Waiting for Godot

Figure 1.

Donald Griffin and Thomas W. Jones II in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,directed by Joy Zinoman at The Studio Theatre in Washington, DC. Photo: Richard Anderson.

The Studio Theatre production of Waiting for Godot, directed by Joy Zinoman, foregrounded race as an inflection of the social and theistic relations of Beckett’s characters, who are left on their own to improvise in a non-signifying vastness that is neither vast nor non-signifying enough. Charged by the hip showmanship of African-American performers Thomas W. Jones II (Vladimir) and Donald Griffin (Estragon), Beckett’s absurdist tour de force was refracted through an overlay of identity politics and black vaudeville traditions, especially as situated by the marked whiteness of Pozzo (Michael Tolaydo) and Lucky (Hugh Nees).

Hardly the first production of Waiting for Godot to feature a racially mixed cast, it nonetheless attracted threats of litigation by US literary agents representing Beckett’s estate, following a high-profile, favorable review by Peter Marks in The New York Times (24 September 1998). Despite the issuance of a cease-and-desist letter ordered by Georges Borchardt, Inc., as well as a series of phone calls, letters, and faxes that Zinoman described in The Washington Post (10 November 1998) as “bullying” and “intimidating,” The Studio Theatre managed to keep the production open and to extend its popular run by almost a month beyond its original closing date.

Zinoman has argued that her production “is the text,” while Borchardt’s representatives have accused her of “injecting race into the play.” My own position is troubled by a profound conviction that racism is more deserving of theatrical attention than existentialism and conflicted by a conditioned desire to constitute Beckett’s text as consistent with Zinoman’s choices. In any case, the Studio Godot vitiates the comment I overheard years ago, as I followed two African-American women out of a production of Ohio Impromptu: “It’s just more of that white people stuff; ain’t nobody supposed to understand.” As has been documented by inmate reactions to the landmark San Quentin performance of Godot, Beckett’s world sustains readings by many cultures or groups; however, I hope not to endorse subjugation of social injustice to the dominion of Art by arguing the reciprocal constitutions of race and Godot that were achieved by Zinoman’s production.

Russell Metheny’s set design situated Beckett’s vagrants in an environment that announced urban cataclysm conflated with all the iconographic resonance entailed by its functions in the script. In the sparsely articulated parking lot of a long abandoned drive-in movie site, Beckett’s blasted tree shared the stage with a heap of shredded rubber (rubble?), evoking at once his familiar material and ideological paradigms, as well as an apocalyptic possibility wryly congruent with the set. Framed against the backdrop of a slightly askew, artfully corroded drive-in movie screen, the ebbing, cyclical narrative of the play was referred instructively to the toppled venue of outmoded stories that proffered up the (markedly absent) comforts of stable meanings and closure. The site spawned the contagion of paradoxes (absence/presence, witnessed/deserted, literal/figurative, and so on) that animates Beckett’s world, but it equally enunciated a locus of marginalization and abandonment that, with the appearance of the performers, was subsequently inflected by race.

Waiting for Godot consists almost wholly of eloquence deployed against the torments of waiting. In this respect, it is ready-made for habitation (and defamiliarization) by the familiar trope of inner-city vagrants, whose nonstop repartee functions precisely as a filling and exhaustion of time. In this production, the dialogue of Didi and Gogo, spoken by Jones and Griffin, acquired literal and figurative allusions that accrete on other dimensions of Beckett’s inferences, amplifying, rather than perverting, his meanings. When, for example, Estragon inquired of Vladimir, “We’ve lost our rights?” and Vladimir replied, “We got rid of them,” or Estragon ruminated over the idea that they are “tied down...