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The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "Waiting for Godot," which opened Thursday at Studio 54, is the one against which others will be measured for a long time.
This is bliss - seriously - theatrical and existential bliss. Anthony Page has directed four mesmerizing actors - and also reined in four idiosyncratic personalities - for a peak event that honors Samuel Beckett's 1953 masterwork by living fully and hilariously in the hope and futile inertia of his great mortal joke.
Have two such empathetic creatures ever made classic clowning as profound as do Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane, brilliantly inhabiting the rags and the bowler hats of the 20th century's apocalyptic tramps?
Has any man-mountain ever careened with more incredibly scary lightness of being than John Goodman as slave master Pozzo, rolling astonishingly on his bully-boy belly and bleating like an unmoored Macy's balloon in the wind? And has a man ever embodied the shadow of an insipient cadaver with more dripping, drooling, wheezing finesse than John Glover as the beast-of-burden named (a perfect Beckett joke) Lucky?
Not in my experience. The authoritative production is a purifying relief after the indulgences of the Mike Nichols- Robin Williams- Steve Martin showboat at Lincoln Center in 1988. Lane, in his most disciplined performance in years, abandons the trap of his popular persona to locate the devastating sweetness in Estragon, who gets beaten daily by strangers for no reasons and whose feet hurt. Irwin is especially wonderful, expanding his new-vaudeville physicality to find the shape-shifting emotions of Vladimir, the gap-toothed philosopher in urinary distress.
They can't move on. Why? Because, day after identical day, they're waiting for a stranger named Godot. They fill the boredom and the suffering with amusing routines and desperate thoughts - you know, just like life. Goodman offers splendid and terrifying diversion as the cruel master in the riding outfit and the master-thespian grandiloquence. He orders his decrepit slave to "think" for their entertainment, which Glover spews in a breathtaking torrent of erudite gibberish.
There are a few nits to pick. Page defies Beckett's instructions by surrounding his simple tree and country road with enormous boulders, which soften the isolation with suggestions of shelter. Also, the British director wants Godot pronounced the English way - "GOD-oh" - which hits us over the head a bit with religious metaphor.
But in countless essential and glorious ways, this is the real thing.
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