In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the New Group’s Zoom-based webcast of Waiting for Godot. Here’s an excerpt.
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What plays were best suited to home viewing at the height of America’s murderous pandemic? At first I hungered for the fizzing diversion of high comedy, but it turned out that what I really needed was deeply serious fare—though the play I most longed to see split the difference, a baggy-pants comedy about the meaninglessness of life that is one of the 20th century’s greatest works of theatrical art. Yet for more than a year, no one seemed to have thought to webcast a staging of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” ideal though it was to the occasion, not only because of its subject matter but because it calls for only a small cast (four men and a boy) and the simplest of sets (a tree by a lonely country road).
So is it too late for “Godot”? That’d be like saying it’s too late for “Macbeth” or “The Iceman Cometh.” There is no time when such masterpieces do not speak resoundingly to all that is within and around us. But the New Group’s webcast version, directed by Scott Elliott, has surely missed its moment, if it ever had one: Not only does it feel pandemic-specific in a way that is already dated, but it simply isn’t very good. With the sole exception of an eight-minute star-turn monologue by Wallace Shawn, it’s draggily paced, portentous and—worst of all—not even slightly funny….
When I was a boy, I lived in an old-fashioned small-town neighborhood, the kind where your house is close enough to the school you attend that you can see the playground from your front door. From then on, though, I was forced to make do with an ever-changing string of dorm rooms and anonymous apartments. Only once did I stay in the same place long enough to feel that I had a neighborhood again. That was in Manhattan, where I spent two decades on the Upper West Side. I’d never expected to feel at home in an urban environment, and it took me by surprise when I realized that I’d come to feel much the same way about my part of New York City that I had about my part of Smalltown, U.S.A.
Throughout most of that time, I lived a block and a half away from Good Enough to Eat, the Upper West Side’s best-loved comfort-food emporium, where you could always be sure of getting a tasty, unpretentious, and wholly satisfying meal. In due course it evolved willy-nilly into my hangout, the only one I’ve ever had. Never before–or since–has there been a restaurant where I was recognized by the staff whenever I walked through the door….
