Word: godot
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...MOON over the Mather House courtyard would delight Samuel Beckett as it dodges behind thick black clouds during this outdoor production of his existentialist tour-de-force, Waiting For Godot. By play's end, it nestles out of sight, casting an appropriate bleakness over a wet and shivering audience. The sky matches Beckett's play in its inability to illumine. The stage slipped between Mather House's cement blocks stands bare of even the smallest of miracles. No leaves flutter on the lone tree that cowers behind a tiny desert. A flute echoes as the only sign of regeneration when...
...sandcastle lit by torches. It's clearly not the kind of sandcastle on which uplifting dreams are built. Since only futility wafts through Beckett's dreams and illusions, this purgatorial anti-Eden perfectly suits Vladimir and Estragon, the two main characters, who wander helplessly in search of the mysterious Godot...
...cast understand the desolation that underlies Beckett's play, they shun many of the more light-hearted elements of this tragicomedy. Beckett's world consists of both circus clowns and downtrodden poets. The director doesn't give her performers enough guidance in the "baggy pants" aspect of Godot, leaving them to contemplate somberly the meaninglessness of their lives...
...novel in 1946, Beckett's Mercier and Camier is stillborn in its transition to drama at Joseph Papp's Green wich Village Public Theater. One can understand what impelled Adapter Neumann's strenuous and occasionally imaginative effort, since the book was, essentially, Waiting for Godot in its earliest and distinctly embryonic state. The two title characters (Frederick Neumann and Bill Raymond) are as close as barstool buddies, and they stumble and blather about in a bleak inscape of metaphysical despair. Despite intermittent japery, they are triste, petulant atheists who resent the fact that they haven...
William Alfred, speaking on "Beckett's Waiting for Godot and After", is reportedly one of the nicest professors around, and for the English Department, this says a lot. The topic is rather interesting, too, although most people will probably re-enact the end of Godot: "Let's go. (They do not move...