Word: godot
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...seeming crazy without being enlightening...[and the play] never gives us sufficient oppurtunity to do anything but distance ourselves from the characters. If this is the rationale behind Muchmore's labeling of the play as mediocre, then the same label must be applied to such plays as Waiting for Godot (Beckett), The Bald Soprano (Ionescu), The Maids (Genet) and The Homecoming (Pinter...
...between the fantastic and the real, bringing the viewpoint of a modern, cynical viewer into the play. In his battered black suit, derby hat and worn-out umbrella, Burt-Kinderman's Jacques seems a cross between Charlie Chaplin and one of Beckett's existentially confused wanderers from Waiting for Godot. Her razor-sharp portrayal electrifies the play. Deftly handling Jacques's bitter one-liners, she also does an unusually effective job with the play's famous "Seven Ages of Man" monologue...
...from its premiere at a tiny Left Bank venue in 1953, Godot seized the theatrical imagination. By reducing what occurs on the stage to essentials, Beckett expanded the horizon of the possible. Oh--and he made it funny. A fancier of the music hall and silent-film comedians, Beckett turned his stranded souls into entertainers. They dance, do calisthenics, trade philosophies and insults, do a giddy hat-switching routine. They could be Neil Simon's Sunshine Boys: wizened vaudevillians replaying the same old effective shtick for 50 years. They know the absurdity of their plight, yet like every Beckett character...
...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...
...hillsides or trash cans, reducing them to mouths or silence--and loved them too, by writing roles so concentrated, in settings so austere, that the performance is the play. And here some wonderful actors (Rosaleen Linehan in Happy Days, David Kelly in Krapp's Last Tape, Barry McGovern in Godot and Endgame) made two weeks of wonderful theater...