The Unexpected Sweetness of Bill and Ted’s “Waiting for Godot”

The jokes started before rehearsals did. “Waiting for Bill and Ted”; “Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure”; “Party On, Godot!” How could we not make cracks after Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, that most righteous duo from the classic 1989 slacker movie “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” announced plans to star in a revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”? The director would be the British buzz merchant Jamie Lloyd, whose work sometimes lacks logical sense but never celebrities—he put Tom Hiddleston in a histrionic “Betrayal,” Nicole Scherzinger in a bloody “Sunset Boulevard.” Anticipation soared, yet my own expectations for a bro-forward “Godot” were low. Sounds bogus, I snickered to myself.

But then I saw this production’s awe-inspiring, sculptural set at the Hudson Theatre. In the 1954 text, Beckett stipulates that his tragicomedy—two Chaplinesque tramps wait for a prospective employer (or savior?) who does not arrive—should be set outdoors. “A country road. A tree. Evening,” the script says, and Beckett’s licensing estate has been strict about those elements appearing as described. Yet Lloyd’s longtime collaborator, the costume and scenic designer Soutra Gilmour, fills the Hudson’s proscenium with a twenty-four-foot-high tunnel mouth, the circular opening to what looks like a stretch of gargantuan sewer built in forced perspective. This majestic fuselage dwarfs the actors, who shelter inside it like mice in a storm drain. Its plywood panels look, under cold lights, like marble.

Gilmour’s set—simultaneously a gesture to Fascist architecture, a conduit to nowhere, and a scatological joke—shores up the production in several ways. Long exchanges between the glum Estragon (Reeves) and his more energetic companion, Vladimir (Winter), take place with the bowler-hatted pair perched on the stage-side rim of the sewer, which lowers the level of difficulty for performers whose last serious theatrical efforts were at least thirty years ago. Winter, whose palpable intelligence drives the show, is graceful in both mania and reverie, but Reeves is a jarringly uncomfortable presence, as awkward as a horse on roller skates whenever he stands up. Here the set becomes a comedy generator, a set of curving sides that Reeves can lean against and slide bonelessly down. It’s useful that you find yourself wanting to protect the big galoot. The audience awws every time Winter gives him a hug.

“Godot” is not usually a show where you go aww. It’s a purgatorial vaudeville, a gallows joke for everyone mortal. (Bored to death, the buddies consider hanging themselves because at least they’ll get erections out of it.) “Nothing to be done,” Estragon grumps in the show’s first line, and even drive-by existentialists will recognize Beckett’s thesis.

At the end of the first act, when Godot fails to arrive, a child—I saw Eric Williams—assures Vladimir that Godot “won’t come this evening but surely to-morrow.” The play then folds itself in half, like a man with a bellyache. (“Nothing happens, twice,” the Irish critic Vivian Mercier said, and every critic has been doomed to repeat him since.) The pompous landowner Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his abused lackey, Lucky (the superb Michael Patrick Thornton), have encountered Vladimir and Estragon in the road; during the same-but-different second act, the two of them come galloping by again, though Pozzo has no memory of their earlier meeting. Estragon, too, has forgotten the previous day. Only Vladimir is awake both to their looping reality and to the idea that, if Godot is anything like the God of the Bible, he’ll play favorites. Vladimir hints that the pair’s aww camaraderie may not survive another iteration of their Groundhog Day. “One of the thieves was saved,” he muses, his mind on the Crucifixion. “It’s a reasonable percentage.”

In Beckett’s play, the vicious gasbag Pozzo leashes Lucky with a rope and forces him to carry his luggage until Lucky collapses, but Lloyd refuses to use the required props—actors refer to bags that are not there; Lucky isn’t whipped, so Lucky doesn’t flinch. Lloyd has worked cleverly within the limitations of his particular Vladimir and Estragon by shading the characters’ codependent dynamic with Reeves and Winter’s shared sweetness and genuine friendship, but, in the case of Pozzo and Lucky, his directorial choices sabotage the relationship. (Lloyd has Thornton wear a Hannibal Lecter-style bite mask, making his Lucky more menacing than his supposedly frightening master.) Thank Godot, then, that despite all that silliness, Dirden is the finest Pozzo I’ve ever seen: a hilarious, scene-stealing melodrama villain with a black beard and sunglasses, drawling bored commands in a Southern accent, standing on his dung-heap dignity like Foghorn Leghorn. Vacuous power is, we know, the most terrifying. This Pozzo has no clue what’s happening—somehow Dirden gives the sense of his eyes shifting madly around, even behind those dark glasses—but he absolutely knows he’s in charge.

I was impressed by the production’s physical grandeur and entranced by the players’ surprising warmth, but I didn’t find myself deeply moved by this “Godot” until, bizarrely, I saw another show altogether. A few days later, I went to “All Right. Good Night.,” a play by the German collective Rimini Protokoll, which ran for only three days in September, at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center. In “All Right” ’s script, the writer Helgard Haug braids together two cases of “ambiguous loss”: the still unsolved mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014, and the gradual progression of Haug’s own father’s dementia. Family members of those lost on the plane weren’t sure when to grieve; neither was she.

There aren’t scenes as such in “All Right”—the title refers to the supposed sign-off given by the pilot of MH370 in his last known contact—rather, the text is projected onto a scrim, behind which a chamber group plays a two-and-a-half-hour electro-classical work by Barbara Morgenstern. Sometimes the musicians stand in line, as if they’re at check-in (the sound designer, Peter Breitenbach, pipes in the hum of the Kuala Lumpur airport); sometimes they sit on a sandy beach, where projected waves wash up on a virtual strand.