Strange Things Are Afoot

A Waiting for Godot production that feels a little too confined.

- SARA HOLDREN

WHEN THE INEVITABLE Bill & Ted reference arrives in the new Broadway Waiting for Godot, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter handle it with good grace.

For a flash, Samuel Beckett's immortal clowns become Wyld Stallyns again. Of course, it's a gimme. And of course, from a more skeptical perspective, the whole project could be described as cleaving to the wisdom of the strippers in Gypsy: You gotta get a gimmick. Jamie Lloyd is the director who has brought us Charles Xavier in Cyrano de Bergerac, Loki in Betrayal, and Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Blvd. But there's also something sweet—even Beckettian—about the moment. We know next to nothing of Vladimir and Estragon's pasts. When the scholar Vivian Mercier told Beckett the two tramps sounded as if they “had both gotten their Ph.D.s,” the playwright asked how he knew they hadn't. How do we know they weren't once wide-eyed goofballs who loved garage rock and historical babes? After all, they've had time to grow old.

Celebrity vehicle though it may often be, Godot certainly isn't easy. It attracts tight-knit pairs of actors who want to get down to some serious work. Winter and Reeves have clearly put in the time. If anything, their Didi and Gogo (Winter plays the former, the more cerebral clown, and Reeves the latter, the disgruntled yet tender beta) are a little on the solemn side. It may be the impulse to push against assumptions, but I think it has more to do with their director, whose hand hovers heavily over the production. The natural heir of Ivo van Hove, Lloyd doesn't wait for a play to inform his aesthetic. Like a bespoke-coffin-maker, he builds a specific type of box. Theatrical bodies have to fit inside as best they can. Some slot right in; others distort and cramp.