For a play that’s famous for the lack of progress its characters make, Waiting for Godot has succeeded in bringing an awful lot of A-list names to the New York stage. The latest to take on Samuel Beckett’s co-dependent hobos, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, have teamed up in the past on film—perhaps most notably, and most appropriately in this case, as the central duo in the Bill & Ted franchise.
The real star of this new Broadway revival, however, is the set. British designer Soutra Gilmour, a frequent collaborator of the director, Jamie Lloyd, has fashioned a stark, stunning, semi-spherical structure that seems to take us inside a tunnel of sorts. Or is it a drainage pipe? Or, just maybe, an enormous tree—since Lloyd has opted not to physically represent that object, which is mentioned repeatedly and used symbolically in the work.
That choice isn’t surprising, given Lloyd’s penchant for bombastic minimalism, evident in previous productions of plays and musicals such as Betrayal, A Doll’s House and, last season, Sunset Boulevard. And of course, Godot, with its lack of linear action or resolution, has a circular structure itself.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
More conveniently, Gilmour’s design provides a ready-made playground for the actors. Even if you’re not as gifted a physical comedian as Bill Irwin or Steve Martin—to cite two performers who have popped up as Vladimir, or Didi, the more gung-ho hobo, over the years (Irwin also played a supporting role in the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production starring Martin and Robin Williams)—having a curved wall to bump and fall against facilitates clowning around.
Winter is cast as Didi here, with Reeves, in his Broadway debut, playing the more passive Estragon, or Gogo. The star of critically and commercially successful action films such as those in the Matrix and John Wick series, Reeves has also done Shakespeare on both stage and screen, and frankly, given his reputation as one of the biggest mensches in show business—accounts of his charity and kindness to people and other animals are legion on social media—I really, really wanted to like his performance.
Yet while Reeves does mine the poignance in his character, the less sharp and more transparently needy of the pair, his line readings can have a flatness that exceeds what’s necessary to convey Gogo’s relative dimness. Winter proves somewhat more facile, and the two actors, predictably, have an easy camaraderie—which Lloyd, just as predictably, milks with a couple of winks to their history in buddy flicks.
In fact, for all of Lloyd’s superficial tweaks—the absence of that tree will surely rankle purists—not much is terribly surprising about this Godot. The director has cast Michael Patrick Thornton, a gifted actor who has used a wheelchair on stage since suffering spinal strokes in his twenties, as Lucky, the ironically named lackey who is physically and verbally assaulted by his seeming master, Pozzo, in the first of their two appearances in the play.
If Thornton’s disability puts a fine point on Lucky’s predicament, the actor delivers his character’s great, rambling monologue, which underlines the play’s existential absurdism, with wit and nuance, making it a hypnotic high point. Brandon J. Dirden proves an engagingly flashy foil as Pozzo, whose bullying hardly conceals his own desperation.
Joh Clark’s striking lighting and Ben & Max Ringham’s sound design, with its artful use of echo, add drama, and Lloyd maintains a brisk pace, so that the production clocks in at just over two hours, including an intermission. But I would have rather spent a longer time with a Godot helmed by a director more concerned about what he wanted to say than how differently he could say it.
Waiting for Godot opened September 28, 2025, at the Hudson Theatre and runs through January 4, 2026. Tickets and information: godotbroadway.com
