Reworking a theatre
classic is not an easy task. The playwright constantly thinks “Will this match
up to the original and provide a new relevance?” The author is, in a sense,
going toe-to-toe with the greats. One thinks of Stoppard’s ingenious
reinvention of Hamlet, Brecht’s
Marxist take on The Beggar’s Opera,
or even Ionesco’s absurdist revision of Macbeth.
Indeed, it is the duty of the playwright, as with any author, to revise and
adapt existing works to our ever-changing, postmodern world.
This is something Paula
Plum’s New England premiere of Waiting for ‘Waiting for Godot’ does
perfectly. Beckett’s absurdist classic is given an inventive spin by playwright
Dave Hanson in which the audience is invited into the dressing room of Vladimir
and Estragon’s understudies (Gabriel Graetz and Robert Orzali) — two seemingly luckless
but ever-hopeful souls who cling to the belief that their big break is just
around the corner. They essentially reenact a meta-version of the original,
with “him” (the never-present Director) in place of Godot, and a hapless ASM (Lauren
Elias) in place of Pozzo/Lucky. In between ill-fitting costumes and a very
Ethel Merman rendition of “No Business like Show Business,” the two
understudies discuss what it means to be an actor and an artist, even if
they’re at the bottom of the pile.
The acting sparkles with
wit, and is full of nods to Beckett’s own sense of tragic-comedy. The structure
of the play is also similar to the original; in Beckett’s words, “nothing
happens twice.” Despite being a take-off on a classic, Waiting For… is a brilliant artwork in its own right. Where the
original asks questions about the meaning of human existence, Waiting For… asks questions about the
need to act out such things in a play, and, indeed, about the need for theatre
and an actor’s place in the world. This is a must-see (at Club Café through
July 30), and an important addition to the absurdist canon.
