Futility as slapstick: Butler Theatre presents 'Waiting for Godot'

Estragon, Lucky, Vladimir, and Pozzo in Butler production, with Rob Koharchik's set and lighting design

Frustration is treated to an extended comic turn as 'Waiting for Godot' gets under way in Butler University's just-concluded production of the Samuel Beckett classic. The drifting wanderer Estragon appears alone as a solitary struggler trying to get a boot off. Doing so  involves an unspoken promise to provide some relief; it proves to be more trouble than it's worth. Every effort in this milieu seems in vain. Estragon's bootless struggle is the herald.

As William Fisher directs the scene and Chris Figueroa plays it, the playwright's concise stage direction is elaborated into a scena worthy of opera. It's one of the production's several salutes to the silent and early-sound film comedies of yore. An episode of accelerating exchange of hats between Estragon and Vladimir, his itinerant buddy and parody intellectual with whom he's locked in place as they wait for the title character, recalls Laurel and Hardy. 

The way Estragon sometimes rolls his bowler from fingertips up the arm and onto his head is a bit I could not find on film, but it's an old trick I'm sure has been recorded somewhere. It has the ironic connotation of dapper control that I once saw from Cab Calloway onstage in a touring production of "Bubbling Brown Sugar." In this play, it's Estragon's only touch of suavity.

The style of physical comedy on film, with the spasmodic sight gags, helps highlight the fact that no simple task can fail to get complicated. It's a clue to the way Estragon and Vladimir get stuck in a dead-end landscape of expectation unfulfilled. Enigmatic reports on when Godot might be expected are delivered to them with officious consistency by Eli Kohn as Boy.

The signature ancient trick that recurs in the script is a variation on the pratfall, a sudden collapse that can go forward or backward. That's so well done here it must have required a seminar in stage falling in addition to  line-gesture-blocking rehearsal. From the audience perspective, there's nothing like it for combined shock and amusement. To see a simulated life seem momentarily snuffed out by a fall is a reminder of our real-life contingency. It makes of theater a parable of human existence, ever subject to being thwarted by accident and unplanned interruption.

Described as "a tragicomedy in two acts," the much-referenced play clearly is a milestone in comedy — the 20th century's reigning genre on page and stage alike. Comedy with its suggestions of wasted effort dominates any representation of human agency, which lies at the core of drama. Nole Beran's risible, purpose-driven portrayal of Vladimir gave particular stature to the dilemma.

Even the authoritarian Pozzo, grandiloquently memorable in Seamus Quinn's portrayal, is decisively undercut. His enslaved beast of burden, the submissive Lucky, is allowed one substantial outburst that owes something in style to the rhetorical flair of "Ulysses," the modernist landmark by James Joyce, for whom Beckett worked briefly as secretary. The speech is a tour de force for Austin Bock, who plays the role otherwise with catatonic stamina.

In a withering assessment of drama in relation to theater, the estimable Canadian author Robertson Davies once wrote: "...drama is what is left of great theatre when you have drained all the fun out of it. Drama is what serious people are ready to accept as worthy of their distinguished consideration. Theatre is the exuberance, the exaggeration, the invention, the breathtaking, rib-tickling zest of theatrical performance at its peak."

An unfair dichotomy? Perhaps, but it points to what makes "Waiting for Godot" a classic, despite its perpetual oddity and avant-garde frisson. With this play, Beckett shed light on the seriousness of what drama tackles without compromising the qualities of pure theater. The fun is still there; the drama survives somehow through it all. The stage direction that ends both acts is the ultimate one-liner. After Vladimir, then Estragon, says "Yes, let's go"  (that's drama), there's this: They do not move. That's theater.

 

[Photo by Zach Rosing]