Why ‘Waiting for Godot’ is worth reviving—with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter

“There’s no lack of void,” Estragon tells Vladimir, in a typical bit of dryly profound wordplay in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 classic, “Waiting for Godot.” That could also describe the solid if overly stylized new Broadway production starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, the sweetly dim bros from the 1989 sci-fi film comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” who give credible performances here as Beckett’s despairing hobos. They caper and bicker crisply, keeping the play’s odd rhythms crackling along, while finding sharp contrasts in their roles: the tall, skinny Reeves bristling with indignance, the rumpled, soulful Winter trying to make sense of the play’s apparent senselessness.

But they are stranded, both appropriately and a bit not, in director Jamie Lloyd’s conception, which places them in a huge, forced-perspective tunnel made of marble-esque wood panels (the set is by Soutra Gilmour), lopped off in front so actors can dangle their legs from it, and opening in back to a frame a black-on-black circle. Looking a bit like a centrifuge designed by the sculptor Robert Irwin, it provides a kind of half-pipe for the performers to parkour and slide on. At other times it is lit to suggest the iris of a camera, or an eye.

It’s a stunning elaboration of negative space, in other words, but it takes a play that is already a delicate quilt of abstraction and makes it even more abstract, with mixed results. On the one hand, I must salute Lloyd and company for their boldness; the typical “Godot” set, following Beckett’s simple opening direction—“A country road. A tree”—is a cartoon wasteland with a sad sapling planted in it. I have often admired, and occasionally warmed to, Lloyd’s aggressive interpretations: the hip-hop-adjacent “Cyrano,” a sere, monochrome distillation of “A Doll’s House,” his video-heavy “Sunset Boulevard.”

Here, though, Lloyd’s tunnel vision is ultimately confining, and a few of his interventions rankle. Occasionally Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design hushes the actors’ voices to a whisper, and Jon Clark’s lighting frames the leads in stark silhouettes. I just don’t think Beckett’s play needs this kind of sweetening. And the sound design choices only serve to highlight one of the weaker aspects of Reeves’ and Winter’s performances: Neither are especially distinguished vocally. Reeves speaks with a dull thud, Winter with a flustered whine.

On the plus side, this “Godot” is also more brisk and playful than most, with a few breaks of the fourth wall (and one irresistible if inadvisable “Bill & Ted” reference). This is not only thanks to the deft timing of the leads but to the show’s two other performers, its true secret weapons. In the role of Pozzo, a haughty gentleman who enters the show’s self-contained world and has difficulty leaving once he’s there, Brandon J. Dirden doesn’t just steal the spotlight; he’s practically doing a solo show up there, an absurdist comedy of manners in which he both asks and answers his own questions. I’ve seen Dirden crush roles both classic and contemporary, but his Pozzo is a high-wire delight.

Equally impressive in his own inimitably quiet way is Michael Patrick Thornton as Lucky, Pozzo’s manservant, who delivers Lucky’s infamously unpunctuated 733-word monologue in a disarmingly rational whisper—it is usually sputtered, logorrheically, in a torrent of verbiage and spittle. Lucky is typically portrayed as a physically distressed literal slave, toting Pozzo’s whip and picnic basket and other effects with visible effort. In this case, Thornton calmly sits in his wheelchair, his face in a Bane-like mask until he’s allowed to speak, and weathers Pozzo’s verbal abuse. This reversal of the master-servant relationship—Pozzo pushing Lucky’s wheelchair, rather than Lucky toting Pozzo’s gear—is yet another case of this production spelling out the play’s dramatic ironies. I must say, though, that I mind it less when the acting is this strong.

Beckett’s play, of course, is not merely a clown show or an abstract exercise. As I wrote when I reviewed the last Broadway production, in 2014, starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, it is a God-haunted work, written by a man who had clearly once known religious faith but had it shaken by the cataclysms of the mid-20th century. Heard anew, well into a new century of civilizational troubles and premonitions of worse, “Waiting for Godot” speaks to a present moment of desolation with often startling force.

“We’ve lost our rights?” asks Estragon at one point, as he contemplates a fresh indignity. “We got rid of them,” Vladimir replies. Much later, Vladimir has an earnestly searching monologue in which he wonders at the misery around him and asks, “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?” And Pozzo could be a contemporary pundit coldly opining about folks experiencing homelessness when he says, of his servant Lucky, “The truth is you can’t drive such creatures away. The best thing would be to kill them.”

Stylization aside, this is why “Godot” is worth reviving, and worth seeing—and hearing—again. Like many classics, or like Scripture, it speaks to us differently in different times. What it says in every era, I think, is embodied in the well-worn relationship of Vladimir and Estragon, the companionate tramps who can’t stand each other but also can’t quit each other. As the United States seems poised on a precipice of illiberalism and political violence, and the question of the moment seems to be not whether Americans can get along but whether we can even tolerate each other, Beckett has an answer we’d rather not hear: We are stuck with each other. Now who wants a carrot?