So this Saturday I saw another play. Two in one week. I feel so…hmmm, well, I am not sure what the word is I am looking for, but maybe I should start hanging out in coffee shops, and maybe I find one of my old berets. Ah berets, where have you gone? Fashion is fickle and cruel.
Artsy and intellectual I guess is what I mean. I have hardly watched any TV at all this week. Now I just have to read a book and I’m set.
I saw Waiting for Godot, the famous samuel Beckett play. It was being put on by Theatre Black Dog at the Balagan Theatre on Capitol Hill. The director and three of the cast memebers were people who were in my Personal Clown class at Freehold.
I have to say I think they did an OK job. This is a hard play to do for experienced actors, and the cast ranged in experience from this was their first play, to having a handful of plays under their belts.
Now I have to say if I they were not in the play, I wouldn’t have gone and seen it. I remember watching the play in high school on video. I thought it was tedious and didn’t make sense. Now that I’m an adult, I thought perhaps I had missed something, being younger and all, perhaps some underlying message had escaped my youthful naivete.
Nope. I still found it tedious and it still didn’t make sense. I could see now where there was deliberate interplay of dialogue. And I sensed the tediousness was inteded to replicate what the characters were feeling. If so, it worked.
Act 1 – The characters are waiting for Godot to show up, who of course doesn’t show. A couple of other people in the form of a landowner and his slave show up for a bit then leave. Act 2 – Repeat the first day with some variations in Groundhog Day-like fashion. (Maybe Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd as Vladimir and Estragon would have worked better for me – Waiting for the Blues Brothers)
At least Bill Murray in Groundhog Day had a problem to solve. He wanted to get out of his situation, and finally did after many tries. Vladimir and Estragon just keep waiting. They talk about leaving but don’t. Entropy I suppose is one of the points of the play.
I sort of feel like I do when I see dance. I always feel like I am supposed to “get” it. People dance and wave their arms around, leap this way, roll on each other and the floor, and that is supposed to be symbolic of European opression of the female archetype in post-modern cranial fragmentation.
So on the one hand want to wear my beret and sit in my Coffee House of Intellectuality (take that Starbucks), but on the other hand I feel like if I do that I should “get” Waiting for Godot (or modern dance for that matter), and I don’t.
Maybe that’s why berets went out of style.
Acting Schmacting 