Audiences in need of a bracing, existentialist thwack across the face would do well to make it down to Navy Pier to see Druid Theatre’s touring production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, now visiting Chicago Shakes. Director Garry Hynes has carved out a sharp, angular rendition of the text that leans into the play’s vaudeville roots, while still leaving plenty of gaps for the wailing horror of existence to fill in. It’s funny, until it’s not, except when it’s both.
In other words, the production is impeccably Irish. (Beckett was an Irishman, but he originally wrote the 1953 play in French.) As Vladimir and Estragon—aka Didi and Gogo—actors Marty Rea and Aaron Monaghan do marvelous things with the play’s rat-a-tat dialogue while also bringing a silent film–like physicality to their respective men. Rea’s tall, imperious Vladimir is all flailing limbs and failing charm, while Monaghan’s small, lumpy Estragon isn’t so much a sad sack as he is a man resembling an actual sack that’s sad.
For those looking for a plot explainer, there isn’t really much to tell you. Didi and Gogo are a pair of down-and-out men standing by a tree on the side of the road waiting for a man named Godot. While they pass the time, they meet a boorish gentleman named Pozzo, played here by the great Rory Nolan as a poncy Englishman practically reeking of the Empire, and the man’s poor servant Lucky (Garret Lombard, also great), led around on a rope like a dog.
After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy enters (played by local actor Zachary Scott Fewkes), delivering a message from Godot that, while he will not be arriving today, he will surely be arriving tomorrow. Didi and Gogo resolve that they should leave, but they do not. Repeat for Act II. It’s not for nothing that the Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously described Waiting for Godot as “a two-act play in which nothing happens, twice.”
Aside from the stellar performances, Hynes and her designers (set by Frances O’Connor, lights by James F. Ingalls, sound by Greg Clarke) bring an elegant yet thrillingly minimalist touch to the milieu. The floor is a parched and cracked stretch of grey earth, while the sky behind it is just splotches of white on canvas, and the whole thing is framed by a white fluorescent frame. When the play’s instantaneous night strikes at the end of each act, the stage is bathed in a rich blue, a blast of color that shocks the system. The subtle, faraway sound of wind underscores Didi and Gogo’s most harrowing moments.
While it was written in the shadow of the atomic bomb, it’s not hard to imagine that Beckett could just have easily penned Waiting for Godot out of anxiety over the smartphone. After all, Didi and Gogo seem to have goldfish-like attention spans and—for Estragon especially—memories that barely extend past their field of vision.
Perhaps a few decades from now, the world will be populated with nothing but Didis and Gogos, their Google-addled brains fried to a crisp by social media and apps and information overload—at least the ones that haven’t perished in the nuclear war that, these days, seems to be shifting from distant possibility to frightening inevitability.
Come to think of it, it’s almost as if nothing has really changed in the 60-some years since Godot first failed to arrive. How stupidly apt.
Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Written by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Garry Hynes. With Garret Lombard, Aaron Monaghan, Rory Nolan, Marty Rea, Zachary Scott Fewkes. Running time: 2hrs; one intermission.