a sprightly 84, plays Estragon (affectionately referred to throughout as Gogo), and McGovern, a mere 64, is Vladimir (or Didi). The cast is rounded out by James Cromwell (the chauffeur in “The Artist”) as Pozzo, and Hugo Armstrong as the unfortunate Lucky. Boy is played by LJ Benet (who was Jojo in the CLOSBC’s “Seussical the Musical”).
Estragon and Vladimir, tired, destitute, hungry, are essentially comic tramps in the mold of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. Recent critics have cited Emmett Kelly, Abbot and Costello, and even Laurel and Hardy, but I imagine that Keaton (and, who knows, maybe Jean-Louis Barrault as the melancholic mime Baptiste in “The Children of Paradise”) is closer to the bone. Anyway, these two weary souls, these two holy fools – who might just as well be two halves of the same individual (otherwise we’d have a Hamlet-like soliloquy) – have made their way to a single bare tree, near to a stool-sized rock, in the vast, open, middle of nowhere. They’ve come to wait – and I hope I’m not giving anything away? – for somebody named Godot.
In reality, these are characters out of Kafka, characters who, like ourselves, have probably spent their lives in anticipation. The questions, if anyone thinks to ask them, are who are we waiting for, and why? How the heck did we get born? What am I doing here, in this time and place? How did this miraculous thing happen to me?
Godot, of course, never arrives (only his boyish messenger, dressed in white). Perhaps he or it can be likened to that elusive lottery ticket that we’ll never win. In short, “Godot” comments on human existence, the parade has gone by. However, while we live, time has to pass, one way or another. We kill time, but in the end it’s us who die.
Mandell and McGovern have fine-tuned their performance into an exquisite duet, amusing but sadly poignant. When Pozzo and Lucky stumble onto the scene the dynamics shift and enlarge and we have a compelling quartet.
Cromwell’s imperious aristocrat is somewhat Luciferian, and Lucky is no more than a beast of burden, shockingly abused. Perhaps Lucky is all of us as well, under the plow or beneath the wheel. At the same time, master and slave are irrevocably roped together. Make of this as you will, especially when they reappear, debilitated and broken, in the second act.
“Waiting for Godot” premiered on Jan. 5, 1953 in Paris, but the gestation period was clearly in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Beckett himself notoriously refrained from explaining what “Godot” symbolized, but in 1936 he traveled to Germany and while in Dresden he saw “Two Men Contemplating the Moon,” by the painter Caspar David Friedrich. He has cited this work, as well as “Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon” (a variant, in Berlin), as his visual sources for “Godot.” There is another Friedrich painting that may have caught his eye while in Dresden, which is called “Northern Lights.” It is a bleak, wintry work with two figures, their backs also turned toward us, in a rocky, dead landscape. It is eerily prescient and foreboding. Critics have called it apocalyptic. Fittingly, then, it was destroyed during the war.
Apocalyptic also has us thinking of the European death camps and also ground zero in Hiroshima, all part of the postwar Zeitgeist from which Beckett’s haunting, absurdist, existentialist play emerged.
Between the first and second acts of “Godot” a few green leaves appear on the tree. Is this the tree of life, or is it still, regardless of any miserly green, a dead tree? Well, hope springs eternal. Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps this is our one consolation.
Michael Arabian is an exemplary director – I still savor the memory of his “Trojan Women” on the set of the old “Gilligan’s Island” lagoon – and John Iacovelli’s lunar-barren stage design couldn’t be more searing. One may imagine a new hunger for Beckett, and for Mandell and McGovern to recreate “Endgame” or another work. Let us hope that the Center Theatre’s Michael Ritchie has an encore up his sleeve.
Waiting for Godot is onstage through April 22 at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles in the Music Center. Performances Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets, $20 to $65. Call (213) 628-2772 or go to CenterTheatreGroup.org.
