Waiting for Applause

        When Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin walked on stage at the start of a production of “Waiting for Godot” by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the crowd burst into applause. Later, when John Goodman and John Glover entered as the comic duo Pozzo and Lucky, the crowd similarly gushed. But when Matthew Schechter, the boy playing the aptly named role of Boy, entered, the crowd watched silently.
        I suspect the crowd didn't know what to do, and so it listened.
        “Waiting for Godot,” like other mid-century plays by Becket and others, is frustratingly untethered to what we know. Dialog is intellectual trackwork for a train that has left recognizable human experiences somewhere offstage. Familiarity has disappeared. It is nearly impossible, therefore, to make sense of the play in one sitting, and so, to engage the crowd, the actors must entertain.
        The result is that drama dies behind the disappearing chug of intellectual experimentation; acting turns to camp, and the play becomes a parade. Poignancy mostly vanishes, and we mostly fail to recognize the helplessness of Estragon and Vladimir’s situation because Gogo and Didi are flailing around so much—and isn’t Nathan Lane so funny when he makes that wounded pouty face?
        In my memory, Lane, Irwin, Goodman, and Glover risked no emotional vulnerability in their roles. They were alternately loud, caustic, risible, lonely, cowed, selfish, voluble, mocking, and more—and their performances offered easy recognition instead of depth. Even the loneliness, most of the time, seemed to evoke chuckles rather than sympathy. This makes for good fun, surely--and I enjoyed watching--but it misses the point of the play. It makes parody of satire.
        And so, we were taken for a joy ride. We give ourselves to the actors, because they are stars and we love them, and they make us laugh, even if we never completely understand their wandering and bickering. It reminds me of a passage from Don DeLillo’s 1992 novel “Mao II” in which Yasser Arafat meets with the press and public:

There was a film crew and some men who looked like government officials and fifty or sixty people just passing by and Scott went over there and saw a man on the top step who wore a khaki field jacket and checkered headscarf, a short guy with a scratchy beard, and it was Yasir Arafat and he was waving at the people on the sidewalk. When a hotel guest came out the door, Arafat smiled and nodded and people in the crowd smiled in response. Then Arafat said something to an official and the man laughed and everyone on the sidewalk smiled some more. Scott realized he was smiling broadly. He could feel the smile stretching across his face and he looked at the people around him and they looked back smiling and it was clearly agreed they all felt good together. And Arafat smiled again, talking to officials, overgesturing for the camera, pointing toward the entrance and then moving that way. Everyone applauded now. Someone shook Arafat’s hand and there was more applause. He lets a stranger shake his hand. Scott smiled and applauded, he saw the men on the steps applaud. When Arafat went inside, the people on the sidewalk smiled and clapped one last time. They wanted to make him happy.

The audience at “Waiting for Godot” was predisposed to enjoy the four main actors. Perhaps, like the crowd above, we even sought to please the performers. We cheered at the actors' arrival, laughed easily at their prancing, and swelled at their curtain calls.
        The boy, however, received no such treatment, and yet his performance generated the most genuine drama of the show—even if it was drama of different kind. The crowd hushed when he spoke. We craned our necks to see and hear him. Young as he was, the boy might have forgotten a line or grown anxious before the crowd. His small voice seemed a whisper next to Goodman’s booming baritone and Lane’s piercing tenor. We held our breath as he tread onstage next to the stars of our day, and we smiled for him when he departed without having missed a beat. Then we leaned back into our seats, our pulses returning to normal, and we waited for the next crack of Pozzo’s whip or whimper from poor old Didi so we could cheer the great figures performing a work whose title we still mispronounce and whose subject matter may be ripe for study but whose production, in order for it to be engaging, breezed over the very stuff that makes it rich.