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    ‘Waiting for Godot’ Review: Old Friends Falling in and Out of Sync

    Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks star in Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Samuel Beckett left as little as possible to chance when he wrote “Waiting for Godot,” a play that, 70 years after its first production, usually looks substantially the same: the country road, the withered tree, the battered boots arranged at the top of Act II with “heels together, toes splayed.” In his stage directions, Beckett spent 195 words choreographing some horseplay involving hats.Live performance itself, then, would be the wild card. And so it proved on Saturday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where Michael Shannon is starring as Estragon (a.k.a. Gogo) opposite Paul Sparks as Vladimir (a.k.a. Didi). The two actors are old friends playing old friends, yet through the whole first act there wasn’t the faintest glint of chemistry between them.It was deadening to the production, and baffling for anyone who has admired Shannon’s and Sparks’s work separately or together, onstage or onscreen; I, for one, treasure the memory of them in Craig Wright’s “Lady” Off Broadway 15 years ago. Here their performances sprang into three dimensions only with the arrival, shortly before intermission, of a Boy (a lovely Toussaint Francois Battiste), who brings a message from Godot.I have no idea whether I caught the show on an off night, or if after merely a week of previews the production was still somewhat underbaked. But the inertness of Act I gave way to a high-energy Act II — rather denting the idea that one day in the nearly featureless void of Didi and Gogo’s existence is practically indistinguishable from another, but thank goodness anyway.From then on, Shannon and Sparks were in sync as scruffy, aimless, quarreling clowns who fail anew, by each fresh sunset, the test of being human. Buffeted by love and loathing, Didi and Gogo prefer to do their languishing together.“We always find something, eh Didi,” Gogo says, “to give us the impression we exist?”Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production for Theater for a New Audience lacks a discernible interpretation that we can grab onto, or that can grab onto us. But it does make striking use of the space, with a paved, two-lane road (by Riccardo Hernández) running downhill from the middle of the upstage wall to the back of the auditorium. The double yellow line in the center of the road — denoting a no-passing zone — could also be decoded as a no-dying zone. From the first moments of the play to the last, Didi and Gogo speak of ending their lives, but their passing is not to be.Under merciless sunlight (by Christopher Akerlind), Shannon is a crabbed and shambling Gogo, fidgety and peckish, bedeviled by ill-fitting boots. (Costumes are by Susan Hilferty.) Though Shannon does a bit of comic tumbling on the road, he also sometimes barely has to move to land a laugh, his remarkable gestural efficiency combining with a marvelous dryness of tone.Sparks, meanwhile, brings buoyancy to Didi’s roughness, and a palpable, if bizarro, human center. Inspecting the amnesiac Gogo’s legs for proof of an attack the day before, Didi is ebullient when he finds it: “There’s the wound! Beginning to fester!”A chunk of a scene in Act II, involving Didi, Gogo and their only passers-by — the vicious Pozzo (Ajay Naidu) and the man he has enslaved, Lucky (a vivid Jeff Biehl) — would get bigger laughs if the blocking allowed more than half the house a view of the actors’ faces. A sightline worry throughout the performance is the road itself, whose incline puts some audience members at an awkward angle to the action.This “Godot” comes at a time so fraught that real-world resonances ambush us in the most unexpected shows, so it’s odd that that doesn’t happen here, or didn’t to me. Yet in some ways we are all Didi and Gogo, victims and onlookers — perpetrators, too — in the barbarism of the world.Weary of brutal cycles that keep repeating, they despair of their ability to alter the course.“I can’t go on like this,” Gogo says.And Didi tells him: “That’s what you think.”Waiting for GodotThrough Dec. 3 at Theater for a New Audience, Manhattan; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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    Mark Duplass Can’t Get Enough of ‘Rocky II’

    The filmmaker and star of “Language Lessons” discusses his teenage education in indie cinema and the screenwriting lessons in “Waiting For Godot.”It was May 2020, two months into lockdown, and Mark Duplass, an avowed workaholic, was getting itchy. So he took up some hobbies, one of which was conversational Spanish lessons with an online institute in Guatemala.Then a good friend, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton, died and Duplass wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Neither, it seemed, was his instructor, and their dialogues began to go deep.“I found it very interesting that this 2D-video chat thing that everyone was starting to complain about and fear was going to be the death of our personal connections was actually bringing us closer,” he said. “I was looking for that feeling of warmth and connection as we were losing it.”Sensing the kernel of a movie in those interactions, he called Natalie Morales, whom he’d known socially and had hired to direct a couple of episodes of his HBO show “Room 104,” and asked if she wanted to collaborate.The result was “Language Lessons,” in which Duplass plays Adam, whose husband surprises him with weekly online Spanish classes. Morales, in her feature directorial debut, is Cariño, his teacher, who becomes a confidant when he throws himself at her like a love bomb. The two built their characters independently and then let them “organically collide,” Duplass said, as each one’s drama played out on the other’s screen.“One of my ways to experience a sense — as someone who is and has been married for 20 years — of falling in love with a new person in your life is to do it through the making of art together,” he said. “I thought this would be such a great way to do this with Natalie, to tell this platonic love story of the two of us.”Duplass’s other onscreen relationship, on “The Morning Show” — as Chip Black, the TV producer to Alex Levy, Jennifer Aniston’s anchor — imploded last season, demoting him to local news as Season 2 begins. “They give me so much creative freedom and respect on that set,” he said. “Working with Jen Aniston has been one of the dreams of my life.”In a video call from his home in Los Angeles, which served as the setting for “Language Lessons,” Duplass discussed cultural touchstones like the New Orleans movie house where he absorbed indie cinema, the Austin music club that taught him about success and the insight he gleaned from reading “Infinite Jest.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. The Black Cat Lounge in Austin In 1991, my brother [Jay] went to college at the University of Texas, leaving me home alone without my soul mate and highly depressed. Then I went to visit him in Austin. He took me to the Black Cat Lounge, where there were dollar hot dogs and dollar PBR and these Texas funk-soul bands, and people were dancing and sweating. And I was like, what is happening here in this place? I had my mind absolutely blown.It was when it started to dawn on me that an artist can have a life that is not you’re either the Top 10 on the Billboard Charts or the Top 10 in the box office — or you’re not doing it. These bands were raking in a couple of hundred bucks a night. They were local-ish celebrities. They also had day jobs. And they were successful artists in that way.2. David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” I had made “Cyrus” and “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” my two studio movies, and they had not lit the world on fire. So I had convinced myself that if you’re going to tell these oddball characters and this level of specificity, it’s never going to be successful. Then I read “Infinite Jest” and was like, “Oh no, you just didn’t do it well enough.” And it gave me comfort. I realized I’m not going to be an auteur like David Foster Wallace. I don’t have that in me. What I do have in me is I’m an incredible collaborator. I’m a great first leg on a relay team.3. Tracy Chapman I was 12 and I was a skater punk with my snarky skater punk friends. We were watching “Saturday Night Live,” enjoying all the chopping broccoli jokes, and Tracy Chapman was the musical guest. She walked on and she played “Fast Car.” All my friends were like, “This sucks,” because we were Metallica fans. I was like, “Yeah, this sucks.” And I went into the bathroom and I sobbed my eyes out. I was like: “Well, I’m different than my friends. This is something else for me.” And that kicked me off into a singer-songwriter journey.4. Neutral Ground Coffee House in New Orleans I was obsessed with the Indigo Girls, obsessed with Shawn Colvin. So from when I was 14 or 15 years old on, I would go to the Neutral Ground Coffee House every Sunday and see their open mic nights. Eventually I worked up my courage to play my original three songs, which — no false modesty — they were terrible. The guy who ran the place, Les Jampole was his name, looked me in the eye afterward and was like, “Hey, Mark, I dig your stuff, man.” And it was everything to me to have someone validate me from the outside. So I kept writing songs, and by the time I was 17, they offered me my own gigs. It was this tiny enclave of confidence-building for me.5. Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” It was how I discovered independent film. I was 14 and I was a big fan of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” A big fan of “Stand by Me.” And I’m like: “Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix. Great. This’ll be a funny movie.” I went to go see it without reading anything, and that’s how I ended up at a Gus Van Sant art film.6. Movie Pitchers in New OrleansMovie’s was a second-run art house cinema, and they didn’t card very hard, God bless them. From ’92 to about ’95, when I graduated high school, that’s where I got my independent cinema education. And I could convince some of my friends to come with me because they would serve us pitchers of beer and we’d watch movies in recliners.7. Chris Smith’s “American Movie” I saw this in 1996 in Austin, and it changed my entire approach to filmmaking. I fell in love with [the filmmaker] Mark Borchardt. I couldn’t believe I loved him despite all his flaws. Also, I was struck in this screening that maybe my narrative films could look and feel like docs so they’d give the impression of feeling more natural and real. Odd zooms, out-of-focus moments left in the edit, important moments happening in poorly lit, canted frames. The offhandedness of it all inspired me to bring it to our narrative work in the years to come.8. Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” I saw a production in college that wasn’t very good. But it gave me the courage to focus on a two-hander and know that that could be entertaining, despite what my playwriting and screenwriting teachers were telling me. And you can draw a straight line from that to “Language Lessons.”9. John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” I don’t know if it holds up. I think it might be a little corny and a little schmaltzy, but the way it hit me when I was 17 was great because it was the first book where I saw the machinations of a detailed plot working. And I saw it coming before it came. It didn’t ruin it for me, but it made me realize the power of writing and how much I identified as a writer. Multiple plot lines, all converging for a satisfying ending.10. “Rocky II” I used to watch “Rocky II” as a kid because it had two fights in it. They showed you the end of “Rocky” at the beginning of “Rocky II.” I was a little bro who wanted to see as much fighting as possible. But what you forget is that, in between, “Rocky II” is a slow, depressing, late-’70s, Bob Rafelson-style drama about this guy realizing the death of his dream and coming to terms with himself being not what he thought he would be. So that was inadvertently soaking into me the whole time. I look back and I think that was maybe one of the most formative movies for me. As a 6-year-old, I was taking in all of this male ennui, slow withering drama, and I think it had a deep effect on who I am as a creator. More

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    Review: ‘Waiting for Godot’ in the Bleakest Zoom Room Ever

    Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo star as Beckett’s tragicomic tramps — minus the comic part.Early audiences were baffled by “Waiting for Godot.” Even Peter Hall, who in 1955 directed the first English language production, claimed not to understand it. When actors with access to its author, Samuel Beckett, demanded explanations from him, he usually professed himself helpless to answer.Now, though some of the references have become more obscure with time, it’s hard to imagine anyone not fathoming the play’s gist. Decades of high school lit seminars, let alone the gradual opening of the playgoing class’s eyes to the world’s inequities and terrors, have transformed it from an enigmatic museum piece into an existential tchotchke.But there is more to “Waiting for Godot,” which the New Group has just released as a lugubrious film starring Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo, than its status as a modern classic suggests. Its portrait of life as a charnel house may be half the story but in this case, it’s the only half.After all, Beckett called “Godot” a tragicomedy, presumably with emphasis on the second part of the word because the first part speaks for itself. The thumbprints of Buster Keaton, and especially Laurel and Hardy, are all over its main characters, the broken-down migrant workers Vladimir and Estragon. (Estragon was first played on Broadway by the great vaudevillian and erstwhile Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.) The undercard, Pozzo and Lucky, are no comic slouches either; together, the four wanderers, with their long-honed routines and jags of passive-aggressive mayhem, outnumber and upstage the Three Stooges.But of the New Group’s cast, which also includes Tarik Trotter as Pozzo and Wallace Shawn as Lucky, only Leguizamo, as Estragon, could really be considered a clown — and not just because he called himself one in his 2011 one-man show “Ghetto Klown.”A theatrical being to his core, he has the quick-twitch reflexes and papered-over wounds that can make injury funny. The best parts of this “Waiting for Godot” mine that duality, and also Leguizamo’s heritage; when Hawke, as Vladimir, discredits Estragon’s account of being beaten for no cause, we get a new, white-privilege angle on their recurrent miscommunication.Hawke, left, and Leguizamo mask up when approaching the other two tramps in the play.via The New Group Off StageBut even Leguizamo is done in by a production, directed by Scott Elliott, that is almost entirely — and, it would seem, deliberately — humorless. The actors are shot in separate gloomy interiors, and from stationary positions, so as to appear in Stygian Zoom-like frames as if at a virtual meeting of hobbits.And though Beckett did say, in response to a proposed in-the-round production, that “Godot” needed “a very closed box,” I doubt this is what he meant. In any case, a play that famously takes place outdoors, with its sole scenic element a barren tree that for Act II sprouts five leaves, is now mercilessly interiorized, and a relationship that is meant to test the limits of intimacy is unhelpfully kept at arm’s length from the start.To the extent this comments on our pandemic moment, it’s at least intriguing; a lot of thought seems to have gone into Vladimir and Estragon’s decisions to mask up, mostly when they approach Pozzo and Lucky. But this and other contemporary intrusions, including the use of cellphones for texting and black screens when the characters apparently disable their feed, don’t actually illuminate anything, let alone emphasize the play’s humor as they seem to intend. It’s hard to laugh when you can hardly see.That problem encourages a certain degree of overacting, especially from Hawke, as if he were trying to make himself visible from a distance. (He has lovely moments, though.) Trotter, who under the name Black Thought was a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, uses his terrific stage voice to capture Pozzo’s first-act bluster without resorting to flailing, but has a harder time with the humbled version of the character who returns in Act II.At least Drake Bradshaw, in the small role of Godot’s young herald, is sweetly effective in both his appearances. And though Shawn, delivering Lucky’s impossible speech — nine minutes of gibberish — is able to make convincing emotional sense of the moment, the production as a whole doesn’t support his efforts. Vladimir and Estragon check out of the Zoom call for much of the harangue, encouraging us to think we might do so as well.It’s not that you need to be literal with “Waiting for Godot”; it’s anything but a naturalistic drama. I liked the designer Qween Jean’s past-midnight cowboy look for Hawke and Mets cap and tank top pandemic ensemble for Leguizamo. But if Elliott, working with the Academy Award winner John Ridley’s Nō Studios and the Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, has avoided excessive fealty to Beckett’s instructions — the estate approved the socially distanced production — he has not provided anything as coherent to take their place.For one thing, the action is awkwardly staged, even beyond the necessity of executing comedy bits when the actors, if not the characters, are calling in from different locations. (The passing of Lucky’s hat, a clear lift from Laurel and Hardy, is totally botched.) At three hours, the show is also long, even bloated. Most problematically, Vladimir’s and Estragon’s embraces, so necessary to the play’s emotional equilibrium, are about as warm here as octopi suckering up to opposite sides of a glass wall.Far from seeming too modern, though, this “Godot,” especially coming more than a year into the pandemic, seems too passé. Other companies, even no-budget ones like Theater in Quarantine, have long since figured out ways to make an aesthetic out of the limitations of lockdown. Why only now, just as those lockdowns are lifting, is this first-gen take on pandemic play production emerging? About the only expressive use of the medium is in the processing that gives the film the appearance of a dodgy video feed, with freezes and glitches that imitate a poor signal.You could argue that a dodgy feed is exactly the way “Godot” depicts life: as a poor approximation of what it should be. But in Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett also finds poignancy, humor and the last dregs of physical love, where Elliott and company find only horror. If they are right, what kind of pass have we come to, in which even Beckett’s vision is not bleak enough?Waiting for GodotThrough June 30; thenewgroup.org More