Wilbury’s Waiting for Godot: A bold beginning to a promising season

The Wilbury Theatre Group’s ninth season opens with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, directed by Fred Sullivan Jr. Embracing vaudevillian antics, the cast of local talent tackles this esoteric tragicomedy from Samuel Beckett. It does not disappoint.

Quick summary: Godot is about two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, played by Richard Donelly and Tom Gleadow. The two friends spend the play waiting for a man who will never show up. This is not a spoiler; it is the point of the play.

First performed in Paris in 1953, Godot is Beckett’s absurdist theatrical exploration of the human struggle for meaning. He broke completely with traditional dramatic structure and the text is full of riddles, nonsense and shadows that are meant to remain unanswered. We are given no information about who these two men are before the play and we quickly learn their struggle is to wait for a man named Godot on “a country road” by “a tree,” Beckett’s only scenic description. The two acts take place on two separate days and, all the while, the men wait, finding playful, crude and cruel ways to pass the time. It quickly becomes clear this ritual has been going on for some time. There is no resolution to the struggle.

Vladimir: Nothing you can do about it.

Estragon: No use struggling.

Vladimir: One is what one is.

Estragon: No use wriggling.

Vladimir: The essential doesn’t change.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

Godot was ahead of its time. As one might expect of such a mysterious masterpiece, it was met with openly hostile reviews in London and America. Yet it continues to baffle learned and novice alike. Starring more recently such notable names as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick, Waiting for Godot is firmly established as a classic of the modern theater.

If I can be blunt, Samuel Beckett wrote theater for theater nerds. Waiting for Godot is one of his least confusing pieces and still, you have to want it. Everyone involved must work hard to wrestle with his language, including the audience. Godot explores the irrational human need to hope in spite of the experiential evidence of life that demands the contrary. You have to go to any Beckett ready to be wrung through the ringer. You must have a glass of something at home ready and waiting for the long hard think you’ll be having into the wee hours of the night.

Sir Ian McKellen described working with the text this way:

“It’s a little like the audience are looking out the window and seeing two men on a park bench, gesticulating and laughing… You don’t understand what they’re saying, but at the same time you begin to understand their relationship.”

This analogy is appropriate. Indeed, I could watch Donelly and Gleadow bantering on a park bench any day. The charm, care and charisma with which they have brought Gogo and Didi to life is at once tender, irreverent and tragic. While their work appeared effortless, their efforts were in fact Herculean. More please!

Fabulous, in turn, is Brandon Whitehead’s performance as Pozzo, who he portrays as both loathsome and hilarious, made only more so when viewed in contrast to the performance of Zachary Gibb as Lucky. Deeply intense and effectively disturbing, every bit of discomfort we might feel watching Mr. Gibb abused about the stage is worth it, causing Pozzo’s absurd and foppish behavior to be all the funnier.

From beginning to end, this production of Waiting for Godot is exuberant and exciting. Now you may be asking yourself, exuberant? Exciting? This does not sound like a review for a play wherein nothing happens. And you might be correct. But, in the skilled hands of this talented company their Sisyphean waiting becomes a joyous exploration of the tedious cycles of life.

As an audience member, you are not a spectator. Sullivan’s Godot pushes our comfort zone to tenuous limits. Indeed, Mr. Sullivan has had me chewing on his choices for days now. This may seem like a backhanded compliment, but in fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I am in awe. It was all I could do to keep up with the immense amounts of energy pouring from everyone on stage.

The language, the story, the characters do not have time for you to dawdle. And there certainly is no shying away in this production with Luke Sutherland’s scenic design. The action surrounds the audience in peak moments of chaos from all sides and levels of the space.

Sullivan’s production has most expertly dismantled any comfort we, the audience, might have found behind the fourth wall. What begins early in Act 1 with some asides and audience pandering quickly shifts as we are appropriately assaulted with the entrance of Lucky and Pozzo, surrounded by Whitehead’s magnificent baritone. By the second act there is “nothing to be done.” We are entrenched in the action of the play; we too are waiting for Mr. Godot.

While this may be a play where nothing really happens, the Wilbury space is filled with emotion, movement and sound for the next few weeks. Book tickets to this bawdy and delightful rendition of a classic.

Waiting for Godot plays through Oct 20 at the Wilbury Theatre Group. 40 Sonoma Court, PVD. For tickets, contact the box office at 401-400-7100 or info@thewilburygroup.org