Word: godot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exploration of nothingness. None did so more persistently and penetratingly than Samuel Beckett, the Irish-born writer whose death was revealed last week in his adopted city, Paris, where for decades he lived in an apartment overlooking the exercise yard of a prison. In such plays as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape; in novels, including Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable; in verse and essays and the script for a wordless Buster Keaton film, Beckett distilled despair...
...works were often funny -- the two battered tramps of Godot might have been written for Laurel and Hardy and were in fact played by Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, Robin Williams and Steve Martin -- but the humor intensified the sadness. In the play's most vivid and haunting image, one character cries out about all mankind, "They give birth astride of a grave." Beckett regarded himself as a sort of historian, a chronicler of misbegotten times. "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion," he said. "It's all around us, and . . . the only chance of renewal is to open...
When Paris was invaded by the Nazis, Beckett and his future wife fled to the south of France, hiding by day and journeying by night. That harrowing experience, especially the footsore conversation along the way, probably inspired the futile wandering in Godot, according to its first Broadway director, Alan Schneider...