While Waiting for Godot

Notes on the starry 1988 Lincoln Center production of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece

Previews begin this week for a new production of Waiting for Godot starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, who are sure to be greeted with populist interest and critical skepticism if not scorn. 

Who do these Hollywood lightweights think they are?

We’ve heard this before, of course. Think back to 1988 when Steve Martin and Robin Williams headlined Mike Nichols’ production of Godot that also featured F. Murray Abraham, Bill Irwin and Lukas Haas. 

Godot arrived in October for a brief run at the Mitzi E. Newhouse theater at Lincoln Center; only a few tickets were sold to the public—you had to line up and pray to be one of the chosen. A lottery was held for Lincoln Center subscribers, and my former French teacher, proved one of the lucky ones.

I’d just entered my senior year of high school, and having dropped French a year earlier, I could not have been on Ms. Tenneyck’s good side. Though she was approachable and entirely sympathetic she was not a soft touch—and that’s Madame Tenneyck, thank you very much.

My mother is a native French speaker but once my twin sister and I began nursery school, she stopped speaking French to us, so although we knew many French words, we were not fluent. In the summer of 1987, I visited Mom’s family in Belgium, and my French improved greatly; my relatives even complimented my accent. 

By then, I’d already dropped French in school. I had the opposite of the right stuff. My twin sister continued, and would even spend a year in France during college, and speaks fluently. 

In fall of 1988, I audited an AP English class I didn’t have the grades to get in, because I was obsessed with The Sound and Fury, and didn’t think I could comprehend it without help; I didn’t care if I got credit. Did I tell this to my former French teacher? I don’t recall. Whatever I said, she handed me a copy of Godot in French after school one day, and said if I read it, she’d take me as her guest to the production at Lincoln Center. 

Why she afforded me this generosity I can’t say but I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I didn’t get far in the French version, though I read the play in English several times. On a cool fall evening around election time, as Michael Dukakis, for whom I volunteered, was getting his ass handed to him in the Presidential election, Madame Tenneyck drove me to Manhattan for a night at the theater.

A grown-up date. 

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Some years stand out more than others: 1988 was such a year for me. After floundering as a student for the bulk of high school, I was suddenly engaged; beyond getting better grades, I dove into reading, attended the theater, and watched movies more intensely than ever. That summer, I got into Hip Hop for the first time because a kid named Tim from Spanish Harlem gave me a cassette copy of BDP’s second album, By All Means Necessary; and late in the year, a show of Richard Diebenkorn’s drawings at MOMA introduced me to his work and a lifelong interest was kindled. 

For my seventeenth birthday, my mother took me to see Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Before we attended a Wednesday matinee, I interviewed for a messenger job at Sound One, the largest post-production facility on the east coast, housed in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway between 49th and 50th Street. A storied home to songwriters dating back to the Tin Pan Alley days, Paul Simon and Martin Scorsese and Lorne Michaels all had offices there, as did the lesser-known Benny Ross, owner of St. Nicholas music on the 6th floor (they published “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”). 

I got the gig and that summer, green as can be, I hauled boxes of 35mm film across midtown, degaussed magnetic 35mm sound stock, and delivered reels of sound to different editing rooms around the building, lit up by hints of show business glamour while also disabused of it by engineers, mixers, and assistant editors on a daily basis. Go be a kid, they said, resigned, some even bitter: What’s the rush?

Inside the Brill building, I hung around in the reception area next to the recording studios where actors came in to loop dialogue. One day, I sauntered into one studio to find Oliver Stone alone on the phone—he was there doing ADR for Talk Radio. He wheeled around, gave me a hard look and said aloud, to no one in particular, “Who the hell is this?”

I slid away and quickly learned to pick my spots. Still, I chatted up Kelly McGillis and John Sales, Bill Cobbs, Jodie Foster, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Gabriel, who was there doing music for Scorsese’s Jesus epic, The Last Temptation of Christ. They were all gracious and forgiving, especially Foster whom I bombarded with questions and thoughts as she prepared to do a session for The Accused.

The Last Temptation of Christ had originally been scheduled to debut at the New York Film Festival, but with opposition already shrill, the movie was rushed to an August release. Which meant long days mixing the sound. I volunteered to stay late one night if my boss gave me his fitted wool Eight Men Out baseball cap—it was too small but I still crammed it on my head for years. 

One weekend, I came to sit next to the projector in the machine room of the 7th floor studio, when Scorsese invited me in to hang out. That afternoon, I was due to visit my grandfather at Lenox Hill hospital, but once I was in that mixing room, I didn’t want to leave. I just sat in a corner on a comfy chair in a smoked-filled air-conditioned room, watched, listened while worrying about how much trouble I’d be in if I didn’t get over to see grandpa in the hospital. 

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Heady stuff, and I entered my final year of school in a state of impatience. I’d been offered an editing room apprentice gig but it would have to wait along with everything else; adulthood so close, yet beyond reach.

Most of all, I was waiting to get laid. I’d already had chances. I’d been propositioned by older girls who were interested in relieving me of my virginity, and I turned them all down. I claimed high standards but really I was terrified. One friend wrote in my senior yearbook, “Congrats on convincing us you were Gay for the last four years.”

I graduated on time but despite my academic efforts those final two years, got rejected from every school I applied to: Temple. Ithaca. SUNY New Paltz. SUNY Cortlandt. Stony Brook. Geneseo. A loser. I ended up moving in with my father and taking three non-matriculating courses at Hunter college including a 400-level class on Samuel Beckett. Why they let me into such an advanced course, I can’t say, but I loved it. 

The professor, whose name escapes me, unlocked the mystery of En Attendant Godot when he told us that literally translated to English, the title was “While Waiting for Godot.” The one extra word explained a lot. All the business about who Godot was, what he represented, didn’t matter; Beckett, the teasing bastard, left a confounding trail of literary breadcrumbs for scholars to puzzle over. In other words, he was messing with us. 

Who Godot is being far less important than what we do while we wait. And that we rely on each other to make it through.

“We have time to grow old,” Vladimir says as Estragon sleeps. “The air is full of our cries, but habit is a great deadener.” 

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Lincoln Center at night, the lights, the fountain, and that New York City sensation that anything is possible. The night we saw the show, the small audience of 300 included luminaries such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mary Tyler Moore and Candice Bergen. Godot had company in the glamour department that season. Madonna’s appearance in David Mamet’s Hollywood satire, Speed the Plow, led the charge. I didn’t see it but in a more minor key, did catch Our Town with Eric Stolz, Penelope Anne Miller and Spalding Gray late in the year.

Even more memorable, was the modern dress production of Coriolanus at the Public with Christopher Walken, Irene Worth, and Keith David. I left the theater that night exhilarated in a way I’d never experienced before. I didn’t understand everything being said but the power of the actors and the staging—and the Philip Glass score—had me rapt. I also remember being thrilled at spotting Ellen Burstyn and Matthew Broderick in the audience.

Steve Martin and Robin Williams were heroes. I’d been listening to their records and watching their movies throughout my adolescence. I rooted for them just as I rooted for my favorite sport teams; when Williams finally scored a movie hit with Good Morning Vietnam, I celebrated as if he’d won a championship. The pair seemed well-suited for the roles in Godot—there were even a few moments in which Williams did a few characteristic improvisations.

A few years later, John Heilpern wrote in The New York Observer:

“Much—too much—has been written about Beckett’s fondness for vaudeville and slapstick, and how Laurel and Hardy would have been ideal at Vladimir and Estragon. Godot with the red nose of a clown has become one of the clichés of Beckett production. The fatal flaw of Mike Nichols’s starry 1988 Lincoln Center Theater Group production of Godot, with Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and Bill Irwin, was that Mr. Nichols assumed it to be a knockabout comedy (every other line a laugh). But it is a tragedy, or tragicomedy, not just a vehicle for comedians.”

Fine points. Then again, how many productions of Godot are guilty of neglecting the comedy portion of the “tragicomedy”? Such a fine line between stupid and clever.

My most vivid memory of the evening is of Bill Irwin as Lucky, the slave. Irwin comes along with the vicious Pozzo (Abraham) in Act One and doesn’t say a word. I recognized Irwin from Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” video, also featuring Williams, that had come out a few months before. Otherwise, he was the unknown on stage that night—everybody knew Lukas Haas as the boy from Witness. 

Saddled with Pozzo’s luggage, Irwin stood in place, silent, his body shaking, like a bottle rocket ready to launch. Could not take your eyes off him, a man ready to uncork.

And when Lucky finally speaks, in a rupture of words, a long monologue of high-falutin gibberish, it felt cathartic. The three other actors on stage, alarmed by the torrent of words, lassoed him with a rope to shut him up. When they did, Irwin reverted back to mesmerizing silence. I understood his repression, agony, and need to escape—his imprisonment—better than anything in the play. 

On the ride back home, I recall the soporific heat of the car, the yellow lights of the West Side highway, and our breathless recapping of what we’d just seen. It wasn’t exactly Lucky’s outburst because we were in conversation, and I was in heaven.

Some of my friends’s parents were unnerved that I wanted to talk with them. They assumed I did it to curry favor, but the idea of “kissing ass” to win an adult’s approval made no sense to me. I was raised to not only speak with adults but to converse with them. And to enjoy myself.

Madame Tenneyck listened and talked; we interrupted each other, thoughts and connections spilling out. I didn’t crack the window open for air, though it became difficult to breathe. Our exchange didn’t tire and when she dropped me off at my house and the cold air and county silence hit me, I wondered how I’d ever be able to fall asleep.

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Picture by Bags; Paul Sableman via Wikimedia Commons]