BACK
STAGE WEST
February
24, 2000
at
the Matrix Theatre
There
are plays, and then there's Waiting for Godot. It can be done as a
play, and director Andrew J. Robinson's new production at the Matrix Theatre is
nothing if not an intelligently mounted great play. But at its weirdest,
windiest heights, Beckett's unruly 1952 masterpiece is so much more--an
intellectual vaudeville, a clown tragedy, a piece of music stuck in a strangely
familiar groove, an epic poem and an epic prank--and this Matrix Godot reaches those levels,
as well. On the strength of Robinson's undistracted vision and not one but two
ideal and tirelessly creative casts (as is the doubled-up Matrix way), this is
the sort of definitive, deeply faithful staging of an over-analyzed classic
that sandblasts away any academic encrustation even as it bears up to nearly
scholarly scrutiny itself.
Robinson
and his eight extraordinary actors play it "straight"--which in the
case of Godot is inevitably, gloriously crooked. They bring its queer,
gamboling slapstick, its perverse wisdom, its amnesiac comic rhythms, its
sinister suggestions, and its moving helplessness to full theatrical life. An
outwardly uneventful play full of absurd feints and turns, small betrayals and
dubious victories, it is charged here with an almost unbearable urgency--unbearable,
apropos Beckett, precisely because the play's antagonists, in life as in the
theatre, are boredom, pain, repetition, forgetfulness, insignificance. This is
a play, and a production, that conjures wrenching drama out of the comic
absence of drama.
Under
J. Kent Inasy's witty lighting, on Victoria Profitt's deftly rendered
middle-of-nowhere set--less like a pure void than an evocatively banal, faintly
Old West setting, like a Krazy Kat strip or a Roadrunner backdrop--the
knockabout vagrants Vladimir (Gregory Itzin, David Dukes) and Estragon (Robin
Gammell, John Vickery) bicker and fret the evenings away, left to their own
desperate devices of diversion except for a pair of visits by the blowhard
Pozzo (Granville Van Dusen, Tony Amendola) and his wizened slave Lucky
(Alastair Duncan, JD Cullum), as well as an opaque message from a small boy
(Willie Itzin, Will Rothhaar).
The
actors are all seasoned and well cast enough to seem both iconic and
in-our-face, evoking acting traditions from burlesque to the Method without
ever seeming a jumble. In the central role of the hope-damaged Vladimir, Itzin
and Dukes contrast in both physical and intellectual approach--Itzin's is
engagingly bipolar, a sad-sack control freak, while Dukes' is a well-meaning
coward for whom thought is visible strain. With the childlike but wary tramp
Estragon, the differences are more shaded: Gammell is more simple and pathetic,
Vickery more prickly and petulant. As Pozzo, Van Dusen is an otherworldly
vision of uncomprehending brutality, dusted lightly with civilization (kudos
here to Maggie Morgan's all-around flawless costumes), while Amendola declaims
him as a bitter dandy who's less frightening than simply unpleasant. Duncan
plays Lucky as a strange, sad, pent-up beast, while Cullum gives the put-upon
menial a bird-like alertness and turns Lucky's famous unpunctuated monologue
into an aria of emphatic nonsense.
Perhaps
most startling about the experience of this Godot is how instantly
recognizable the world of the play is. But from where? From Sennett comedies or
Bunuel phantasms? From dreams? From our (tread lightly, now) collective
unconscious? This is the kind of universal, quasi-religious space Godot occupies. And the
fraught antics of this spare, soulful, queasily funny production measure, with
unflinching theatrical precision, how much can be done when there's nothing to
be done.
"Waiting for Godot," presented by Joseph Stern
at the Matrix Theatre Company, 7657 Melrose Ave., Hollywood. Tues.-Sat. 8 p.m.,
Sun. 7 p.m. Feb. 3-Apr. 30. $15-27.50. (323) 852-1445.