Tag Archives: black comedy

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

Le Grand Bouffe

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This 70s French film that I happened upon, quite by accident, left an impression on me much not unlike John Water’s Pink Flamingos. Rather than camp, this “comedy” that follows a group of men who have a houseparty one weekend to eat themselves to death, is quite dark. Both are unnerving in their complete lack of moral boundaries or “sane” reference point. The worlds are guided by an inner logic that trumps that of the world we know. In this sense, they are grotesques, curiosities of culture, much like the gargoyles and corbels of the most extravagent medieval cathedrals. The viewer simply watches powerless as the characters follow out the rules that they invented for their existence to their logical, extreme end. At the end, no sudden denoument unmasks them as aberrant psychologies—no things merely end as they had to, the characters being what they are. This is itself creates a cohesiveness, a harmony to the piece, which I think is one of its better qualities. The macbre subject matter has all the appeal of the macbre, and the odd combination of horror and laughter rather conquers the disgust one feels at watching the men, on the 3rd day into their gorging, becoming sick yet forcing themselves to eat pate and confit du canard and truffles with utter abandon. Adding to the orgiastic atmosphere is the apperance of a sweet local schoolteacher who becomes utter fascinated and one of the group. Some conflict arises as she sleeps with each man. Her sex is as unisexual, as grotesque, as the manner in which they eat. Perfectly desirable things, sex and food, become utter devoid of enticement during the film. Indeed, when it ended I was quite sure I never wanted to eat again. The ambivalence I felt nearly every moment while trying to decide whether to laugh or vomit was strong, and I couldn’t stop watching though I half-wanted to. It has a harmony all its own, and the plot impels one onward. And even though I haven’t seen it since that first time 4 years ago, scenes and images stick out so clearly in my head that I feel it must be a great work of art, and one that certainly opened my eyes to a new way of viewing life.