At times, he sounds like he’s reading off a series of telegrams, which is disappointingly clunky, especially for a verbally nimble MC. Making Pozzo Black subtly changes the way we interpret him, which is a novel idea, but Trotter’s line readings are too clipped. Beckett left Pozzo’s relationship to the main characters deliberately vague, but he’s definitely some sort of bourgeois nabob who might know Godot and who keeps the wretched Lucky at his beck and call. Trotter, playing Pozzo, is an interesting casting choice that doesn’t hit the mark. It’s amusing, but after a while you start to wonder if the characters are the ones who are getting squirrely with waiting or if the real life actors started to lose it from doing a three-hour play filled with nothing. They make childlike, goofy gestures, they hoot and stomp like monkeys, at one point they do a weird yoga pose, and generally ham it up. Beckett wants us to see his characters’ plight as comic, and Hawke and Leguizamo go for the gusto. They’re just trying to fill the time before Godot shows up, if he ever will, and the obscure nature of their waiting gradually makes them go a little bonkers. They bicker and reminisce like old friends and try to buck each other up while they wait around for whatever it is that’s supposed to happen. The play indicates that the two have some kind of ill-defined history together. He’s more sensitive than earthy Estragon, who suffers from constant nightmares and whose stinky boots just won’t fit. Vladimir is more the brains of the operation, quoting and querying and seeming to have as much of a grip on the essentially absurd situation as possible. Hawke and Leguizamo are an interesting pair. At times they hand each other objects that pass through the frame and sometimes seem to be in each other’s faces, which adds a surreal spatial dimension. They occasionally tap their screens whenever they’re done gabbing. The characters speak to each other as if they are in separate basements having a Zoom meeting, with their names popping up to cue their different entrances and exits. The story plays out in a kind of a weirdly three-dimensional conference call. Since the play consists almost entirely of dialogue, an online production is natural. Their adaptation packs some wacky fun over its three hour length, but they lose Beckett’s dark poetry in the antics. ![]() Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo play Valdimir and Estragon while Black Thought from The Roots, also known as Tariq Trotter, and the great Wallace Shawn play the minor roles of the pompous Pozzo and his servant Lucky. Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.Ī new production of the play, available online from The New Group for a three-day rental fee of less than $10 until the end of the month, takes Samuel Beckett’s vision of the absurd into some zany territory, with mixed results. ![]() ![]() There’s a high probability that nothing is still going to keep happening over and over again. If you’ve ever sat through some website’s endless buffering or waited for hours for customer service to take your call, sat in the DMV all day, or ordered something online only to never have it arrive, then you know what I mean. But the existential tedium of modern life hasn’t gone anywhere. Once described as a play “in which nothing happens, twice” Waiting for Godot seems especially relevant now that we’re all emerging from the quarantine haze and back into something resembling everyday life.
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