Still Waiting

NewGate's exquisite Godot

by Bill Rodriguez

WAITING FOR GODOT. By Samuel Beckett. Directed by Brien Lang. With Henrik Kromann, Victor Lavenstein, Jeffrey Ouelette, Kate Lester, and Ethan Epstein. Presented by NewGate Theater (at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre) through November 19.

"Mr. Beckett's acrid cartoon of the story of mankind" was Brooks Atkinson's pithy summation of Waiting for Godot in the Times after the play's 1956 premiere. That the bitter existential allegory has as much to do with Merrie Melodies as with Sartre and Camus has been lost in many subsequent stagings, performed as if upon an altar.

However sacred the text, the NewGate Theater production now at the SFGT Theatre never loses sight that this is a comedy, however black. Deftly directed by Brien Lang and exquisitely performed, we're invited to sit back and watch the macabre show as projected through Samuel Beckett's life-shocked eyes. Picture Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd encountering Yosemite Sam, all of them on high-dosage meds for authenticity crises, and you get the general mood.

Hapless Vladimir (Victor Lavenstein) and whining Estragon (Henrik Kromann) -- Didi and Gogo, as they affectionately call each other -- are stuck in a desolate landscape, not unlike pre-renewal downtown Pawtucket with the sun in your eyes, anxious, anticipating, and bored nauseous. They are both in tatters, derelict, drifting. Godot, whoever he is, is someone who can vaguely improve their situation, kind of like God with a dental plan. Each twilight they wait in hope for his promised arrival, only to be disappointed when night falls and they are told that he will definitely show up the next evening. The messenger is a boy (Ethan Epstein), a sincere (and forgetful) innocent who believes the obvious lie he is sent to convey.

The simple set consists of a tree on a country road. The NewGate "tree" is virtually a gibbet, an L-shape that might as well have a trap door beneath it. More than once, Gogo and Didi discuss hanging themselves, in practical discussions that revolve around the strength of a belt-cord and the importance of neither surviving alone. In No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre covered much the same philosophical ground, concluding that "others are hell." With Beckett, bless his dark heart, this is no misanthropic Sartrean landscape. Here the lack of exit is self-imposed by their hope -- remember, there is no such thing as false hope -- that today Godot will arrive and their misery will be somewhat relieved. Their mutual reliance is affectionate and willing.

Kromann and Lavenstein are a delightful team, through spirited characterizations saving the pair from pathos. This Estragon does complain about his boots hurting his feet, but when Kromann leaves the footwear behind, it's a spunky gesture of defiance rather than martyrdom. If Emmet Kelly's Sad Clown came out right then to sweep a spotlight into a dot, I'd like to believe that the audience would kick the shit out of him.

Similarly, Lavenstein gives us a Vladimir we can't dismiss as the empty billow of halitosis he can appear to be. Didi is generous, giving the foot-sore Gogo their last carrot or radish; and optimistic, cheering at the thought of their hanging themselves because that would give them erections. Lavenstein makes Didi someone who is interesting not out of a desire to please but out of quixotic charm.

An alternate relationship lumbers up in the form of the whip-cracking Pozzo (Jeffrey Ouellette) and his slave-like servant Lucky (Kate Lester), who trudges before him with a long rope around his neck. The usually silent Lucky is being hanged to death in slow-motion, so terrified of losing his decades-long employment by the imperious Pozzo that he tries to impress his boss with his dedication, not putting down the luggage he is lugging. This encounter is like Alice might have had in Wonderland if Lewis Carroll had been much more depressed. Pozzo is every cruel boss and elementary school bully you may have encountered rolled into one smug stranger.

Ouellette controls the stage in his scenes, as the imperious Pozzo does in his own egocentric imagination, and if a certain hookah-smoking caterpillar doesn't come to mind then Jabba the Hutt will. The actor gives an appropriately larger-than-life inflation to the role, bellowing instructions to his slave, conversing condescendingly with Gogo and Didi. And Pozzo's purring self-satisfaction assumes more than person-sized proportions. Like Greed or Lust in a medieval morality play, arrogant Power assumes human form, and Ouellette climbs in and zips up with hand-rubbing glee. For her part, Lester is a mighty emblem of endurance as the woebegone Lucky, and when the exhausted creature summons the energy to speak, to "think" upon demand, the endless quasi-coherent monologue bursts upon us like the flood of best-and-brightest masturbatory rationalization that nearly washed away 20th-century civilization.

Applause for this talented NewGate ensemble, for the brilliantly embittered Beckett, and for us all for coping with being born over an open grave, as this magnificent play states and commemorates.