To all those whose subscription memberships to the Lincoln Center Theater failed to procure them a ticket to “Waiting for Godot”—relax. Mike Nichols’ overhyped, oversold, all-star production—with famed comedians Steve Martin and Robin Williams, famed clown and mime artist Bill Irwin, and famed scenery-chewer F. Murray Abraham—turns out to be a big nothing. Not since The Great Vowel Shift has anything made to seem so important in Western culture caused so little stir. The revival, which opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse a week ago Sunday, has Mr. Williams in the role of Estragon (the tramp with boot trouble) and Mr. Martin as Vladimir (the tramp with bladder trouble), and Mr. Irwin and Mr. Abraham as Lucky and Pozzo, respectively. It’s a washout on every count: as theater, as cultural history, as entertainment—even as a chance to see Mr. Martin and Mr. Williams perform live. Beckett’s bleak, absurdist expression of what an entire generation of intellectuals chose to regard as the fundamental existential dilemma confronting modern man offers the two comedians little scope for their talents. On the whole, you’re better off watching their movies, TV specials, and concert tapes—in short, spending time with them in situations in which they have control over the material.
The Lincoln Center “Godot” isn’t even an interesting failure—just the tedious inexorable realization of a tedious bad idea. What can have been the point of casting two such idiosyncratic performers in roles created to embody universality and anonymity? Robin Williams is the guy who makes us laugh by assuming an oddness of manner—by talking to fast or in a funny voice. His signature role is that of an alien—the Russian émigré or the non-conformist d.j. so zany he appears to be from outer space. (Mr. Williams actually rose to stardom playing a sort of Martian on a television sitcom.) Mr. Martin, meanwhile, has made a career of sending up universality. What the outward elements of his style—the aura of colossal oafishness and ineptitude, the nasal monotone, the squint, the seemingly unmanageable frame—add up to is a portrait of the average American male as grotesque.
More particularly, Mr. Martin specializes in the exaggerated simulation of heightened emotion, overstating the concept of yearning or indignation or uncertainty by means of the too ardently flared nostril or furrowed brow. Mr. Martin performs Vladimir the way he performs everything else: consequently, it’s impossible to take a anything he says seriously. Among the simple utterances he can’t get away with are “A running sore!” (Didi is examining Lucky), “Tomorrow everything will be better” (comforting Gogo), and “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?” (musing aloud to himself). Just imagine Steve Martin delivering any of those lines on “Saturday Night Live” and you have the key to the whole mess.
Nichols’ idea seems to have been to use some of American’s premier comic talent to highlight the comic side of Beckett’s play. For, as the feature stories keep reminding us, Beckett acknowledged his debt to such comedians as Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers in the creation of Vladimir and Estragon; scholars have suggested commedia dell’arte improvisation as the source of the tramps’ halfhearted attempts to entertain themselves; the role of Estragon both in the play’s disastrous American premiere, at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami in 1956, and in the subsequent Broadway production was played by Bert Lahr; and the play contains a number of funny lines. But both vaudeville—which produced Chaplin and Lahr—and commedia dell’arte are highly traditional forms, built on stock types and routines. In the current production, Harpo’s “Here, hold my leg” gag is played once or twice, and Mr. Irwin, extraordinary as ever, does Chaplinesque tricks with his hat—tricks that Mr. Martin is in his element trying to imitate badly. (Travestying what the virtuoso does artfully is Mr. Martin’s forte.) But these are Mr. Nichols’ rare nods toward the idea of a comic heritage. Mostly, Steve Martin and Robin Williams just turn Beckett’s two bowler-hatted tramps into a couple of wild and crazy guys.
Mr. Martin does his outrageous pantomimes and tantrums; Mr. Williams does his weird voices. He has some fun with noises and impressions, transforming Didi’s name into the “Twilight Zone” theme, or into a heart monitor; imitating a game-show buzzer when Didi takes too long to answer a question. What is unique about his antics is how localized they are: he does an impression not of a man playing the harmonica or of a paparazzo but, rather, of the harmonica or the flashbulb itself. Still, what’s a flashbulb or a harmonica doing in “Waiting for Godot?” As an actor, Mr. Williams is adequate, but only just. Like Mr. Martin, he seems uncomfortable or insincere when he isn’t doing shtick, and you can’t help thinking how much more moving another actor might have been in the role. As Pozzo, F. Murray Abraham has one or two endearing turns, but, as usual, the assumption behind his performance seems to be that the character he is playing would not be interesting in his own right.
Actually, the Lincoln Center “Godot” represents an ill-starred encounter between two antithetical schools of comedy—one that came out of academia while the other was a reaction college-bred gravitas. Mike Nichols is a product of the same era that brought forth Beckett, absurdist theater, and existentialism in general. He belongs to the generation of Cold War comedians for whom to be at the University of Chicago in the early and mid-fifties was to be at the center of an intellectual movement, as it was for their audience. For the students who flocked to see Nichols and May, Shelley Berman, Alan Arkin, and improv groups like the Compass Players, college was a heady experience and comedy inextricably linked with political satire and social purpose. To their children, the generation that became Mr. Martin’s audience, college was something routine and expectable that young people felt they had to distance themselves from in order to be able to style themselves intellectuals. What made Mr. Martin and his colleagues so appealing to this generation, in the early years of “Saturday Night Live,” was the open contempt they affected for earnest, liberal-arts, intellectual values and anything that came with an odor of seriousness.
No wonder every time Mr. Martin pronounces the name Godot you want to roar with laughter: it sounds so much like college parody. But this isn’t really his fault. “Waiting for Godot” invites parody. As theater, it doesn’t really hold up very well. Seeing the play isn’t all that different form reading it, and today it can seem ponderous and superficial, with its heavy symbolism, its existential paradoxes, quips, and whimsies, and its endless theatrical jokes about art as a reflection of life’s boredom. To a public that had lived through the Second World War, discovering the unspeakable and unimaginable extent of human evil and suffering, all those musings—about life’s lack of meaning or purpose and about the impossibility of action and belief—would have had tremendous resonance. But what can they mean to people lucky or influential enough to have landed a ticket to the Lincoln Center production?
Mr. Nichols, who has had some experience directing works of a nihilistic or absurdist stamp—“The Graduate,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Catch-22”—seems to have no answer. In fact, he seems generally at a loss confronting the play. He directs Williams and Martin at breakneck speed, so that lines like “You’re my only hope” and “Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?” lose all pathos. (He turns Pozzo into a Mafia lord. Why?) In terms of design, Nicholas has made all the obvious choices. Ann Roth’s costumes contain a reference to the homeless. (Robin Williams wears a hooded sweatshirt, complete with front zipper and severed sleeves.) Tony Walton’s set looks backward to T.S. Eliot via Sam Shepard: a literal wasteland, littered with natural and roadside debris—a truck tire, a Nevada license plate, bits of machinery, animal skulls; even the withered tree that dominates the stage seems bowed with existential angst. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting works hard to create a lasting afterimage: her final dim-out lingers savoringly on the closing tableau. In the end, though, Mr. Irwin (turning Lucky’s dance and long gibberish set-piece into expressions of cultural anxiety) is the only memorable thing about the production.
Will people look back on this event years from now and say, “I was there when…”? Will they talk about seeing Robin Williams in the role of Estragon the way those who saw the original production—even those who admit there was nothing special about it—reminisce about seeing Bert Lahr? Probably. People have to come away with something after so much fuss.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, November 21, 1988