Waiting for Godot at the Roundabout, Just “To Give the Impression that We Exist”

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In the interminable dialogue of Waiting for Godot, it’s hard to pin down the exact moment you realize what a bleak farce it is, how brutal humanity, or what little value life has. But it seeps out of every crack of the dialogue and every fissure of the character’s faces. The play goes on and occasionally you laugh, but, if you’re like me, you grimace more often.

My poor boyfriend thought he was going to a light comedy last night, and he turned to me in the middle of the first act to whisper, “This is horrible.” “Yes,” I enthusiastically agreed. Horribly, brilliantly good in this adaptation by the Roundabout Theater.


The Roundabout puts on a lively version of it, relatively speaking, and Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman, and John Glover create a sense of crackling immediacy as these good-times clowns float over the darker undertones with Vaudevillian abandon. I agree with the NY Times’s Ben Brantley who feels he has never known the play to pass so quickly. They allow the play itself to be the star here, with the rhythm of unending cycle, with its half-hearted jokes, with its struggle to use up its time.

Goodman with his floundering bulk was fantastic. Glover’s Lucky is horrifically wonderful, especially in his entrance and the revelation of his neck. Irwin and Lane were at ease and competent. Yet “Didi? Diiiidi?” coming from Nathan Lane’s mouth is the most cloying part of the performance, where Lane seems to be playing himself rather than Estragon. It’s that strident voice of his that doesn’t belong in this play.


It’s an astonishing play really. I’m shocked at how great it is: how sparse, how suggestive, how open-ended and complete. So despite my better judgment (and probably my sanity), I’m off to wallow in the bleakness of the script. You know, ‘to give the impression I exist’ and all that. Between this play and Lear, I might need a little cheering up soon.

Oh, and like Lear, I’ve managed to review this play just before it’s run ends. Sorry–I plan to work on that.

k

Skeletons and Masks: Ensor at MoMA

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Light, pure colors are floating, happy things until they are paradoxically combined with death. Then the light intense red become hysterical as it floats about carpets, drapes and fruit. Belgian painter James Ensor‘s works is many things, but above all he is hard to classify. Rubens, Van Gogh, William Blake, Breughel, el Dio de los Muertos, William Hogarth, Carnival and its masks…

I was swimming it an otherworldly sea of comparisons when I went to see the exhibition at MoMA yesterday. Here are some of them:

Here he poses as the Old Master painter Rubens, in a flowered and plumed hat, beginning the process of his self-fashioning, in which he gradually becomes a tormented artist plagued by thoughts of death.

Early works; Ensor’s The Drinker’s next to Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters

In these later works, both artists have shifted to pure pigment in bright, crowded interiors. Ensor has added himself as a skeleton in The Skeleton Painter.

The Fireworks doesn’t share the Biblical theme that some of Ensor’s harder to find images do with Blake, but it does share a simplicity of composition that is elemental and wondrous.
Although its hard to see the details here, Ensor’s Baths at Ostend is swarming with cavorting tiny figures rather like earlier Flemish painter Breughel’s Maypole Dance, which also takes a large, contemporary social scene as his subject before imbuing it with meaning.

You might have noticed, Ensor likes his skeletons up walking and talking or here, Skeletons Warming Themselves by the Fire. This sort of celebration of death among the living reminds me of El Dio de los Muertos both in the skeletons and the colors.

The irony of the former scene descends to pure satire in Ensor’s The Banquet of the Starving. Although the British artist William Hogarth’s The Humours of an Election was lampooning a more specific occasion, the two shared a minute dedication to attacking social and political systems.

And everywhere in Ensor, along with skeletons, you find masks. A theme throughout his life, inspired by the novelty store he lived above his whole life, here the masked people crowd around Death in Masks Confronting Death. Much good may it do them.
j

On through September 21 at MoMA, check it out and see what connections you can dream up.

How Artists are Poor

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Visual artists, poets– NPR thinks you do it for the love, because as its new series on how artists make a living reveals, you’re not doing it for the money. Revelation, huh?
j
What the articles explore is the myriad ways artists support themselves while pursuing their craft. While it is mildly interesting to hear about how different people make money (teaching is a big one), nowhere does it question how difficult it is to make a living in the arts. I believe artists create something of great value for the world, and yet that value is less than often paid back to the artist in dollars that amount to a good living. Partly it’s difficult to assign a dollar value to a work of art.
h
But we also have a value system in which the arts seem expendable, like dessert. It’s pleasant, but it’s not meat and potatoes. And the stereotypical ‘starving artist’ doesn’t even get potatoes. While its true you can’t eat a painting or a novel, I rather think- to continue an overextended metaphor- we eat too much, and look and read too little. This leaves artists in rather a tough situation, like this one…

On the other hand, you can’t eat a painting. What do you think?

k