No More Waiting: Godot Has Come and Gone.

By Toufic Haddad Senior Editor

ith much anticipation I awaited the arrival of Samuel Beckett's epic play Waiting For Godot to be shown at the Austin Arts Center at Trinity College. Although I had previously never read Godot, nor had I ever seen it performed, I was very familiar with the absurdist European genre from which Godot was the pinnacle. I'd read Ionesco, Arrabal, Jarree and other such playwrights so I felt that I had a reasonable background to judge what I saw.

The production itself I found to be an engaging success. The cast was composed of four adept and clearly experienced actors (all Trinity students or graduates), which brought considerable energy to the stage. I was particularly enthused by the fact that Trinity (a school not particularly known for its appreciation or celebration of the arts) was able to produce such a potent expression of the play.

Of course the director Arthur Feinsod owes a great deal to Beckett himself: the writing of the play is simply second to none in its terse and poignant expression of life's pointlessness. If you have not read the play before, I suggest you pick up a copy as soon as possible. But Godot is not simply about life's futility. Rather Godot perhaps emphasizes to a greater extent man's inability to come to terms with this fact. The two protagonists are constantly searching for distractions to the ubiquitous silence and seeming absurdity of their lives. They are fatally destined to repeating the same mistakes, falling pray to fickle emotion, forgetting their discussions, and generally expressing a pervasive shallowness that exists as the result of an inability to find anything lasting or meaningful about life. Instead, "waiting for Godot" is employed as the prosaic excuse to fill the all too empty space that exists between an indifferent and irrational world, and their own sensitive and rationally driven sensibilities.

Godot is clearly a masterpiece of theater that everyone is made wiser by reading or watching. The unwarned reader may fall pray to frustration and disillusion from the play's intrinsic impenetrability. Beckett is ceaseless in his effort to convey to the reader that there are no comforting answers nor Panglossian powers behind life. Because of this, I was particularly turned off by something one of the actors said after the play was over. An informal discussion was held in the auditorium with the actors and director, where audience members were allowed to ask questions to the cast. When asked whether there was "any hope in Godot" the actor replied (after much repeated confusion) that an enduring sense of the "human spirit" is a small but identifiable element of hope. Unfortunately, I could not agree with this sentiment at all. I think Beckett would be particularly offended if he heard that anyone found any cheap "hope" in Godot. The "human spirit" as portrayed in Godot is so incorrigible and pathetic (barely even tragic) that to find any hope in it is nothing less than an ersatz filled attempt to mollify or escape the inescapable condition of our being.

As a whole, the play was a noted success. One issue about production struck me as potentially troublesome. Director Feinsod chose for "Lucky" (Pozzo's defeated and enslaved servant), Therelsa Watson, who is a black woman. Her performance was quite possibly the most riveting of the whole show, and she deserves considerable kudos for her captivating accomplishment. Her presence on stage however becomes potentially problematic when we consider her existence on stage as a black woman enslaved to her white master Pozzo (Josh Weinstein). I wonder whether her presence introduces to the play a parochial confinement that distracts from Beckett's larger point. Her symbolic existence as an enslaved person (both black and female) was perhaps too obvious a emblem of oppression. It also introduces a select political and (almost overused) cliche of oppression. Beckett is interested in the universality of the human condition, its acceptance of its enslavement and its own defeat. Feinsod (presumably) is more interested in introducing the more limited theme of black female oppression. Although a noble cause in itself, I found it to be out of place in a play that is marked by its scant landscape, color and scenery (all symbols of the unimportance of time and place.) Feinsod of course has this liberty as director, but he must also understand the undertones of his choices on the play as a whole.

Overall, I have nothing but praise for the performance which was entertaining and thought provoking. I commend both the cast and director and implore the Trinity community to support such productions in the future. Let us wait for Godot for as long as we are here.