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Monday, November 27, 2023

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (Bakersfield College 2023)


I will admit that I never expected my first chance to see Waiting for Godot live would be at the local community college. I mean, it is far from the easiest play to understand or pull off. It isn’t exactly a trendy Gen Z kind of play. The cultural references are more “early 20th Century philosophy” than anything. Oh, and the scenes with Pozzo and Lucky are just brutal. 

 

But, I must admit, Bakersfield College has been taking some risks, and tackling some challenging projects lately. So, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me too much that Kimberly Chin (the “new” faculty member when my wife went to BC - we are dang old) decided to do it. 

 

Samuel Beckett was an Irish writer who lived in Paris most of his adult life. He also chose to write primarily in French. During World War Two, he became part of the French Resistance (although he downplayed his role as “boy scout stuff”) and had to spend much of the war in hiding. 

 

As one of the last of the “modern” era playwrights, he was part of the Absurdist movement generally, and specifically one of the giants in “The Theater of the Absurd” - a way of presenting plays where every facet of the production contributes to the absurdity. Waiting for Godot is perhaps the most representative play of this style. 

 

Absurdism is related to, and an outgrowth of existentialism. Whereas the existentialists would argue that humans do - and must - create their own meaning in life, the absurdist would find this pursuit pointless, absurd, and impossible. Meaning itself is impossible. 

 

It isn’t difficult to find the philosophical antecedents of Absurdism dating back to antiquity. In a way, Ecclesiastes is a work that veers between an existentialist view of the world and an absurdist one. Everything is meaningless…

 

In that sense, trying to find a “meaning” to Waiting for Godot is to miss the point. At its core, it is “about” meaninglessness itself. 

 

Who - or what - is Godot? There has been a lot of speculation about this, naturally. Beckett himself refused to explain the play, and generally dismissed all proposed interpretations. In particular, he denied that Godot is God. And also said, “If I had known who Godot is, I would have written it in the script.”

 

There is a bit of a backstory here. In the United States, we pronounce the name “go-DOH” - emphasis on the second syllable. In England and Ireland, they pronounce it “GOD-oh” - emphasis on the second. The original play is in French, which would give equal emphasis to both syllables: “Go-Doh.” While the English pronunciation implies “God,” the French word for God is “Dieu,” not at all related to Godot. So perhaps not God…or maybe yes?

 

In my opinion, Godot stands in for a constellation of meanings, and which one resonates for a given person will depend on that person’s own psyche and life experience. 

 

The central meaning, in my opinion, is that Godot is death. We are all, in a sense, waiting for Death - and perhaps trying to find or create meaning while we do. In a lesser sense, I would say that Godot also means meaning itself, salvation, enlightenment, something beyond the mere fact of existence. You could call that “God,” or you could call it “transcendence” or perhaps something else entirely. 

 

From this central metaphor, all the rest of the play is built. The two friends, Vladimir and Estragon, also have multiple valences. On the surface, they are both older men who have fallen on hard times. We know they have been together for 50 years, so they are not young. Their bodies are betraying them: Vladimir has prostate issues and is regularly leaving to pee; Estragon has bad feet and a failing memory. Do they represent aging? Waiting for death in old age? Perhaps.

 

But you can also read Vladimir as being a metaphor for the intellect. He is restless, always moving, always talking, always searching. His lines are often about philosophy or religion. In contrast, Estragon is all about physical sensation. He sleeps, he is hungry, his feet hurt, he just wants to feel better. 

 

And then what about the other characters? There is Pozzo, the obnoxious rich fuck, who has gotten bored by his slave Lucky, and is taking him to be sold. I think the telling line here is one by Pozzo, who muses that it is mere chance that makes him the enslaver and Lucky the slave. Together, they represent the meaninglessness of unjust systems, which brutalize and dehumanize both of them. 

 

Pozzo tells of how he once found Lucky to be amusing and stimulating, and now he only finds him infuriating and disgusting. Perhaps this implies the idea that even oppression of others has lost its attraction, and dominance no longer has meaning beyond the absurd.

 

One of the most memorable scenes in the play is when Pozzo commands Lucky to “think!” All that results is a word salad combining esoteric phrases and nonsense sounds. Thought itself has been reduced to absurdity. 

 

Not that Pozzo has it any better. He is figuratively blind to everything in the first act - totally clueless about how horrible he is. When he returns in the second act, he is literally blind, although he cannot remember when or how he became blind - or indeed, that he had met Vladimir and Estragon the day before. He is now unable to even sit up after falling. 

 

The final character is the Boy - ostensibly Godot’s servant (or is it two different boys?) He doesn’t paint much of a picture of Godot, who remains pretty opaque except for having a beard. Is he a good man? A bad man? Or is he just a disembodied idea? 

 

The Boy arrives to tell the men that Godot will not be coming that day. But he will definitely come tomorrow. Of course, we know he won’t come then either. In the 70 years since the play premiered, we continue to wait for Godot. 

 

Since this is a play in which little - or nothing - ever happens, it is the dialogue itself which carries things forward. There are a lot of quotable lines, and some really funny moments - particularly if you know the ideas that Beckett is parodying. 

 

“Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.” 

 

You can’t get any more iconic than that recurring bit of dialogue. In the BC production, Estragon gives a primal scream of frustration after each one. 

 

There is also a recurring gag where Estragon tries to push things in some direction or another, to move, so to speak. He is inevitably shot down by Vladimir, who explains convincingly why they cannot take that route. Estragon sighs, “True.” 

 

I also took note of these other lines, which I don’t think I really need to comment on; they stand by themselves. 

 

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” 

 

“In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.” 

 

“We wait. We are bored. No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!”

 

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.” 

 

“That passed the time.”

“It would have passed in any case.”

“Yes, but not so rapidly.” 

 

“We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?”

“Yes, yes, we’re magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.” 

 

“What's the matter with you?”

“I'm unhappy.”

“Not really! Since when?”

“I'd forgotten.”

“Extraordinary the tricks that memory plays!” 

 

I should mention some things about the production. This took place in the “Black Box” theater - a small space with around 40ish seats. The set is sparse by design - a tree, a rock, some garbage. 

 

There are only the five characters. Vladimir and Estragon have by far the most lines - they probably talk for two hours out of the two-and-a-half hour length of the play, with most of the rest taken up by Pozzo. The memorization demands are high, and I give credit to the two leads for strong work in keeping what is a somewhat circular and repetitive text straight. 

 

Also impressive was the chemistry between the leads. Vladimir was played by Ruka, a relative newcomer to local stage who I had never seen in a lead role before. (She was in Torch Song, which others of my family saw, and had a small part in Love’s Labour’s Lost last year at BC.) Estragon was played by Daniel Lizarraga Ramos, who has been in various small parts over the past couple of years. The two of them played off each other quite well - this is not an easy play, and needs the leads to have that believability when the script veers increasingly into the absurd. 

 Ruka (Vladimir) and Daniel Lizarraga Ramos (Estragon)

Xaviahn Yunior Rodriguez channeled Slash in his portrayal of Lucky. Kind of a limping, highly put upon Slash, I would say. His delivery of the word salad monologue wasn’t as clearly enunciated as I would have preferred - it came across as one big joke rather than the series of jokes that it was written as. Other than that, good physical acting. 

 

Logan Scott has also been in a number of productions lately, including both of the Shakespeare plays last month. He was lugubrious and vulgar as Pozzo - a memorable version that I think is true to Beckett’s intent. Easton Salazar rounded out the cast in the role of the Boy, with a naive and flat aspect that fit the bland lines. 


 Logan Scott (Pozzo) and Xaviahn Yunior Rodriguez (Lucky)

Overall, I thought Bakersfield College really did a nice job with the work. It is no small feat to keep a sense of direction, of meaning, in a directionless and meaningless script. To live in Beckett’s dystopia of the mind without getting lost requires focus and care. And that is what BC was able to do. For all its unreality, what unfolded on stage felt real, felt true, felt believable. 

 

In the end, perhaps all of us who experience Godot have to choose whether we will take the existential approach - choose our own meaning, decide what we think Beckett was doing - or the absurdist one - and just let the play wash over us without attempting to see it as meaning anything. Is there a point to choosing, though? Will any of these choices change our fate or enable us to find meaning? 

 

Expand this to take in life, the universe, and everything, and you have Absurdism in a microcosm. At the end of the day, we are all still waiting for Godot. 

 

***

 

Does this play count as “in translation”? Beckett wrote it in French first, but then “translated” it into English himself. Since it was the author, and not the translator, perhaps both versions are the “original.” In any case, one can assume that the English version represented Beckett’s intent and vision for the play.

 

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