How do you pronounce Godot?
Some Beckett specialists, like British director Sean Mathias (who directed the Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart), prefer “GOD-oh.” Others, like New Yorker critic John Lahr (whose father starred in the original American production), favor the more popular “Guh-DOH.” To complicate matters, Beckett’s former agent Georges Borchardt told the New York Times last year that he likes “the French way, with equal emphasis on both syllables.”
The estate of Samuel Beckett is infamously persnickety—it prohibits women from playing the tragic-comic tramps in Waiting for Godot, bars almost all staged readings of Beckett’s radio plays, and once blocked a Parisian production of Footfalls partly because the actor violated the stage directions and went walking in the wrong places—but refuses to shed light on the one question that actors, directors, and critics around the world might like a little help with.
How very Beckettian.
For his precise and orthodox production of Waiting for Godot at ACT Theatre, Seattle Shakespeare Company director George Mount has chosen the less familiar road: GOD-oh. “For a US audience used to Guh-DO, the GOD-o pronunciation makes the name stand out, have more presence when it’s spoken,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I think it makes us more aware of Godot and his importance rather than just being a familiar name we’re already used to before getting in the theater.”
I first encountered the text of Waiting for Godot as a freshman in high school when an English teacher I adored, who’d spent a lot of time in France, recommended I check it out from the school library. (I think I’d asked her was existentialism was—this was her answer.)
I read act one that afternoon on the floor of the library, between the shelves, and finished act two in my bedroom that night. While I couldn’t claim to have completely understood it, when I closed the book, I knew something in my mind had permanently shifted. It wasn’t just the newfound knowledge that fart jokes, dick anxiety, and stinking feet—all staples of early male adolescence—could live comfortably at the heart of a classic of world literature. (Though that was certainly part of it. Who knew that the grubby bits of living in a human body are an integral part of any serious conversation about The Human Condition?) It was the flash of insight that fresh out of middle school, I had no idea what it meant to be alone, to be heartbroken by the world, to be broke and hungry, or to be deeply afraid of anything in my future further away than next week.
Godot showed me the shallowness of my own experience—the comedy in the desolation, and the desolation in the comedy may have been my first inkling of what it might feel like to be an adult. For a moment, that yearning to be on one’s own, another staple of adolescence, seemed more terrifying than liberating. For better or (and?) for worse, I have kept that feeling with me.
I can’t count the number of productions I’ve watched since then. I’ve seen it done by the grizzled masterminds of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, by eager kids in charmingly shitty basements, by mediocre grown-ups in fringe theaters, by drama-school grads on the Seattle waterfront, and now by high-caliber local actors working with Seattle Shakespeare Company. Aside from the pronunciation of the name, Mount’s production tries other tricks of disorientation, too, including heightened theatricality in act one (tinny pianola music, streaky whiteface on the actors, and a mechanical moon that rises in a comically labored way) contrasted with a softer, more naturalistic act two (dreamily dissonant piano by Schoenberg, no more whiteface, and a projected moon that drifts behind the stage). The set, designed by Craig Wollam, is a stage-on-a-stage—a teeny proscenium with dusty red-velvet curtains, broken molding, and battered floorboards marooned in the middle of ACT’s much larger stage, like an island of vintage vaudeville floating in the middle of a void.
As the lights come up on Beckett’s existentially exhausted tramps who spend the play waiting for a savior who never arrives, actor Darragh Kennan sits scowling on a stone, tugging at his boots. His counterpart, the tall and elegant Todd Jefferson Moore stands, looking offstage with an expression that is simultaneously vacant, hopeful, and despairing. It takes a master actor to inflect one gaze with so much subtlety, and Moore—as the slightly less world-weary Vladimir—is a joy to watch throughout this masterpiece of pathetic comedy in a blasted world.
As Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously described Waiting for Godot, “nothing happens, twice” yet it “keeps audiences glued to their seats.” Godot is a resilient play that way—Beckett’s despairing humor veers from fart jokes (literally, “Who farted?”) to harrowing aphorisms about life and death.
The text alone can carry even a half-decent production, but it’s so much better when actors like Moore and Kennan bring squirming, frustrated life to its metaphysical stasis. Every time they deliver the play’s six-time refrain, for example, it feels like a fresh emotional arc from assertion to confusion to despair:
Estragon: Let’s go.
Vladimir: We can’t.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.
Estragon: Ah!
Moore’s Vladimir is the more optimistic and intellectual of the two, never quite comfortable with his hat while earthbound Estragon is mostly concerned with his empty belly, the excruciating boredom, and his smelly, too-tight boots. (“There’s man all over for you,” Vladimir muses after one of Estragon’s complaints, “blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.”) Chris Ensweiler as Pozzo, a fat and self-centered slave owner, is appropriately pompous and bombastic, though his maniacal chortling—Pozzo, at least in the beginning, is strangely amused with himself and Godot’s grim world—is a jarring shift of gears from Kennan and Moore’s more delicate way of moving through the play. But Jim Hamerlinck as Pozzo’s busted-down slave Lucky is truly piteous. He’s physically larger than his brutal master and could be giving the beatings instead of getting them, but he’s hunched, mute, and panting. When Lucky finally opens his mouth to speak—commanded by his master to “Think, pig!”—Hamerlinck’s voice sounds oddly noble, with a tobacco velvetiness. “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattman of a personal God,” he begins reasonably, before descending into the painful froth of a mind hijacked by suffering:
In spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished…
Once Pozzo and Lucky have left our two tramps alone again, Kennan’s Estragon announces he’s unhappy. “Not really! Since when?” Moore’s Vladimir asks sincerely. “I’ve forgotten,” Estragon answers. “Extraordinary the tricks that memory plays!” says Vladimir, ever the optimist, ignoring the implications of his friend’s infinite misery.
Mount allows one notable tweak to the text—the two tramps argue briefly about where they’d once picked grapes for a living. In standard versions of the play, Vladimir insists it was in “Macon country” while Estragon counters: “No, I was never in the Macon country! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In Cackon country!” In Mount’s production, Vladimir says they’d picked grapes in “Napa valley” while Estragon says he’s puked his puke of a life away in “Crappa valley!” That got a big laugh but caught my ear. When I asked Mount why he made the change, he said it was approved by Beckett himself for a 1957 performance of Waiting for Godot in San Quentin State Prison. (Sometimes Samuel Beckett relaxed his iron fist.)
As a side note, while sitting through—and genuinely enjoying—this perfectly high-quality production of Waiting for Godot, I had a revelation: I realized I don’t think I ever need to see another production of Waiting for Godot again. It will always be a masterpiece and it will always have changed my life, but while watching this production, I realized that the play is an exquisite and hard little piece of theatrical sculpture but not infinitely giving like the huge works by writers like Shakespeare and Melville, which are messy and sprawling and seem to pump oceans of polychromatic blood through their veins. Godot, despite its glances into the void, is finite. I’ve hit the Godot wall. We’ve had our moments, but I didn’t feel the need to wait around for him any longer.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll be drawn (or coerced) into seeing another Godot someday, but hearing Pozzo deliver my favorite line before he disappears forever offstage, in his apt distillation of the entire play, felt like a very personal finale: “They give birth astride the grave, the lights gleam an instant, then it’s night once more.” 
