Why I love Samuel Beckett… and why you should, too.

When I arrived at the box office for the Marin Theatre Company production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, I was the only audience member without hearing aids or a walker.

A two o’clock matinee performance on Superbowl Sunday of a bizarre-o absurdist play is a tough sell to anyone besides die-hard theatre goers (like myself) and old folk – that is, people who already get it, or at least have senior citizen theatre subscriptions and are willing to give it a try.

Waiting for Godot is far from approachable theatre. It’s not your recognizably singsong, narrative-arch-driven, that-play-your-high-school-did kind of show; if you come to the theatre expecting it to be, you will be sorely mistaken.

Shocking and even infuriating audiences everywhere since its premiere production in 1953, Godot famously saw entire audiences leave after only the first act. Initial reviews did not know quite what to make of it. They alternately claim it’s the worst play ever created and the most important play of a generation.

Most people who have vaguely heard of it know it as “the play about nothing,” or “the show where nothing happens.” And this is actually true: Beckett’s Godot consciously depicts two men (Vladimir and Estragon, nicknamed Didi and Gogo) doing essentially nothing, in the middle of nowhere, allegedly waiting for a man (Godot) who never comes. Needless to say, it ain’t no Guys and Dolls.

Godot, especially this Marin County Theatre production, is a challenging production, yet one that is ultimately worthwhile, entertaining and excruciating, hilarious and tragic, perfectly obvious and unbearably complex. It’s particularly a must-see as a 20-something in college, someone in the thicket of our modern world trying to figure out what life is all about.

In the world of the play, our heroes, Didi and Gogo, appear eternally desperate for action and yet are paralyzed by a sort of unnamable, ubiquitous inaction. It seems nothing Didi and Gogo do reaches any meaningful fruition or conclusion: they talk in circles and can never answer their own self-inflicted and confusing questions about where they are, why they are here, what day it is, what time, who may be around them, who Godot is, what Godot looks like, when he said he’d arrive — the list carries on. They bicker, argue, embrace, weep, sleep, and exhaust themselves, but none of their actions move them forward. “Let’s go,” Gogo often repeats throughout the show. And to this, Didi always replies, “We can’t.” When the Gogo asks why not, he simply states, “We’re waiting for Godot.” Silence falls and they grimace. Circular talk resumes.

Who is Godot? The audience wonders the same question. While the Americanized pronunciation of the name would read god-OH, with an emphasis on the latter syllable, the play was originally written in French (Beckett, an native Irishman, moved to France as a young man and remained there for many years) and warrants the French pronunciation and first-syllable emphasis, GOD-oh. This pronunciation, evidently, reveals the name God within the name Godot, suggesting that perhaps Didi and Gogo are not waiting for any man but in fact waiting for God himself.

A quick history lesson: in 1940, Beckett served in the Second World War, joining the French Resistance after Germany occupied France and fighting for two perilous years before fleeing South with his wife. By 1953, the world – and Beckett – still felt the weight of WWII’s wreckage, which called to the general consciousness the meaning of life and the forced questioning of the presence and/or mercy of God after such destruction and seemingly pointless loss.

In this context, are then we supposed to think that in Godot, we finda world abandoned by God, where our meaningless lives are hardly worth living? Beckett, I should mention, is considered one of the pioneer thinkers of existentialism – but does this mean that, as audience members watching Godot, we are forced to buy into an entirely depressing existentialist philosophy? Is the play simply some heady intellectual mumbo-jumbo meant to make us realize that we’re completely pointless? You can’t help but feel a mingled sense of pity, frustration, horror, and exhaustion watching poor Didi and Gogo. How then does God, or whatever’s out there, look upon us?

Beckett once said that good art is “not about a thing – it is the thing itself.” In this same vein, Godot cannot be simplified to being about the nothingness of life, or about an existential crisis. Instead, Beckett presents in Godot the thing (life) itself, which, for all its darkness and “nothingness,” is also unquestioningly full of moments of hope, laughter, beauty and love. Beckett is quick to embrace contradictions, and remains impervious to simplification. In a famous response to actor Ralph Richardson’s question about whether or not the character Godot is supposed to be God, Beckett replied flatly, “if by Godot I had meant God, I would have said God.”

Marin Theatre Company embraces this element of contradictions and complexities within Beckett. The play is funny: Didi and Gogo demonstrate moments of hilarity, complete with slapstick comedy and crude jokes. The play is warm: our heroes are often depicted in moments of true companionship, even love, and the audience feels a deep connection both between these characters and to them.

Examine the opening minutes of the show to find immediate proof of this. Before the curtains rise, the house is filled with a jaunty stream of ragtime melodies, giving the audience the impression that they are about to watch a circus act or a vaudeville show. Then the stage is revealed and the audience discovers a no-man’s land. The stage is barren but for a scraggly tree upstage left and a large rock upon which our man Gogo sits, crouching, head in his hands, wearing a tattered suit and sad flattened bowler cap.

Gogo, played by Bay Area actor and MTC returner Mark Anderson Philips, looks up at the audience, clownish, then sighs and hoists his foot into two hands, and finally gives a colossal yank on his boot while groaning and grimacing like a cartoon character. This repeats three or four times, and the audience gets the acute sense that they are watching a silent movie actor in an early twentieth century film: Gogo appears to be a weird and warped version of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Beckett was, for the record, an avid fan of silent movies and cheeky comedy.

Enter Didi, characterized by Oregon Shakespeare Festival company member Mark Bedard. Dressed nearly identically to Gogo, Didi makes entrance in a truly absurd walk: though a fully grown man, his heels are held raised and he shuffles lightly without lifting either foot from the floor, giving him the appearance of a bird-like animal. Thus, before a word has been uttered, the audience is enraptured in their comedy. These joking, clowning sequences – while odd – give the play an absurdity and subsequent lightness that the audience welcomes happily.

Similarly, there are moments of tenderness between Didi and Gogo, during which the audience feels compelled by their sense of brotherhood and love. The two men take care of each other throughout the play. “Without me, you’d be just a heap of bones by now,” Didi says to Gogo in the play, to which Gogo seems to agree. When the first act features a moment in which Gogo disappears off stage and later returns, Didi exclaims, “I’m glad to see you’re back, I thought you had gone forever!” When Gogo disappears and returns again in the second act, Gogo laments that Didi did not miss him enough; he wants terribly to be missed by him. The two seem constantly seeking the other’s attention or approval – a product of their deep companionship and dependence on one another. Audience members can relate to such behavior, and to see a connection being made between Didi and Gogo fosters a sense of togetherness, of hope in a desperate world.

In Godot, though, as soon as comedy or tenderness provides hope and warmth for the audience, the next moment strips this sentiment away. Once-comforting slapstick jokes or moments sweetness become unsettling in moments of existentialist darkness. At one point, exhausted with the idea that Godot may never come, Gogo turns to Didi, gestures to the tree behind them, and asks for rope. “What about hanging ourselves,” Gogo offers, in a grave moment of seriousness. The duo tries to decide who should hang himself first, who weighs more, and they consider the logistics of how to get rope until the exhaust the subject and find themselves in a different circle of thought, having reached, of course, no conclusion.

We in the audience think – No! These are the same silly and tender characters we’ve grown to laugh at and learned to love! How could this be! Yet at the same time, we empathize with the bleakness of their eternal waiting, and we realize the sadness of their fate. Thus, the stark contrast between adjacent moments of light and dark push the play into intellectual territory and asks the audience member to think about the strangeness of our lives; it demonstrates the contradictions of life itself and forces us to face them alongside Gogo and Didi.

See the show. See it to watch what happens to our heroes (spoiler: a visitor does approach and meet them. Spoiler again: it is not Godot). See it to wrestle with the full agonizing, exciting, hopeful and damning complexities of our lives, and to witness the work of a genius playwright and a brilliant production who have created a vehicle of expressing such big ideas. As college students, most of us don’t have it – that is, anything – figured out yet. Maybe we never will. Waiting for Godot doesn’t answer your questions, but it prompts them, asks you more, and then forces to more closely examine the ones you thought you already had. And this, I think Beckett would agree, is worth something.

photo courtesy of The New Yorker

Katie Straub (‘14, English) hails from the suburbs of Chicago, where she learned, among other things, how to attend public school and enjoy white bread. When she is not organizing or promoting student art on campus, she’s probably performing in a play or singing in the shower.