Dennis Začek's solid staging lets Samuel Beckett's existential comedy be.
Written in the wake of World War II, with its carnage and cruelty committed by all sides on a scale previously unimaginable, Irish writer Samuel Beckett's 1949 Waiting for Godot is timeless and of the moment—a bleakly comic portrait of human beings coping with the basic, harsh realities of existence while vainly looking for something "to give us the impression we exist." Confounding audiences and scholars who have debated for decades what Godot means (or, for that matter, who "Godot" is), this "tragicomedy in two acts" is theatrical poetry that embodies Archibald MacLeish's dictum (stated in his 1926 "Ars Poetica"): "A poem should not mean / But be."…
Dennis Začek's solid staging lets Samuel Beckett's existential comedy be.
Written in the wake of World War II, with its carnage and cruelty committed by all sides on a scale previously unimaginable, Irish writer Samuel Beckett's 1949 Waiting for Godot is timeless and of the moment—a bleakly comic portrait of human beings coping with the basic, harsh realities of existence while vainly looking for something "to give us the impression we exist." Confounding audiences and scholars who have debated for decades what Godot means (or, for that matter, who "Godot" is), this "tragicomedy in two acts" is theatrical poetry that embodies Archibald MacLeish's dictum (stated in his 1926 "Ars Poetica"): "A poem should not mean / But be."…