Paul Sparks (left) plays Vladimir (“Didi”) and Michael Shannon is Estragon (Gogo) in Arin Arbus’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. (This photograph and banner by Hollis King.)
When Samuel Beckett’s own production of Waiting for Godot—in German—toured to London’s Royal Court theater in 1976, Guardian critic Michael Billington noted that the actors playing Estragon and Vladimir were “physical and temperamental opposites.” Vladimir was huge and ungainly; Estragon was “short legged, crab-gaited … and moonfaced.” In Arin Arbus’s strong production of Beckett’s despairing modernist masterpiece, Paul Sparks and Michael Shannon aren’t so physically distinct, but their individual temperaments land where they need to.
Shannon plays Estragon, aka Gogo, the more earthbound of the pair. With a sullen demeanor, Gogo struggles with boots that don’t fit his feet, and those feet smell. His obsession is with pain, sleeplessness, and hunger. Sparks’s Vladimir, aka Didi, is afflicted with a persistent urination problem and stinks of the garlic he takes for it, but otherwise he’s voluble and philosophical, eager to pass the time playing games or discussing subjects such as the Bible: “How is it that of the four evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved.” Gogo won’t have it: “They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it.” Yet their lives have not always been so colorless:
Estragon and Vladimir comfort Pozzo (Ajay Naidu, center). Photograph by Gerry Goodstein.
Estragon: How long have we been together all the time now?
Vladimir: I don’t know. Fifty years maybe.
Estragon: Do you remember the day I threw myself into the Rhône?
Vladimir: We were grape harvesting.
Estragon: You fished me out.
Vladimir: That’s all dead and buried.
The passage clues in listeners to Gogo’s suicidal tendencies, echoed later when Gogo looks at the tree and says, “Pity we haven’t got a bit of rope.”
Threads like that arise, then recede, then catch the ear again in Arbus’s production, as Didi and Gogo wait for someone who never arrives. Beckett’s play seems like a woven tapestry of life: hunger, illness, anger, frustration, religion, play, and cosmic indifference.
The two leads, longtime friends offstage, have a warmth and chemistry that serves as a glue as they engage in their comic squabbles. Initially, one may find Sparks a bit hammy, playing with funny voices, scooping vowels, and changing pitch frequently to indicate the kinetic Didi’s brighter demeanor. He has a way, too, of stamping one foot when Didi turns, but gradually the mannerisms become one with those of the character.
Sparks with Jeff Biehl (right) as the luckless Lucky. Photograph by Hollis King.
For his part, the more restrained Shannon displays an unexpected gift for deadpan comic timing. When Ajay Naidu’s Pozzo, having bloviated lyrically about the night sky, worries about his “performance,” he says, “I weakened a little towards the end, you didn’t notice?” Gogo growls a rote assuagement: “I thought it was intentional.”
Beckett’s production had an “Oriental simplicity,” noted one critic, and that simplicity is honored in Riccardo Hernández’s set—a bare tree on a country road, the asphalt embellished with a double yellow line down the center—for Arbus’s spare, traverse staging. There are tiny changes: Beckett’s script specifies that all the actors wear bowlers, but Shannon’s hat is flat-topped, closer to a modified porkpie. And while Beckett’s production had Vladimir and Estragon each clothed with one half of the other’s costume, Susan Hilferty has given Didi a rumpled light-brown linen suit and Gogo a darker outfit.
Vladimir demands to know of the Boy (Toussaint François Battiste) when Godot is coming. Photograph by Hollis King.
The other characters include Naidu’s pompous Pozzo, the whip-wielding overseer of the hapless, literally slavering Lucky. One might see the two pairs as representing humanity in toto: colleagues, friends, equals on the one hand alongside masters and servants, or bosses and the working class, on the other. Pozzo constantly sprays his throat with a vaporizer and pulls out pince-nez to read, but Naidu doesn’t make any of the business amusing or important. Whether because of the writing or the actor, the result is tedious and unpersuasive. As the Boy, Toussaint François Battiste does a creditable job in his brief scenes.
As Lucky, Jeff Biehl gives a riveting rendition of his long speech, made more engaging by its calm forthrightness—no vocal shenanigans or excruciating business on his part. Cannily, Arbus ignores the “tirade” that the script describes. Instead, she has Gogo, Didi and Pozzo react to each mention of a sport—“tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding” with twists and hops and gestures of activity, while losing none of the force of the speech’s existential agony: “the air the earth the sea the earth abode of his stones in the great deeps the great cold on sea on land” and “the strides of alimentation and defecation.” This Godot is not perfect, but it’s a forceful depiction of Beckett’s classic.
Arin Arbus’s production of Waiting for Godot plays through Dec. 17 at Theatre for a New Audience (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday (no performance on Thanksgiving, and curtain is at 7 p.m. on Dec. 1); matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit tfana.org.
Playwright: Samuel Beckett
Director: Arin Arbus
Set: Riccardo Hernández
Costumes: Susan Hilferty
Lighting: Christopher Akerlind
Sound: Palmer Hefferan
Choreography: Byron Easley
