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It says much about modernity that the most admired play of the 20th century should be a baggy-pants comedy about the meaninglessness of life. "Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett's dark parable of two bowler-hatted tramps who await a long-deferred rendezvous with a man who may or may not be God, is one of those works of art that is not diminished but enhanced by familiarity. The more you see it, the better it looks, though I doubt that it's ever looked much better than it does on Broadway right now. The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival, which stars Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman and John Glover, is beautifully simple and straightforward -- and very, very funny, as "Godot" should be. Every aspect of the production, directed by Anthony Page, serves the script faithfully, and none of the performances gets between you and what Beckett wrote.
Among the virtues of this "Godot" is the way in which it brings out the best that each member of the cast has in him. This is especially welcome in the case of Mr. Lane, who has been coasting ever since "The Producers." No more. As Estragon, the tramp with sore feet who was first played in this country by Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion of "The Wizard of Oz," Mr. Lane has renewed himself: His acting in "Godot" is fresh and unforced. Instead of going for the laughs, he simply lets them happen -- and they do, in blessed abundance.
As for Mr. Irwin's Vladimir, all I can say is that I had no idea that this great clown was also a great actor. His flat, flip performance in Mr. Page's 2005 Broadway revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" gave no indication that he was capable of anything like the devastatingly understated pathos with which he delivers the climactic speech in which Beckett tells those with ears to hear what "Waiting for Godot" is all about: "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on."
Mr. Goodman is the most familiar face in the cast, a consummately reliable comic actor whose work in film and on TV did nothing to prepare me for his supersized performance as Pozzo, the bullying slavemaster who proves to be at the mercy of Lucky (John Glover), the pitiful wretch who carries his bags and does his bidding. He speaks his lines in a plummy basso that quivers with the fraudulence of an indicted pol (I love how he manages to extract three separate syllables out of the word "vacuum"). Mr. Glover lacks the name recognition of his colleagues, but you won't wonder why he was cast as Lucky: He looks like a month-old corpse, gaunt and haunted, and tears through his lunatic soliloquy as though he were being pursued by a pack of ill-fed bears.
Not having been at the rehearsals, I can't tell you what Mr. Page did to coax such magnificent performances out of his cast. I can only report that his staging, like David Cromer's Off-Broadway production of "Our Town," seems to show you the play itself, plain and true. Likewise Santo Loquasto's set, a stony mountain pass whose sole ornament is a near-bare hanging tree (I was reminded of the rock-strewn hills of Lone Pine, the desert village in California where so many of Randolph Scott's Westerns were filmed).
New York has seen its share of "Godots" over the years, including Mike Nichols's 1988 Off-Broadway production, in which Steve Martin and Robin Williams starred as Vladimir and Estragon and Mr. Irwin played Lucky. But it's been a half-century since "Waiting for Godot" was last performed on Broadway. In those days the play was widely regarded as an impenetrable piece of avant-garde trickery. Today it is universally acknowledged as a masterpiece, yet there are still those who doubt their ability to penetrate Beckett's irresolvable ambiguities. So if you've never seen "Godot," let me assure you that this production will leave you in no doubt as to what the fuss is about -- and if you know it well, you'll feel as though you're seeing it for the first time.
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