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SLAPSTICK EXISTENTIALISM ON BROADWAY

Is Studio 54 the right spot for the ultimate existential protest against the empty avarice of the post-war era? If you're looking for a good time, writes Kitty Kaletsky ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In the 1980s heyday of disco, when Gordon Gekko ruled Wall Street and brash young bond traders ran Manhattan's night-life, Studio 54 was the world’s most famous night-club: the epicentre of decadent materialism in the most decadent, materialistic city on earth. Thirty years on, the former "Masters of the Universe"--reincarnated as respectable, middle-aged New Yorkers--are returning to the same venue to see the ultimate existential protest against the empty avarice of the post-war era: Samuel Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot", which has been playing since April at Studio 54.

Built in 1927 as an ornate opera house, Studio 54 evolved 50 years and several bankruptcies later into a drug-addled den of hedonism. After a multimillion dollar renovation, the space has spent a decade as a thoroughly reputable home for the Roundabout Theatre, a leading not-for-profit theatre on Broadway. Yet the capacity for continuous reinvention, so characteristic of America (and even more of New York real estate) does have its drawbacks. As Santo Loquasto, the set-designer for this production of "Waiting for Godot", told the New York Times, “I feel a bit guilty. Beckett’s stage directions call for a bare stage. But I felt that in such a big theater, with such a large stage, we had to have a set. I don’t know whether he would have approved.”

Loquasto's concerns were justified. The theatre's fussily ornate ceiling drips with gilded cherubs and its hundreds of plush seats are destined for the derrieres of the middle-aged middle-class. None of this suits the haphazard emptiness of this play. And it is not just the set design that has been adapted; the performances cater to the space too. As Estragon and Vladimir, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin mug and bounce like Laurel and Hardy, turning a grim meditation on existence into a playful, guffaw-triggering diversion. John Goodman's larger than life Pozzo might have overwhelmed a small studio stage with his bombast. Only John Glover as Lucky manages to strike the proper balance between his character's viciousness and his victimised intellectualism. 

In 1956 Vivian Mercier famously described "Waiting for Godot" as "a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats."  It is a very difficult play to put on, largely because we tend to demand logic from theatre. If we see a man walk across the stage, we infer that he has come from somewhere and is probably going somewhere. We presume a past and a future. Yet "Godot" is not only unconcerned with such things, but also denies their very existence. The play ignores our inevitable questions and denies us the comfort of props, of context. The effect is disconcerting, by design.

Estragon ("Gogo") and Vladimir ("Didi") come to us devoid of background. They don't seem to have clear memories of what they did before we meet them. Seeing "Godot" should be like meeting an articulate and beloved relation stricken wtih Alzheimer’s. This production just isn’t baffling enough, and the venue is part of the problem.

True, it is possible to treat "Godot" as a comedy. This makes a play about nothing easier to digest, and Beckett certainly delivers absurdity by the bucket-load. But this production goes too far--it has become farcical, slapstick. It is as if the director, Anthony Page, who directed the first revival of "Waiting for Godot" at the Royal Court in London (in 1964 and with Beckett's help), felt the play's existential morass was too much to bear for ticket-buying Americans. Such folks want to be entertained, surely.

So like the carrots that appear from Didi's mangy pockets, this production is something silly to nibble on, not nourishing. I left feeling hungry. Beckett once claimed, “What do I know about man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.” Page seems to have taken this to heart.

Of course, there are successful moments. The physical energy onstage--all those falls and fights--captures Beckett’s sense of the power struggles that drive all human relationships. But these tensions are fraught and nervous. They require a pensive and frustrated audience, not an indulgent, enthusiastic one.

What would Beckett have thought of this bourgeois audience, clapping and laughing with such pleasure at his display of existential angst? Perhaps he would have observed the standing ovation and understood it to be a product of the grandiosity of Studio 54. What else is one meant to experience in a pleasure palace, after all?

"Waiting for Godot", Studio 54, New York, until July 12th

Picture credit: Joan Marcus

(Kitty Kaletsky is a writer based in New York.)