The Not-Best of 2015

Although Ben Brantley's opinion can change the fate of a show, and yours and mine can't, in a deeper sense his is no more valuable than ours. Some of us may bring more experience to the table; some of us may be better writers; some of us may know more about the history of theatre. Nevertheless, an opinion is an opinion. Here are some definitions:

• Merriam-Webster: a belief, judgment, or way of thinking about something: what someone thinks about a particular thing.
• Google: a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge
• Dictionary.com: a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty; a personal view, attitude, or appraisal
• The Free Dictionary: a belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof

Brantley and the other mainstream theatre critics follow the essay style of giving their opinions as though they are fact. Here's Charles Isherwood* on The Humans: a "blisteringly funny, bruisingly sad and altogether wonderful play." No wishy-washy-ness here. Isherwood gives his blessing from on high, and The Humans gets to move to Broadway. (Yes, I am simplifying here, and The Humans received many positive reviews, but would it be moving if the New York Times had hated it? Very possibly not.)

Waiting for Godot (Vartn af Godot)

Waiting for Godot is one of those masterpieces of modern drama that everyone has read or seen or, at the very least, picked up the basics of through cultural absorption. (If you have managed to make it to this point in your life without ever having heard a thing about the play, here you go: Two guys with memory issues wait around in a sort of dreamy, disconnected wasteland for someone named Godot. They meet two other memory-challenged guys who are locked in a real whopper of a power struggle, and the four of them all kill time together. Then there's an intermission, and pretty much the same things happen again in act II. At the end, the original two guys go back to waiting on their own. Godot never shows up.) Being the landmark that it is, Godot has been translated into many languages and gets staged an awful lot all around the world. Since it first showed up in New York City in 1956, Godot has been performed by Very Big Names. The Broadway premiere featured Burt Lahr and EG Marshall; a revival the following year starred Geoffrey Holder, Earle Hyman, and Mantan Moreland.

As if convinced that the show wouldn't click with....well, with anyone unless very famous men were in it (Becket wasn't cool with with the idea of women doing the show), producers seem to have made star-studded casts a requisite for any New York-based Godot revival. BAM staged it in the late 1970s with Sam Waterston, Austin Pendleton and Milo O'Shea. The Mike Nichols production at Lincoln Center in 1988 went simply balls out with megawatt famousness: it featured Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Bill Irwin, F. Murray Abraham, and Lukas Haas. In 2009, Nathan Lane, John Goodman, John Glover and Bill Irwin (again) took Godot on; just last fall, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley appeared in yet another starry revival.

It occurred to me the other night, after agreeing to attend a performance of Godot in Yiddish at the tiny Barrow Street Theater in the West Village, that the play has been revived so frequently, and so fancily, that I've just never bothered to see it. I've read it, sure, but I've never seen one of the star-studded casts perform this monster masterwork about the tragicomic nature of human existence. My bad; it's just one of those shows, like King Lear or Grease, which shows up so often that I always figure I'll easily be able catch it the next time around.

The other thing that occurred to me--after I'd committed to a date and secured a ticket to the Yiddish version--that maybe my first time seeing Waiting for Godot should have been in a language that I actually understand.