I went to see Waiting For Godot as a requirement for my acting class, but I definitely would have wanted to see it anyways. I remember reading the play in high school. I stared at the pages in total confusion, waiting for something to happen. The repetitive, short snippets of dialogue didn’t come across to me as anything special. I’ve learned that to truly enjoy this play, it must be seen.

This production was filled with remarkable actors, but the one that really left an impression with me was Ilan Kwittken as Lucky. He interrupts the waiting of Gogo and Didi with a powerful entrance, staggering in with a rope across his shoulder while carrying two basket-like suitcases. Throughout the strange interaction with Gogo and Didi and Lucky’s master Pozzo, Kwittken spent the time in an exhausting stillness, legs should-width apart, facing the audience directly, and staring up to the sky with big, tired eyes. I’ve learned that stillness in acting is very difficult, and I was amazed both at his endurance and the expressiveness of his stage presence. I had trouble keeping up with the translation on the projector because I wanted to keep observing his lonely part of the scene. This was contrasted with his nine minute nonsensical speedy monologue. I don’t know how he had time to breathe in between all that!

Also, I actually thought Lucky was played by a woman at first, because I thought his face had feminine characteristics. I believe Pozzo even comments on his effeminate face in the beginning of their interaction with Didi and Gogo. That’s why I found it refreshing to see Kwittken in these awesome Youtube videos! Check them out!

I don’t know much about this Yiddish Troupe, but if they do any more production this year, I’ll be sure to see them.

“A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread.

Then cook up with a ladle

And beat him till he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running

And dug the dog a tomb

And wrote upon the tombstone

For the eyes of dogs to come:

A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread…”

One moment of the play that caught my attention was Didi’s song from the beginning of Act Two. On reflection, I think it captures many of the recurrent themes of the play.

The first thing that stands out about the rhyme is its brutality: the tyrannical cook shows no remorse for the dog, taking up his ladle not drive him away but to beat him to death. The dog, for his part, is a pitiable figure, stealing not a loaf of bread as an indulgence, but a crust, presumably out of desperation. The hunger of the dog, next to the assumed plenty of the cook, underscores the inequality of their power dynamic. The other dogs fare no better; rather than pursuing vengeance against the cook, an action that would suggest strength among the community and hope for change, they simply bury the dead dog and turn the incidence into a grim admonition for “the eyes of dogs to come.”

The circularity of the verses affirms the inevitability of the tragedy. The entrenchment of the system of oppression that gave rise to the dog and the cook dooms them to repeat the scenario again and again and there is, as Didi and Gogo suggest elsewhere in the play, “nothing to be done.”

Like the rest of the play, the song is also ahistorical and ambiguous in its origin. The cook and the dog, like Didi, Gogo, Pozzo, and Lucky, exist in a timeless and placeless setting (with the only signifying features being the kitchen, for the former, and the tree and the moon for the latter). The origins of the nursery rhyme – who made it up, why, and how Didi came to learn it – are as obscure as those of the bizarre circumstances in which he now finds himself and his companion.

What did you guys think of the song? And which other moments of the play stood out to you?

At the start of Waiting for Godot, I did a lot of waiting myself– waiting for the play to develop more action, waiting for the play to become more exciting, waiting for the play to start making more sense. I admit to being tired (initially) by the repetitive dialogue and the lack of structure. However, as the play unfolded, it started to become something more than I had expected. The two old men in ragged clothing, waiting by a lonely tree for a man called Godot, soon had their musings interrupted by the entrance of a slave and his master. The moment that Lucky and Pozzo stumbled onto the stage and into the lives of Vladimir and Estragon, things started to get more complex and more interesting. The four characters interacted with each other in hilarious and slightly horrifying ways. Lucky, the unlucky slave, was mistreated horrendously while the master Pozzo was respected and sympathized with. Vladimir and Estragon tried to hang themselves, but were short a good piece of strong rope. Every character forgot each other and the events that had taken place the previous day, except for Vladimir who was left alone in his frustrated understanding that every day was a cycle and was a cycle that would never end. Ironically, this was in large part his own doing, as he would always insist that they try again the next day, clinging on to a little bit of hope (as he insists if Godot comes they will be saved). “I can’t go on, I will go on.”

The play was inherently frustrating. It was difficult to understand all of the messages. It was tedious to hear the same lines repeated again and again. And at the ending, after waiting for Godot for an unknowable period of time– the play seems to suggest that the main characters have been waiting for him for so many days that it has become the sum of their existences– they decide to wait yet another day. It made me want to scream a little. However, for me, it was the play’s contrasting blend of absurd comedy and bleak hopelessness that made it something worth watching. And even as I experienced confusion and frustration with the shrouded meaning of the play and the cryptic dialogue, I saw my emotions reflected in the almost constant confusion and frustration of the characters, as they waited senselessly with no end in sight.

Waiting for Godot was anything but typical. It was intriguing and annoying. It was boring and yet roused my emotions. As soon as I got home I felt relief and yet while trying to fall asleep I couldn’t stop thinking about all the characters.

Thursday I had the opportunity to attend the first Rose Scholars event offered this year! We watched a play called Waiting for Godot preformed by the Yiddish theatre troupe at the Swartz preforming arts center. Honestly, when I signed up for this I had NO IDEA what to expect. So to answer the first question that I’m sure came to your mind… YES the play was in Yiddish. Which, according to the very informative packet they handed out is a language rooted in Middle High German and Hebrew, and can also include vocabulary derived from Polish, Russian, or Romanian. And as far as I know, I have never heard Yiddish before, so unfortunately I had no idea what they were saying! Luckily though they had translated the play into English and projected those subtitles for those not proficient in Yiddish (I’m pretty sure the man next to me understood every word though!).

For those of you wondering what the play was about:

I’m not quite sure to be honest. There was a lot of random banter among characters, but it did seem sort of cohesive. These two older men, Didi and Gogo, were waiting by this tree for a man (or being? Or someone?) named Godot, and for the most part it seemed they were trying to find ways to pass the time. At one point a rich looking man and his servant come on stage and have some interesting dialogue with the main characters. (This was my favorite part as there were many things to laugh at). After this point, I had to leave due to other obligations (we all thought the play ended at 9, when it actually went on longer!). So I look forward to reading the other blogs to see if the characters ever got to meet Godot! I hope they weren’t left to continue waiting indefinitely…

(Picture: Man on left is Gogo, man on right is Didi)

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.