When I first mentioned that I had never heard of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, my roommate, an English major, freaked out. Apparently it was one of the most significant plays of the twentieth century, and she was beyond shocked that I had never even heard of the play before. So I suppose I went into this experience rather blindly, besides the 5 minutes of speed-reading the play’s Wikipedia page out of slight guilt towards my roommate.

While watching the performance, I was struck by how much Waiting for Godot reminded me of Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. Both works seemed to go around and around in circles, never really reaching a conclusion or climax, and yet through the cyclical nature of the texts the authors revealed thoughts about life, death, and the nature of human existence. With Waiting for Godot, there is a sense that the main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, go through the same actions day by day and meet the same people without remembering them. This feeling of déjà vu illustrates the circular nature of the work and, if we want to go deeper and be more philosophical, how life itself is just made of reprises of days we have already had.

I found it really cool that the performing company presented the play in Yiddish. It was the first time that I had heard the language outside of the Hanukkah songs my high school band played during the holidays. Also, in the dramaturgy, the company highlighted some symbolic meanings behind performing Waiting for Godot in Yiddish. The play itself highlights the absurdity of existence, and an aspect of that is the unpredictable nature of life. It’s how life twists and turns and manages to surprise at every corner. The survival and proliferation of Yiddish today after it seemed destined for destruction during the Holocaust is, at the very least, unexpected. In that sense, the choice of Yiddish reflects the very nature of the work itself.

That being said, having to read the English supertitles kept me from being able to fully experience the play. I found myself so focused on reading and understanding the dialogue that I didn’t really pay attention to the performers themselves, which kind of defeats the purpose of going to a play. The only time I was able to focus solely on the actors was during Lucky’s soliloquy-turned-rant, which became so indecipherable that there were no supertitles displayed at the end. That moment allowed me to watch and laugh at the expressions and actions of the performers, which makes up the essence of what a play really is. I kind of wish I had read the play beforehand to get a gist of the work, and I’d really like to see Waiting for Godot in English, to see what was lost in translation.