by Grant Koo for the Autumn 2025 issue
A country road. A tree.
Evening.
Beckett’s spark notes approach to set design in his side-splitting masterwork Waiting for Godot has invited all manner of creative staging decisions since the play first premiered in Paris at the beginning of 1953—which, for historic reference, also happens to be the year that the Korean War ended, Josef Stalin died, Queen Elizabeth II was coronated, the Soviet Union tested their first hydrogen bomb, DNA’s double helix structure was discovered, and the first successful polio vaccine trials were launched.
I’m very pleased to report, then, that this latest Broadway production did not disappoint. Sticking to austerities, there isn’t even a tree to look at on stage. The one stage prop’s location is rather suggested as being somewhere towards the rear of the theater, behind the audience, perhaps overlooking a low hill as the hobos’ gazes tilt slightly above the horizon to casually bat around the idea of entering into a suicide pact, for shits and giggles, and maybe an erection, lol?
All the play’s “action” (read “distraction”) takes place in this foreshortened tunnel (see Figure 1) that, as the play reaches its emotional zenith, fills with the dreadful echoing voices of all those who once existed before us, bouncing through the hypnotic suggestion of celestial light, whose dramatic transitions are often the only indication that theatrical time is even passing, though just how much time & and how much time is left is left anxiously ambiguous, an effect enhanced by the remarkable lighting and sound design, so kudos to the crew!
So Bill and Ted are all grown up. Their veils of innocence woven with dreams of rock n’ roll may have fallen quietly away, but their irrepressible friendship has endured fifty time-tested years, and thank God for them*, because as we hear in the opening lines,
VLADIMIR: (gloomily) It’s too much for one man.
I love how Keanu Reeves (Always Be My Maybe) brings his star power to shine a light on Beckett’s masterwork, which at bottom, is really one hell of a funny play that really ought to be performed, or at least read, more often. Reeves’s sense of comedic timing was impeccable, and the way he looked like he needed to go the entire time (hands criss-crossed in front of crotch) was somehow perfect. If ABMM turned things around for his acting career (in my humble opinion), his nuanced onstage portrayal of the lovable, happy-go-lucky Gogo has certainly skyrocketed his dramatic credibility with the just now self-appointed Chief Theater Critic here at The JZJ.
In similarly spectacular fashion, Alex Winter gives a phenomenal performance, perhaps the most profound of his career, telegraphing Beckett’s devastatingly personal notes on existential dread in a voice that is perfectly balanced on the blade’s edge separating introspection from silliloquy (sp?), comedy from tragedy, laughter from forgetting, and remained pitch-perfect throughout, not a single false note detected all night.
Of Pozzo and Lucky, played by Brandon J. Dirden and Michael Patrick Thornton, I’ll just say, WOW, they somehow managed to upstage even Bill & Ted themselves! It made me think of Pinter’s response to WFG, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and its brilliantly playful figure-ground reversal, where two minor characters from Hamlet find themselves taking centerstage and, well, waiting, while snippets of Shakespeare’s tragedy waltz in & out of the background. In the famous scene where Lucky is commanded to think, Thorton is in full command of his considerable dramatic powers in conveying how horrifyingly feeble the protections offered by human thought against, well, nothing, really are. Five enthusiastic thumbs up!
👍👍👍👍👍
*They pronounced it “God-oh” in one of several charming, crowd-pleasing callbacks to their cinematic collaborations as the more youthful Bill & Ted, when they would mispronounce “So-crates” with two syllables instead of three. 🏁
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