I Feel Like We've Been Here Before: A Review of The Godot Cycle

It's 17 July 2011, and we're in the middle of a heat wave in Toronto. Temperatures are climbing the charts like a Justin Bieber single. It's thirty-four degrees in the sun and in the forties with humidity. It's also the last day of the Toronto Fringe Festival.

I'm two floors below ground—directly under the Fringe Tent outside Honest Ed's—at 11:45 p.m. in an underground parking garage that's been fashioned into a theatre space. There are plywood boards boxing about three hundred of us in like POWs while construction lamps throw light on the action underway in the centre of the room. Walking in, you sort of feel like you're entering a real life Fight Club or—at the very least—an illegal cock fighting match in Tijuana. Giant scoreboards on the back wall are keeping unobvious track of time while, under the lights, a pair of actors are rounding the corner of act two in Waiting for Godot ... for the twenty-third time in fifty-four hours. Straight.

Eric Craig and David Christo look like shit. They're pale, thin, coated in sweat and parking garage grime which, I imagine, contains at least a little asbestos. This fifty-four-hour cycle was preceded by a thirty-hour cycle one week previous. Any recovery the two had made in the days between is all but erased. Christo (as Estragon) is collapsed on the floor; it might be blocking, it might be exhaustion. Craig (as Vladimir) is faring a bit better; on his feet, in any case. The space has been capped at a fifty-person capacity, but in this—the final hour—the producers have opened the floodgates and there's wall-to-wall bodies inside, now. This isn't a play anymore, it's a title fight: It's Christo & Craig vs. Time & Fatigue, in a tag-team match that has lasted twenty-three rounds. Although they don't know it, as they've lost all concept of time, they are only a dozen or so minutes away from winning.

I'll get back to that.

Nine months later, I'm sitting down with Christo, Craig, and Caden Douglas—who co-conceptualized and produced with Craig—at a bar patio on an unseasonably warm April afternoon. The boys look less like heroin addicts these days, but they still wince at the reminder of the physical toll exacted by the show. It was Craig who came up with the initial idea, refining the concept with Douglas over a year and a half. The concept itself is diabolically simple: a production of Waiting for Godot that loops end-to-end for one thirty-hour and one fifty-four-hour cycle. The two actors playing Vladimir and Estragon would only ever leave the stage between shows; there was no intermission. The amount of time they were sidelined only lasted between ten seconds and ten minutes, so they could hydrate, eat, and expel as needed. Then the play would start all over again.

When I ask them about the genesis of the project, Douglas says, "We really wanted it to be a 'happening'.... We wanted the community to be involved and people to continually come back and check in on the show, so they could watch the progression and the evolution of both the actors and the piece."

"And they [the audience] identified with it so strongly, as if they were going through it with us," adds Craig.

Throughout the marathon performance, there was never a time when the house was empty. Even through the wee hours and the breaking dawn, people showed up to watch. Maybe out of some morbid curiosity if one of them would collapse, maybe out of support for the actors ... or maybe just because theatre is a communal experience. Maybe Kevin Costner had it right and if you build it, they will come. One audience member stayed almost straight through the entire second cycle. He made it fifty-two hours before leaving ... and not a single person working on...