It’s hard to define chemistry between performers. But you know it when you see it, and it’s definitely there between Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks in Theatre for a New Audience’s new production of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot. These two longtime friends and colleagues inhabit their characters Estragon and Vladimir so fully it’s easy to imagine that they’ve been spending eternity waiting for a mysterious figure who will never arrive.
Director Arin Arbus has staged a relatively faithful and straightforward rendition, which is probably for the best since the playwright’s estate tends to take a dim view of any radical reinterpretations. A bare stage with the familiar leafless tree provides the setting, although it here takes the form of a long catwalk-like strip made to look like a desolate highway, with a painted line down the center. As we enter the theater, Shannon’s Estragon sits onstage, doing, what else, waiting. Except in this case for the show to begin.
The production is definitely more energetic than most, with frequent doses of slapstick, including at one point Shannon throwing himself around the stage with such abandon you hope he’s wearing knee and shoulder pads beneath his shabby costume expertly designed by Susan Hilferty. (Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, in the last major revival seen in these parts, certainly didn’t engage in such physicality.) There’s also a nifty bit of chair hurling between Shannon and Sparks, as if they were circus performers.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Later in the play, the two actors leave the stage to sit for a few minutes on a small stool in the theater’s aisle right alongside bemused audience members. “Fun evening we’re having!” Shannon exclaims, as if he’s as confused by the proceedings as the rest of us.
The actors work beautifully together, like the seasoned vaudevillians their characters resemble. You can feel their rapport even in their mutual anguish, as when they stare at the tree in suicidal despair. “Pity we don’t have a bit of rope,” Estragon comments. They test the strength of his belt to see if it will serve as a noose, but it breaks. They can’t go on, but they’ll go on.
Sparks leans heavily into the play’s humor, sporting a Gabby Hayes-like beard and delivering his lines with comic vocal inflections that would have made Rodney Dangerfield proud. His exuberant turn makes for a nice contrast with his co-star, whose resting murder face provides a provocative air of danger.
Speaking of danger, it’s delivered in spades by Ajay Naidu, who infuses his Pozzo with a genuine menace that makes his domination of his hapless servant Lucky, well played by Jeff Biehl, fully convincing. Their Act 1 encounter with the central characters proves the evening’s highlight. (For the record, 6th-grader Toussaint Francois Battiste rounds out the cast and holds his own as the Boy who periodically informs Vladimir and Estragon that Godot won’t be arriving that day.)
If you’re not a Beckett fan, even the terrific performances on display in this strong production probably won’t be enough to change your mind. And truth to tell, as seminal as the play is, Waiting for Godot doesn’t need to be nearly as long as it is, unless the playwright’s goal was to make us fully identify with his characters’ existential frustration.
Waiting for Godot opened November 14, 2023, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through December 3. Tickets and information: tfana.org
