The Unexpected Sweetness of Bill and Ted’s “Waiting for Godot”

The jokes started earlier rehearsals did. “Waiting for Bill and Ted”; “Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure”; “Party On, Godot!” How could we not marque cracks aft Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, that astir righteous duo from the classical 1989 slacker movie “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” announced plans to prima successful a revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”? The manager would beryllium the British buzz merchant Jamie Lloyd, whose enactment sometimes lacks logical consciousness but ne'er celebrities—he enactment Tom Hiddleston successful a histrionic “Betrayal,” Nicole Scherzinger successful a bloody “Sunset Boulevard.” Anticipation soared, yet my ain expectations for a bro-forward “Godot” were low. Sounds bogus, I snickered to myself.

But past I saw this production’s awe-inspiring, sculptural acceptable astatine the Hudson Theatre. In the 1954 text, Beckett stipulates that his tragicomedy—two Chaplinesque tramps hold for a prospective leader (or savior?) who does not arrive—should beryllium acceptable outdoors. “A state road. A tree. Evening,” the publication says, and Beckett’s licensing property has been strict astir those elements appearing arsenic described. Yet Lloyd’s longtime collaborator, the costume and scenic decorator Soutra Gilmour, fills the Hudson’s proscenium with a twenty-four-foot-high passageway mouth, the circular opening to what looks similar a agelong of gargantuan sewer built successful forced perspective. This majestic fuselage dwarfs the actors, who structure wrong it similar mice successful a tempest drain. Its plywood panels look, nether acold lights, similar marble.

Gilmour’s set—simultaneously a motion to Fascist architecture, a conduit to nowhere, and a scatological joke—shores up the accumulation successful respective ways. Long exchanges betwixt the glum Estragon (Reeves) and his much energetic companion, Vladimir (Winter), instrumentality spot with the bowler-hatted brace perched connected the stage-side rim of the sewer, which lowers the level of trouble for performers whose past superior theatrical efforts were astatine slightest 30 years ago. Winter, whose palpable quality drives the show, is graceful successful some mania and reverie, but Reeves is simply a jarringly uncomfortable presence, arsenic awkward arsenic a equine connected roller skates whenever helium stands up. Here the acceptable becomes a drama generator, a acceptable of curving sides that Reeves tin thin against and descent bonelessly down. It’s utile that you find yourself wanting to support the large galoot. The assemblage awws each clip Winter gives him a hug.

“Godot” is not usually a amusement wherever you spell aww. It’s a purgatorial vaudeville, a gallows gag for everyone mortal. (Bored to death, the buddies see hanging themselves due to the fact that astatine slightest they’ll get erections retired of it.) “Nothing to beryllium done,” Estragon grumps successful the show’s archetypal line, and adjacent drive-by existentialists volition admit Beckett’s thesis.

At the extremity of the archetypal act, erstwhile Godot fails to arrive, a child—I saw Eric Williams—assures Vladimir that Godot “won’t travel this evening but surely to-morrow.” The play past folds itself successful half, similar a antheral with a bellyache. (“Nothing happens, twice,” the Irish professional Vivian Mercier said, and each professional has been doomed to repetition him since.) The pompous landowner Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his abused lackey, Lucky (the superb Michael Patrick Thornton), person encountered Vladimir and Estragon successful the road; during the same-but-different 2nd act, the 2 of them travel galloping by again, though Pozzo has nary representation of their earlier meeting. Estragon, too, has forgotten the erstwhile day. Only Vladimir is awake some to their looping world and to the thought that, if Godot is thing similar the God of the Bible, he’ll play favorites. Vladimir hints that the pair’s aww camaraderie whitethorn not past different iteration of their Groundhog Day. “One of the thieves was saved,” helium muses, his caput connected the Crucifixion. “It’s a tenable percentage.”

In Beckett’s play, the vicious gasbag Pozzo leashes Lucky with a enactment and forces him to transportation his luggage until Lucky collapses, but Lloyd refuses to usage the required props—actors notation to bags that are not there; Lucky isn’t whipped, truthful Lucky doesn’t flinch. Lloyd has worked cleverly wrong the limitations of his peculiar Vladimir and Estragon by shading the characters’ codependent dynamic with Reeves and Winter’s shared sweetness and genuine friendship, but, successful the lawsuit of Pozzo and Lucky, his directorial choices sabotage the relationship. (Lloyd has Thornton deterioration a Hannibal Lecter-style wound mask, making his Lucky much menacing than his supposedly frightening master.) Thank Godot, then, that contempt each that silliness, Dirden is the finest Pozzo I’ve ever seen: a hilarious, scene-stealing melodrama villain with a achromatic beard and sunglasses, drawling bored commands successful a Southern accent, lasting connected his dung-heap dignity similar Foghorn Leghorn. Vacuous powerfulness is, we know, the astir terrifying. This Pozzo has nary hint what’s happening—somehow Dirden gives the consciousness of his eyes shifting madly around, adjacent down those acheronian glasses—but helium perfectly knows he’s successful charge.

I was impressed by the production’s carnal grandeur and entranced by the players’ astonishing warmth, but I didn’t find myself profoundly moved by this “Godot” until, bizarrely, I saw different amusement altogether. A fewer days later, I went to “All Right. Good Night.,” a play by the German corporate Rimini Protokoll, which ran for lone 3 days successful September, astatine N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center. In “All Right” ’s script, the writer Helgard Haug braids unneurotic 2 cases of “ambiguous loss”: the inactive unsolved enigma of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared implicit the Indian Ocean successful 2014, and the gradual progression of Haug’s ain father’s dementia. Family members of those mislaid connected the level weren’t definite erstwhile to grieve; neither was she.

There aren’t scenes arsenic specified successful “All Right”—the rubric refers to the expected sign-off fixed by the aviator of MH370 successful his past known contact—rather, the substance is projected onto a scrim, down which a enclosure radical plays a two-and-a-half-hour electro-classical enactment by Barbara Morgenstern. Sometimes the musicians basal successful line, arsenic if they’re astatine check-in (the dependable designer, Peter Breitenbach, pipes successful the hum of the Kuala Lumpur airport); sometimes they beryllium connected a sandy beach, wherever projected waves lavation up connected a virtual strand.