Alaska Employment Law

In June I saw one of theatre’s most confounding plays, Waiting for Godot, which recently closed following a two-month engagement at Studio 54 in NYC. Most of the generally favorable press for this performance went to the well known comedians Nathan Lane (Estragon) and John Goodman (Pozzo), but the equally talented Bill Irwin (Vladimir) and John Glover (Lucky) rounded out an unusually good cast.

Studio 54, notwithstanding (or perhaps due to) its notorious history, is run down. Fittingly, the set, a blighted assemblage of rocks and dirt and a single ruined tree like a cross on Golgotha, was just right for Godot. Samuel Beckett called his play a tragi-comedy, and I suppose we must agree. It’s funny in parts, and was meant to be. It’s part slapstick, part vaudeville. Realizing, as some critics say, that Beckett meant to hold a mirror up to his audience (which includes me), I will offer that this is a bleak tale, a play about waiting for someone, or something, that will never show up, a play about passing time that would have passed anyway.

As played by Irwin and Lane, the homeless characters Vladimir and Estragon don’t mesh quite as well as I think Beckett intended, except perhaps when Pozzo and his slave Lucky are onstage, when they are united in what looks like fear. Mr. Goodman, who we know is a big man, looked impossibly big, physically gigantic, in this production. Mr. Glover’s Lucky is a pile of rags on a chain. He is downright scary.

The oddest thing about the afternoon’s event was the tendency of the audience to laugh at inappropriate times, more often when either Lane or Goodman was speaking. My wife and I were both amazed (truthfully, appalled) at what this Sunday matinee crowd thought was amusing, and we could only conclude that this was an audience raised on television sitcoms, an audience determined to find Lane and Goodman funny no matter what, an audience with too many people unfamiliar with the play – an audience, I guess, passing time that would have passed anyway.