Word: godot
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Humor was not just funny: it was seriously funny in those days. Tragedy was dean-everybody accepted that. But comedy was managing double duty, in plays like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros, even Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Audiences laughed until quite literally they cried. In fiction, the selling phrase was "black humor." Some of the best books of the '60s came out ghastly-funny, as if novelists were facing nuclear-age madness, crossed eyeballs to crossed eyeballs: Terry Southern in his underrated little masterpiece...
Director Harold Scott's conception of Godot is fuzzy at best. He appears to believe that the play is about the brotherhood of man, and the production has been so ethnicized that it makes Beckett into a kind of emcee for United Nations Day. Leland Moss' Estragon seems to have been imported from a Catskills road company of Fiddler on the Roof. His gestures might have been modelled on Menasha Skulnik's, his lines threaten to slip into Yiddish, and the "nu's" and the "oy's" and the Diaspora world-weariness almost crown Beckett the prince of pushcart playwrights...
...character just the right Marat/Sade touch. Yet because his buckskni leggings, his moccasins, his headband, his pigtails, and his blond fright wg make him look like an albino Apache, the spectre of Lucky-as-oppressed-Red-Man is aggressively and offensively present on stage. As an additional ethnic touch. Godot's angelic messenger is portrayed as a Mexican-American, whose appearances are accompanied by throbbing rascados on the Desi Arnez classical guitar...
...Loeb, however. Vladimir and Estragon smile, exchange hearty fratternity-house slaps, advance eagerly toward the wings as if to leave, and fall short of taking a full exit only by freezing into a tableau. The'Loeb's Waiting for Godot has a happy ending...
...closes so similarly, the play derives a structure which its content denies, it resolves issues which ought to remain at loose ends, and it manufactures corrugated conclusions where there should remain the gnawing anxieties of ambiguity. And what can Let It Be possibly have to do with Waiting for Godot? The voice of that song is, at the very least, peaceful, and McCartney's crystal words of wisdom are light years from Beckett's terrifying existential despair. Godot isn't about the brotherhood of man; it's about the spirtual death of mankind...