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Theatre in Review: Waiting for Godot (Hudson Theatre)/Krapp's Last Tape (NYU Skirball)

Top: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter. Photo: Andy Henderson. Bottom: Stephen Rea. Photo. Greg Kessler.

How do you like your Samuel Beckett? Frothy and starry, or straight, no chaser? In New York this week, you have a choice: A slicked-up revival of Waiting for Godot, starring Hollywood's once and future Bill and Ted, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, or a magnificently chilly Krapp's Last Tape in an all-too-brief Off-Broadway run starring Stephen Rea.

Because we have had so many fine revivals of Godot in recent years -- Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks at Theatre for a New Audience, Aaron Monaghan and Marty Rea in a production from Ireland's Druid Theatre Company, and a Broadway staging with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart -- that it's hard to get exercised about the attraction at the Hudson. It is, after all, the latest expression of Broadway's star-crazy 2020s, in which producers package a familiar title with a couple of big names, in hopes of getting in and out in twelve or fourteen weeks with a fat profit. (The practice oddly recalls the Kenley Players, the Ohio theatre circuit of my youth, where you could see television luminaries like Carol Lawrence in Sweet Charity, and Betty White in Hello, Dolly!, and Paul Lynde in any number of sex comedies. Some things never change.) Moreover, you can argue that Reeves and Winter have, in their films, established themselves as a kind of existential comedy team ripe for importation in Beckett's blasted landscape. Whether you can make the argument stick is another matter.

It is, nevertheless, sheer folly to build a revival of Godot, one of the most challenging plays in twentieth-century drama, on a pair of actors with little theatrical experience and limited technical skills. Reeves, his Giacometti face overrun with tufts of hair, his prehensile hands firmly gripping his knees, engages in frantic crosstalk with Winter, his face marked by a deathly pallor, his piercing eyes focused on some distant object. They speed through exchanges as though directed by a metronome, but one quickly wonders: Must Reeves deliver every line with the same up-and-down cadence, shaking his head and shoulders? Can Winter do anything more than volley back dialogue with his scene partner? Where is the music in Beckett's dialogue, the harsh, self-mocking laughter?

The stars are not helped by Jamie Lloyd's production, which seems to have been conceived on Opposite Day. Instead of the empty landscape, populated by a single tree, specified by Beckett, Soutra Gilmour has devised an enormous sewer pipe. A stunning piece of work by itself, it diminishes the actors and leaves few options for blocking. (Reeves and Winter spend much of the show sitting on the set's edge, conversing like guests on a talk show.) Because the character of Lucky is played by Michael Patrick Thornton, who uses a wheelchair, he is no longer a beast of burden, instead getting wheeled about by his master Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden, bringing an amusing ham-actor flourish to the role.) Thornton impressively delivers Lucky's big speech, a mashup of academic gobbledygook, but even here the gimmicks intrude: Lucky's "dance" consists of a series of Fosse hat moves, some discreet beat-boxing, plus clapping, with the actor urging the audience to join in. Thus, a play about the desolation of human existence becomes an audience participation game.

Lloyd adds many more touches, including some intrusive electronic music before the show, heavy vocal reverb in certain scenes, and strange lighting cues. (The sound design is by Ben and Max Ringham; lighting designer Jon Clark does get some striking silhouette effects when the actors are posed against a glowing white moon disk.) All these inventions call attention to themselves; in the reverb sequences, the actors are hard to understand. But fan service is not neglected: You can be sure that Reeves and Winter will reprise one of their air-guitar gags from the Bill-and-Ted films.

And, I guess, why not? The production is doing sensational business, the audience is thrilled to see the stars live, and nobody going to the Hudson is likely to expect a straight-up staging of Godot. At a little over two hours, it's an unusually pacey production; it's no-pain, no-gain Beckett, with plenty of horsing around to replace the author's probing questions about why we were born. The audience gets what it paid for, and, even at these prices, it seems to offer them value for money.

Down at the Skirball Center, Rea is revealed only gradually, thanks to a glacially slow lights-up cue. With his hunched posture, torso and legs shooting out at odd angles, and hair that suggests a woodland creature burrowing on his head, he looks like an oversized garden gnome. Seated at a table in the dead center of a block of freezing white light, he executes a series of priceless bits with an unnaturally long drawer, a couple of bananas, and a peel that spells trouble. Rea performs all this with such poker-faced gravity that one can't help recall that Beckett revered the work of Buster Keaton.

The actor is even more memorable when handling the play's text, delivered partly live and partly through voiceover. Rea's voice -- slow, whispery, haunting -- positively caresses certain words. (He makes "spool," which he turns over in his mouth several times, sound like it was translated from some ancient runic language.) Krapp is a burned-out writer and solitary figure rooting around in the ashes of long-dead passions; Rea finds wicked amusement in his character's failed career ("Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas") or fleeting memories of, say, "a girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform." Whether recalling his youthful plans for "a less . . . engrossing sexual life," thumbing through a dictionary to discover the definition of "viduity" ("state -- or condition of being -- or remaining -- a widow -- or widower"), or hearing a tape of himself decades earlier, dismissing himself as "that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago," he is a ghost before the fact of death, an apparition watching himself vanish into the surrounding darkness.

Krapp's Last Tapeis less a play than an immersion in an existential night informed by fragmented poetry. Everything in Vicky Featherstone's production is executed with Euclidean precision, including Jamie Vartan's set, an island in a sea of blackness, and Paul Keogan's lighting, including a stab of white that leads to an upstage door. Kevin Gleeson's sound design is utterly clear, and Katie Davenport's costume design is suitably ragged.

As a young man, I found Beckett hard to tolerate; in recent years, I've grown to love the intense rigor and black Irish wit of his writing. I continue to resist the notion that we are little more than dust on "this old muckball" of a planet, devoid of meaning. And yet, in a modern world defined by clutter, noise, and nonsense, there's something intensely clarifying about his vision. But you have to take the playwright as you find him: Lloyd only adds more noise and clutter, obscuring the beauty of the writing, while Featherstone and Rea allow the author to be heard: Running less than an hour, Krapp's Last Tape is as evanescent as a dream yet hard to shake off. Waiting for Godot is a fun night out for fans of the two stars. --David Barbour


(10 October 2025)

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