Friday, October 27, 2006
WAITING FOR GODOT
....last night, at Kimmel Hall, NYU...amazing, and a night I will not soon forget. The Gate Theatre from Dublin has come to campus to perform this masterwork, and I got faculty rate tix for Peter, Pat and Charles (they are on a wonderful visit with us) and myself, and we went, en famille, for a night at the theatre!!
I don't know the last time any of you have sat in the presence of great work, but, lest we forget why we live, I highly recommend that each and every one of you go sit in a theater and watch greatness as soon as you can!!! The problem is, of course: there is so little of it around, these days! Greatness, I mean . In theater, or any other arena of human endeavor.
But, last night, at Kimmel, we were the lucky ones. The Irish came to town! And brought their knowledge of the Master with them: Becket, being Irish, was, and is, one of their own, and even though the play was originally produced in France, in French!, it is thoroughly Irish through and through...the melancholy and poetry are pure , the dilemma far too familiar to the people of that war-torn land...but, then again, one of the things that makes WAITING FOR GODOT
magnificent is its terrifying and gratifying universality: Estragon and Vladimir, Pozo and Lucky.....could be any people, anywhere...their fates are so deeply ours. Their waiting, their striving, so very much everyone's.
And so there we were, in the maginificent NYU community (so much talent in that one theater, brains and intellectual power, sitting side by side, waiting for Beckett), part of yet one more audience for this astonishing and ever-modern play. And it did not disapoint.
The Gate's finest Beckett interpreters: Johnny Murphy as Estragon, Barry McGovern as Vladimir, Stephen Brennan as Lucky and Alan Stanford as Pozzo. Showing us how it's done! Not an amplified voice in the place...all pure actor sound..and subtle and terrifically powerful..elegantly physical, (and these are not young men), perfectly realized...the words, those strong sad words rang out, ("I CAN'T GO ON!!!) and we laughed at the futility of it all, as we felt the horror of the simple fact that Godot never does come. And the innocent, scary little boy played by a marvelous Devin O'Shea-Farren, patiently briging the news that Godot will make them wait one more day...it's all so damned current! Chilling. And that spare moon rising over the skeletal tree....ideal design. A familiar aching gathering around this particular camp fire....it was wonderful wonderful, wonderful. Truly.
And, on thinking back, it seems I now have a new understanding of what clowning and comedy are ...what they are meant to be for...the old adage about how we must laugh or we will cry...there is no clearer definition of life than that....the simple samsara..the Hell/Nirvana of it all.....the horrible laughable truth....and last night we shared that. It is so brave to choose GODOT over GREY's ANATOMY...to choose live theater instead of dead television...and no matter how hard and how brilliantly even the best writers strive to make TV a live proposition for all the millions who they hope will watch, the fact is: what happened in Kimmel last night cannot be replicated...that slow silent torture of elegant stage picture held in suspended realization...brave and daring and true...not possible anywhere but a live theater stage.
I don't know what it is that keeps me coming back for more, in this world of theater I have matured in, but last night may be one way for me to sort it out. To think on, dissect, bathe in the memory and honor the sheer fact of last night's WAITING FOR GODOT may assist me on this part of my continuing journey of discovery.
I am grateful for the company of such art.
I don't know the last time any of you have sat in the presence of great work, but, lest we forget why we live, I highly recommend that each and every one of you go sit in a theater and watch greatness as soon as you can!!! The problem is, of course: there is so little of it around, these days! Greatness, I mean . In theater, or any other arena of human endeavor.
But, last night, at Kimmel, we were the lucky ones. The Irish came to town! And brought their knowledge of the Master with them: Becket, being Irish, was, and is, one of their own, and even though the play was originally produced in France, in French!, it is thoroughly Irish through and through...the melancholy and poetry are pure , the dilemma far too familiar to the people of that war-torn land...but, then again, one of the things that makes WAITING FOR GODOT
magnificent is its terrifying and gratifying universality: Estragon and Vladimir, Pozo and Lucky.....could be any people, anywhere...their fates are so deeply ours. Their waiting, their striving, so very much everyone's.
And so there we were, in the maginificent NYU community (so much talent in that one theater, brains and intellectual power, sitting side by side, waiting for Beckett), part of yet one more audience for this astonishing and ever-modern play. And it did not disapoint.
The Gate's finest Beckett interpreters: Johnny Murphy as Estragon, Barry McGovern as Vladimir, Stephen Brennan as Lucky and Alan Stanford as Pozzo. Showing us how it's done! Not an amplified voice in the place...all pure actor sound..and subtle and terrifically powerful..elegantly physical, (and these are not young men), perfectly realized...the words, those strong sad words rang out, ("I CAN'T GO ON!!!) and we laughed at the futility of it all, as we felt the horror of the simple fact that Godot never does come. And the innocent, scary little boy played by a marvelous Devin O'Shea-Farren, patiently briging the news that Godot will make them wait one more day...it's all so damned current! Chilling. And that spare moon rising over the skeletal tree....ideal design. A familiar aching gathering around this particular camp fire....it was wonderful wonderful, wonderful. Truly.
And, on thinking back, it seems I now have a new understanding of what clowning and comedy are ...what they are meant to be for...the old adage about how we must laugh or we will cry...there is no clearer definition of life than that....the simple samsara..the Hell/Nirvana of it all.....the horrible laughable truth....and last night we shared that. It is so brave to choose GODOT over GREY's ANATOMY...to choose live theater instead of dead television...and no matter how hard and how brilliantly even the best writers strive to make TV a live proposition for all the millions who they hope will watch, the fact is: what happened in Kimmel last night cannot be replicated...that slow silent torture of elegant stage picture held in suspended realization...brave and daring and true...not possible anywhere but a live theater stage.
I don't know what it is that keeps me coming back for more, in this world of theater I have matured in, but last night may be one way for me to sort it out. To think on, dissect, bathe in the memory and honor the sheer fact of last night's WAITING FOR GODOT may assist me on this part of my continuing journey of discovery.
I am grateful for the company of such art.
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