Waiting for Godot

Photo: Joan Marcus

From the moment the curtain rises, revealing the astonishingly beautiful set, this is a Godot well worth seeing. How Santo Loquasto manages to make an array of gray boulders both forbidding and gorgeous is beyond me, although I'm sure that Peter Kaczorowski's emotionally evocative lighting has more than a little to do with it. Bill Irwin, John Glover, and John Goodman are superb (and while I'm far from a Nathan Lane fan, I give him credit for tamping down his Nathan Lane-ness and actually playing Estragon.) Although I have seen four previous productions of Godot, I once again found the play surprising, funny, moving, bleak, true, absurd--and new. Exit the King strikes me as an extended skit; Godot strikes me as profound. (For the record, in this production, Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for God-doe, not Guh-doe.)