Funny thing about Waiting for Godot: although Theatre for a New Audience’s production is my fifth Godot in 17 years, I always feel like I’m hearing it for the first time. Mind you, certain bits have always stuck: Estragon’s irksome boot, Pozzo’s “They give birth astride of a grave,” Lucky’s logorrheic “think,” the trading of insults that ends in the knockout “Crritic!” But a high percentage of the banter and action drifts past me like fog in twilight. Samuel Beckett’s dialogue is so loose and improvisatory-seeming, deeply meaningful yet thrown away, it’s easy to keep rediscovering moments at a fresh angle in a new light. Perhaps I’m also not giving credit where it’s due: as Estragon and Vladmir, Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks blend their idiosyncratic styles so ingeniously with the text, they give it uncommon clarity.
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Shamblin’ Shannon and Blazing Sparks: the powerhouse duo we’ve waited decades to see sharing the spotlight as Beckett’s tramps, threadbare in trousers and spirit. In what might be a post-apocalyptic neverwhere, they dawdle and quarrel and peevishly await one Godot (O’God?), who will never arrive. Estragon wrestles with his painful boot, trying to free it from his smelly foot; Vladimir periodically races offstage to urinate (bad kidneys). Sound designer Palmer Hefferan creates thin piddling in a shallow metal receptacle. I saw a hubcap, since director Arin Arbus and scenic designer Riccardo Hernández translate the “country road” stage direction into a U.S. highway; the two men stalk up and down asphalt and across yellow median stripes looking for all the world like Depression-era hobos who lost their bindles at dice.
Arbus and her actors achieve a dynamic and even heartfelt production of a classic that can easily grow tedious or mechanical. Besides the crackling rapport between Shannon and Sparks, the wraithlike Biehl does wonders with Lucky’s bonkers peroration, a vomit of pseudo-academic gibberish about God and wasting and, um, tennis. This was the first time I saw a performer play the internal logic of the speech, which spirals into demented cries about “the skull in Connemara!” Pozzo traditionally goes to an actor of girth and stature who can scale operatic heights of pomposity but also wither into humiliated abjection. Naidu is on the shorter side, so his transatlantic-accented Pozzo has something of Napoleon about him. He’s enjoyably hammy, but Arbus lets the pacing flag a bit with Pozzo’s reappearance in the second act. Even the walk-on role of the Boy, Godot’s guileless messenger, is played with sensitivity and charm by Toussaint Francois Battiste. When Estragon flies at the Boy in anger upon hearing that Godot won’t come today, the violence of Shannon’s attack the sweetness of the young actor leant the moment a surprising edge of ugliness and desperation.
