ABSTRACT
Vladimir’s line led to a reverential silence from an inmate audience who were otherwise “productively noisy,” wanting to talk with the characters onstage. Seeing is confirmation—does Vladimir ask too little or too much? We see him and his pal Estragon, all of us, those onstage and in the house. But we do not see Godot, or, as a director friend once said, “If Godot doesn’t appear for those onstage, he also doesn’t appear for us in the audience. The joke’s on all of us.” In the enervating “presence” (the “while” in Beckett’s original French title) of the play, the question is: “Is that all there is, my friend?” (to echo Peggy Lee’s song out of the 1960s). Is there only seeing, only what is there before us at the moment of performance—the actors, the minimal set, a few meager props—with no certainty of any larger purpose, let alone a divinity ratifying our existence? Can we live with this? During a tour of ten Florida prisons with a production of Beckett’s “tragicomedy,” the inmates’ silence during Vladimir’s exchange with the Boy ratified a director’s concept of Waiting for Godot; that same silence touched the actors as well.
