Beckett's "Waiting For Godot,' by EgoPo

The Philadelphia theater community has already staged more than a half-dozen new plays this calendar year alone, including offerings from the Tony Award winner Terrence McNally and nationally recognized writers Bruce Graham and Yussef El Guindi. This week will see two more world premieres: Margaret and Allison Engel's Red Hot Patriot (at Philadelphia Theatre Company) and Some Assembly Required, by Kate Brennan (BCKSEET Productions), with Interact opening a new work by Tony- and Pulitzer-nominated Lee Blessing during the next.

So Philadelphia clearly deserves its reputation as an obstetrics ward for new plays. Still, all of these offerings are new in name only. To see a truly original work that forever altered the theatrical landscape, you'll need to take in a work that's six decades old: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

An unfair advantage?

By formulating existentialism—Western Culture's last complete philosophical system of philosophy (Ayn Rand's groupies notwithstanding)— the thinkers of Beckett's era handed playwrights an advantage that current writers lack. Sartre first portrayed the theory's emotional depth in No Exit, but Beckett's Godot managed, in a single play, to capture existentialism's (then) revolutionary metaphysical core.

In his tale of two attendant hobos, Beckett conveyed the absence of fixed references (not even space or time), the loss of a continuous personal identity, the lack of universal meaning, and the constant reminder that life consists only of mere attempts to pass the time. By choosing vagrants as his characters, he universalized the concept of isolation coupled with unlimited freedom, and blended the anguish of choice into the despair that nothing one does actually matters.

More important, Beckett gave shape to these ideas through new dramatic techniques that allowed later writers to operate in the confines of plotless meandering, disjointed language, hopelessness triumphing over resolution, the practical endorsement of nothingness over significance, and the elimination of stakes and conflict.

Links with Holden Caulfield

Previous playwrights had employed one or another of these techniques, but existentialism enabled Beckett to shape them into a theatrical approach. With this one work, he effectively licensed the subsequent efforts of Pinter, Albee, Shepard and Stoppard, whose writing in turn shaped much of the rest of 20th-Century drama.

That said, I disagree with critics who regard Godot as the century's greatest playwright. But my dissent stems from ethical, not aesthetic considerations. The nihilism embedded in the idea of bums who represent universal humanity strikes me as merely a variation on a tired old philosophy lived out by every literary anti-hero and wannabe-rebel, from Holden Caulfield to Tyler Durden. To paraphrase Nixon, "We're all existentialists now."

Modern dance movements

Nevertheless, EgoPo's careful, astute direction by Brenna Geffers resurrects the bones of Beckett's work into a fresh and exciting production. She transforms his hobos into two men of the world, vagabonds who deliver their oft-esoteric lines as casual conversation that sounds beautiful without appearing poetic or flowery, and that embodies philosophical poignancy without putting anyone to sleep.

Her staging— full of more significance and movement than most modern dance pieces— captures the challenge of the play's major theme: "We must always find something to give us the impression we exist." This near constant physical action in a no-action play reaches inside the meaning of each phrase to amplify or play with the words or lend them poignancy. EgoPo's hobos are neither clowns hamming it up for the audience or depressives in a mental ward, but two ordinary men waiting endlessly for some sign of their own significance. It's the most natural— and therefore, valid— presentation I've seen of Beckett's play.

Bouncing liveliness, emotional depth

EgoPo's superb cast deserves much of the credit for the production's emotional depth and bouncing liveliness. Charlie DelMarcelle tints his lines with a grinning hue of malice while still rendering all of Pozzo's wild outbursts as casual habits of polite conversation. Doug Greene re-invents Lucky's verbal acrobatics in his athletic, fire-and-brimstone ranting. Robert DaPonte's deadpan delivery as Estragon buttresses the subtle sarcasm in his lines while still eliciting heartbreaking sympathy when he asks Pozzo for the table scraps of his lunch.

But the production rightly belongs to Ross Beschler's incredibly measured performance as the restless, philosophical Vladimir. The narrative line sails on the back of his nuanced acting, and he deserves much of the credit for inspiring our belief in the meandering.

What's next?

A few major philosophical trends have emerged since existentialism, most notably postmodernism (which itself hinges both historically and conceptually on existential tenets). But this philosophy by itself only affords techniques or approaches to drama, rather than a holistic system that a play could embody. (By definition, postmodernism denies the possibility of such systems.)

When will we see the next revolution of thought that will re-infuse significance and novelty into drama? I don't have another 60 years to wait. Until then, I wish Philadelphia's current slew of world premieres offered me such new worlds to explore as Waiting For Godot does.