My knowledge of Waiting for Godot before watching this production was limited to its brief titular reference in the television show Bunheads (which is the title of this blog post). I expected someone to wait for someone or something named Godot. Needless to say, I was going into the theater pretty ignorant about the play.

Initially, I was surprised by the cast in the playbill. I was expecting more actors, because I wasn’t sure how engaging the same five characters could be for a whole play. In some ways, I was right. The play started off pretty dry with Didi and Gogo talking to each other like it’s any normal day. This went on for a while and it definitely became harder to remain interested in their conversation. This being said, there were definitely moments of comic relief that made the play enjoyable. When Pozzo entered the stage, the play definitely became more exciting. Finally, there was someone else entering the conversation; however, as comedic as the characters Pozzo and Lucky were, they were also quite tragic. The fifth character, the boy, was a little unsettling to me, because it seemed to me like perhaps he wasn’t real because he seemed out of place and only appeared briefly in sort of angelic-like clothing.

I found myself trying to analyze the English supertitles as they went along and thought about what it might be like to just read the play. I thought back to plays that I’ve read versus plays that I’ve seen, and there is definitely a difference. Plays are meant to be performed, and I think you can gain a lot more insight and clarity about the characters and their interactions if you see them performed rather than just reading the dialogue. Especially with a piece like Waiting for Godot, in which very little plot development actually happens and most of what is said is seemingly nonsense, I tend get tired of reading the material quickly.

I was hesitant about the English supertitles going into the play, because I had never attended a performance with them before. Perhaps differing from the experiences of others, I paid a lot of attention to the spoken Yiddish. It turned out to be more Germanic than I had anticipated and I found myself picking up on some words and phrases that sounded very German and comparing what their German definitions were with the English supertitles. It was also interesting to hear the actors’ different speaking styles. In the beginning, Gogo and Didi’s conversation was quite redundant as they repeated each other and asked the same questions over and over again. The actors, however, used slightly different vowel sounds and emphasized certain syllables differently even when repeating what the other had said, perhaps due to different ways Yiddish is spoken in different communities. When Pozzo and Lucky joined, they too brought their own way of speaking Yiddish.

Going back to my point about comic relief, I personally found it a little frustrating that they didn’t had readable supertitles for Lucky’s soliloquy. Basically, he started “thinking” on and on and talked about a bunch of different things, and the supertitles scrolled quickly through the giant chunk of text to indicate how drawn out the soliloquy was. During this, Didi broke the fourth wall, pulling extension cords apart and waving at the tech people to stop the rant. While this was very entertaining, I wanted to know what he was talking about. I know that if I was given the giant chunk of text to read on my own, I would probably get bored and skip over it; however, the actor portraying Lucky was so engaging that I wanted to know what he said. There were a few words here and there that I picked up on, for example he was saying something about the earth and the air and the earth and the air, but I at the speed he was talking at and with my extremely minimal level of somewhat understanding, I couldn’t tell what he was saying.

Overall, I was pleased with the experience. I went in not knowing what to expect of the Yiddish and the supertitles, but ended up paying a lot of attention to it to the actors’ speech. I had very little knowledge about what the play was about, and came out at least knowing the premise of it, but perhaps not its purpose. So to answer the title, while I felt like I was waiting for Godot at times, my experience was much more enjoyable than a simple wait.