Word: estragon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Peeping warily into the new century, the cultural traditionalist (anyone over the age of 40) feels like saying, with Estragon in Waiting for Godot, "I can't go on like this." He forgets the brave and cheeky response Samuel Beckett, last of the classic modernists, gave to Vladimir: "That's what you think...
...down on my bed, close my eyes and imagine Times Square, desolate save for Vladimir and Estragon, the stammering tramps of Waiting for Godot...waiting for the millennium that never comes. And the famous ball--by dint of Zeno's paradox--falls but never reaches its destination. It's an infinitely deferred climax, a perpetually peaking party, an existential rave...
...Estragon to Vladimir: I can't go on like this...
Vladimir to Estragon: That's what you think...
Godot might have been obscure, but Beckett no longer was. Tout Paris swarmed to his play, and the theater world soon caught up. After a disastrous U.S. premiere in Miami, Godot had a respectable Broadway run with E.G. Marshall as Vladimir and Bert Lahr as Estragon. Other beguiling star tandems never quite materialized: Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson in London; Buster Keaton and Marlon Brando on Broadway. In the '60s, Steve McQueen wanted to star in a Godot film. Beckett declined...